Table of contents for June - August 2021 in Womankind

US mythologist Joseph Campbell said and wrote a lot of things over the course of his life, but there was one sentence, in particular, that caught the attention of the US public back then and still today, and that statement is “follow your bliss”. Readers of Campbell’s books were forever captivated by his prompting to hear the call to your own adventure. “Where is your bliss station?” he questioned. “You have to try to find it.” To what is Campbell, a professor of literature and expert on mythology, referring when he prompts us to follow our bliss? Campbell studied at university in Europe, but he didn’t get a PhD. And when it was time to get a job, he didn’t get that either. Instead, he turned to what impelled him…

Be childish, playful, remain curious about the world - these are the traits of a great person, believed German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. More than fame, wealth, and other such worldly achievements, Nietzsche commended the person who rediscovered their childish sense of wonder and curiosity. To become the child again is, for Nietzsche, the way to find your bliss. “It is bliss to paint flowers...” When Claire Basler was a child, her parents took her to a medieval palace in Avignon, Southern France, called the Palais des Papes. When her parents toured the many rooms of this palace, little did they know they were silently laying the foundations for their daughter’s future, paving a way that would, many years later, find her dangling high from makeshift scaffolding to paint forest scenes…

Graphic designer Vince Frost has designed most things in his long career as a designer - from corporate workplaces to signage for museums and universities, to bottles for herbal extracts. His role as designer for companies has always been to understand the client: who are you, what do you stand for, and what message do you wish to convey to the world? But one day these ongoing discussions with clients got him thinking: could similar design principles be applied to everyday people in the act of designing a life? “To solve a problem you need to fully understand it, and to understand it you have to ask a lot of questions,” he writes in his book, Design Your Life. “When a brief comes into the studio, the first thing we…

When we follow our bliss, we incidentally create a vision for the future. Brunello Cucinelli grew up on a farm a rural town, Castel Rigone, in central Italy, in a house without running water or electricity. His father was poor and uneducated, and worked in a cement factory. It was a tough life and his father’s work “did not make life more beautiful”, Cucinelli says. Cucinelli still carries the memory of seeing his father’s face - holding back tears - as his superiors at the factory humiliated him. As a boy in rural Italy, Cucinelli decided to commit his adult life to creating a life that was not only beautiful but also respectful of human dignity. Cucinelli did not head to Rome or Venice, but instead followed his bliss by…

Until I embraced yoga, my education centred on cultivating my mind. If salvation was ever to come, it would come from the knowledge that I was building up there. It never dawned on me that some of the questions that made me most curious might find their answers in my body. Certainly there was nothing in the culture I grew up in to suggest that my body had a language of its own, which was my responsibility to develop. Ten years ago I went to a doctor with lower back pain, triggered by months of renovating, and was sent off for a scan. As I lay in a scary MRI machine, I whiled away the time with negative fantasies of my body breaking down, bit by bit. Even being in…

When Jen Powers noticed her two-year-old son stroking a bee’s back with his tiny finger, without a hint of fear, she decided she wanted to know more about the enigmatic insects busily pollinating her Los Angeles garden. Soon, she was so enamoured she was scaling trees to rescue hives and sawing through concrete walls on demolition sites to uncover colonies she’d tracked down with thermal imaging cameras. Just as these tiny creatures have an outsized impact on the planet - a third of the food we eat is pollinated by bees and their current decline could have devastating effects on sustaining human and animal life - they have a powerful ability to hook into the hearts of those who take the time to get to know them. When I met…

Consider a few of the things I did during the 24 hours before beginning to write this article. I watched an hour-long episode of a TV drama my friends had recommended, long after it became clear it wasn’t one for me. I spent 20 minutes replying by email to a sort-of-friend who, if I’m honest, doesn’t play a particularly important role in my life. And I wasted the usual hour or two on social media. I’ll stop there, because this list is exceedingly dull - which, in a way, is the point: I used my precious time in some notably half-hearted ways. And at the risk of giving offence, I’m willing to bet that you did too. Yet as multiple philosophers and other wise minds have noted, there’s something fascinating…

“Mum, why does some music make me cry?” I was sitting at the kitchen table fumbling with my algebra homework which, granted, was enough to make me weep. The radio was on and I can’t recall the song playing, but the arrangement of strings, saxophone, drums, chords, and lyrics opened a cavern of sweet pain in my chest, an ache that made me put my hand close to my heart because I fully expected its beat to match the song. The opportunity to play a musical instrument was not available to me growing up, so it was in middle age that I began taking harp lessons. I’ve always loved the harp, an instrument that sounds lovely even if you’re a fumbling beginner. It’s been a steep learning curve, so I’m…

Of late, artist Monica Rohan has been obsessed with a tree. It was the inspiration for an oil painting, and more recently a drawing in ink. “It’s an amazing tree that arches over and leans on itself like a snow gum,” she says, speaking from her rented house in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, a house that edges on to a national park. Alongside her husband, who is also a full-time artist, the couple work from their studio downstairs. “This tree is beautiful, and I have been obsessed with it since I saw it.” Rohan became a full-time artist not long after finishing art school, at age 24. Considering the average age for painters is 52, taking up the brush full-time in your twenties is, she agrees, “fortunate”. If she…

Holding a conversation with Catherine Edsell - founder of CathAdventure, offering life-changing travel opportunities for women - feels rather like running after a bus calling out “Wait for me! Wait for me!” Her zest for life is infectious, as the many women who have joined her on expeditions to Africa, Indonesia, Mongolia and Costa Rica will attest. For Edsell, the call to adventure came early. As a student of theatre arts, she was, by her own admission, “a city girl who didn’t know the outdoors”. However, at university, Edsell says, “I started to get into being outside, and I thought, ‘I need to travel. I need to be of use somehow.’” While travelling during those college years, Edsell learned lessons that would stand her in good stead. “I learned not…

It’s the one question that we’d all like to know the answer to, so we could just get on with it - the living part, that is. If we knew what the ‘good life’ entailed then we could shun the rest, and just concentrate on the important bits. But society has a tendency to derail us. We’re repeatedly told that the good life is about making loads of money, having a successful career and buying as much as we can possibly shovel into our houses and garages. Some are convinced that they need to be famous and get their name up in lights for the good life to kick in. It’s worth remembering that the phase of flight for the Kunanyia stephaniae butterfly lasts a mere 14 days, long enough…

The life of artist Georgia O’Keeffe took a seminal turn when she travelled from New York City to Taos, New Mexico on a holiday with a friend in the summer of 1929. Already the toast of the town as a gifted and celebrated artist whose work demanded high prices, she was nevertheless feeling increasingly restless with having to spend every summer with her husband’s family in New York, an activity that encroached on her time to paint and filled it, instead, with the kind of familial pressure and expectation that would be recognisable to any modern woman. Her letters home to her art dealer husband, Alfred Stieglitz, must have sounded a warning to him that she had fallen in love with something wholly new and separate from him. They were…

For most of us, Big Adventure is something other people do. Other people leave their homes and walk into the wilderness to pit themselves against the natural environment. Other people (mostly men, often bearded), forge across frozen tundra carrying two weeks’ worth of food on their backs. Other people run thousands of kilometres across the desert, sail the ocean alone except for the sharks. Other people scale rock faces in conditions that would leave the rest of us weeping frozen tears. These ‘others’ who are doing unimaginable, death-defying acts with joy seem like Adventurers with a capital A - people who must be larger than life. While we are having small adventures like forgetting where we left the car and running out of wipes in the nappy bag, the Adventurers…

Please tell us a little about your experience shooting the women for the series RIPE. How did you find these women? And what was the experience like photographing them? I had observed that strong and confident older women were largely underrepresented in Slovak media and I wanted to take this step, both for myself and others. Some of these women I knew, and then one step followed another, through encounters, recommendations, but most of all, once you start to be interested in a specific topic, your eyes become open to it. This is one of my oldest projects and so I appreciate it more for its meaning and for its personal value, rather than for its quality or my artistic input. In the end, I did not create the images…

In November 2020, days before the American presidential election, my husband Dave travelled to Philadelphia to knock on doors for Joe Biden. That he went was no small feat: the US was in the grip of COVID-19; I was in the mid-stages of pregnancy and, while he was gone, was left alone in New York; and the atmosphere in the country was tense. Donald Trump - sensing that his time might be up - was becoming increasingly belligerent. Added to this, Dave and a band of his friends would be door stepping in some of the most dangerous and poverty-stricken parts of the city. Despite the risks, Dave felt like it mattered. Pennsylvania was a swing state. Even a few thousand votes cast in the last few hours could make…

Like many people approaching middle age, I used to hear a little voice asking, “Isn’t there more to life than this?” My answer was always “no”, followed by a harsh rebuke. I shamed myself for expecting more out of life than a good job, healthy children, and the means to put dinner on the table. To combat my still-nagging emptiness, I practised mindfulness and gratitude. I ordered myself to change my perspective: no one has cancer, so shut up. Until 2020, I thought I was greedy for wanting more out of life. But then the pandemic hit, and I soon realised that ‘remote learning’ wasn’t going to work for my family, not for an entire school year. I had earned a sabbatical to write a book the next year, which…

“Employ your time in improving yourself by other people’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have laboured hard for.” Socrates Pathways to Bliss By Joseph Campbell Campbell examines the personal, psychological side of myth. Like his other classic best-selling books, Pathways to Bliss draws from Campbell’s popular lectures and dialogues, which highlight his remarkable storytelling and ability to apply the larger themes of world mythology to personal growth and the quest for transformation. Here he anchors mythology’s symbolic wisdom to the individual, applying the most poetic mythical metaphors to the challenges of our daily lives. Happiness by Design By Paul Dolan Dolan conducts original research into the measurement of happiness and its causes and consequences, including the effects of our behaviour. Here he creates a new…