Table of contents for February-May 2021 in Womankind

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…

Let’s do a small experiment. Turn around and note - before returning to the page to continue reading - what you see around you. Make a list of the things you notice. Did you list items such as chairs, tables, computers, cars, and so forth? But, what about space? Not seeing space is an oversight because most of what we see around us is space. Turn around now and notice how much space you see, with little objects swimming about. In his book, No Self No Problem, psychology professor Christopher Niebauer uses this experiment as a way to introduce the idea that what we see, and think, and believe, can’t be entirely trusted. In other words, the ‘little voice in your head’ that continually explains things to you, and puts…

“Waking up in the morning is a perfect time to let go, to start fresh,” says meditation teacher Oren Jay Sofer. The daily practice of starting fresh was vitalising in his early meditation practice. In a brief, five-minute meditation, he gently orients us to each new day. “Right now, you’re awake. You’re alive. Let yourself take a few deep breaths. Breathe in fully, receiving the air; breathing out, just let go. Then, whenever you’re ready, I invite you to reflect silently: Today is a new day; anything’s possible. So, as you look ahead, let’s take a moment to clean the slate. Yesterday’s gone. It’s in the past. Whatever happened is done. So, to whatever degree possible, see if you can just let that be. Today we have an opportunity to…

In the early days of the 20th century, a Romanian princess with auburn hair took solitary walks up a mountain path through the forests. She wore heavy boots, a wide brimmed hat, and a long coat. She looked at the willows, looked into the fast mountain stream, she looked into her heart. At night, she filled a blue exercise book with words. The girl had married the most handsome man she had ever seen. His name was Prince George Bibesco. After a brutal honeymoon, the prince had delivered his 15-year-old bride to his family home - Posada Castle. Here, he left Marthe with his mother for company. He had other duties, like gambling, womanising, and running his cement factory. The year was 1902, and hail, rain or snow, Marthe walked…

I was born in Sighetu Marmației, in the north of Romania, 600km from where I now live. I had a dreamy childhood, living in the city in a block of flats, but then on weekends and holidays, we lived in our country house in the village Mara. It was this interesting mix of city life and this nature weekend getaway. The country house was located right next to the Mara river, so I’d wake up and go to sleep with the river’s whisper in my ears. My sister and I would play all sorts of games. Our parents let us do crazy things, no one was watching over us, because we were safe there. I had two very close friends, the same age as me and my sister who is…

Existentialism is the only type of philosophy that has ever called me to “think higher, feel deeper”. When I was 18 and taking my college first philosophy course, a priest in the confessional cautioned me against reading dangerous books. Even then I doubted the wisdom of warning precocious young women against reading, but I had heard that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had the power to take away your faith. So, I compromised: I took my philosophy homework to church and read Nietzsche in the safety of God’s silent presence. Unlike that priest of little faith, I trusted that God would not be intimidated even by Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s mischievous alter ego who walks tightropes for a living. I read, understood, and was amused by Nietzsche. He makes a strong argument…

Fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship controls its subjects’ fertility with an iron fist: rape is state-sanctioned; babies are removed from their mothers for the elite to raise; execution and bodily mutilation are used as deterrent and punishment. The Handmaid’s Tale may read like dystopian fiction but, as Margaret Atwood relayed in a 2017 essay for The New York Times, there is not a single policy or phenomenon in the novel that does not mirror the real-life horrors of yesteryear. “One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the ‘nightmare’ of history, nor any technology not already available,” writes Atwood. “No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say.…

“What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.”–W.H. Davies “The harshness of life and other people’s expectations can constantly force us to be always looking forwards to the allure of what our success will bring... Sometimes chasing a future success helps to propel us and gives us momentum, but other times it makes us feel unworthy, like we have failed already, or are not living up to our perceived best life. If we take away the goal of the finish line, and simply stop and focus on the journey, a lot of the anxiety falls away. Rather than always worrying about what others are doing better than us, we can remind ourselves that their journey could be very different to ours. Giving…

If there’s anything the past year has taught us, it’s the virtue of waiting, of patience. And to be honest, it’s a skill few in the 21st century - in a time of instant gratification, entertainment, and connectivity - possess. We’ve been accustomed to getting what we want now. Want to travel some place? Want to buy something, anything, from around the globe? We learn that plans can all be done in an instant. And as the world has sped up, our expectations as to what we can get and how fast we can get it have grown apace. We’re disgruntled when the product we purchased online doesn’t arrive in days from the other side of the planet, or when the bus is late. When events are out of our…

Please tell us a little about your childhood growing up in Romania? I grew up in Craiova, a southern Romanian city filled with a mix of communist blocks and historical buildings. I lived on the second floor in one of those blocks, and from my balcony I could see people come and go through the leaves of an old nut tree. My childhood was full of passions, singing, dancing, painting, and writing poetry. I was a bit of an outcast among my peers, but still managed to make friends. I also used to spend a lot of time, especially during holidays, in the countryside, where my grandparents lived, at the end of a small village where the church and forest could be seen from the window. It was a period…

I was born in Suceava county, in the northeast of Romania in 1975. My mum tells me it was 23 hours of labour. I was kind of undecided whether to show up or not. My childhood was happy. My parents managed to give me and my sister a childhood without knowing about the horrors that were happening around us. My godmother was living in Germany, and she came to visit with her daughters. I loved it when she visited because she came with a bag full of candy, and fancy school supplies, and soaps, shampoos, and silk panty hose for my mum and razor blades for my dad. And her daughters were telling us that when they go out for ice cream, they can choose from 18 flavours. I remember…

Kathy Hebb Day one: I have always believed in the power of fresh starts. Yet, in the last 15 years of my life, rather than by choice, fresh starts seem to have been thrust upon me against my wishes; my dear dad’s death in July and COVID-19 being the catalysts for my most recent need for change. No matter; change is good and, with all fresh starts, life-renewing elements are experienced. I am sure the world is ripe for a fresh start in 2021; I know am. Since being introduced to Womankind magazine five years ago at my local bookstore, I’ve been empowered toward a fresh start with each and every new edition. The motivational messages, the breathtaking art, I absorb it all. Now here it is inspiring me again…

If you have any doubt about how iconic a figure Count Dracula is in the popular imagination, try closing your eyes and summoning an image of the famous figure in your head. Bats? A black cape? A deep widow’s peak and glittering, hypnotic eyes? This is the Hollywood image of the vampire Count, famous since at least 1931 when Universal Studios released their blockbuster horror movie starring Bela Lugosi, the man with the hair that launched a million Halloween outfits. Since then, the notion of the vampire who cannot die, who haunts the darkness sucking the blood of the innocent, has become a global phenomenon, spawning hundreds of adaptations, products, costumes, and spin-offs. There’s the purple Count on Sesame Street, who loves to count, not use his fangs. There’s the…

What is home? Is it a place to sleep? Is our home a centre for domestic duties? Is it a refuelling centre so we can get on with another day? Is home a continuation of the office, a place where we can store our ‘stuff’, merely a roof over our heads? Or is our home a refuge, a place where we can be ourselves - an abode of creativity where we can, cut off from the world, retreat to our ‘maker’s quarters’ to sew, read, reflect, or paint? Is our home a canvas of beauty, an artwork, a visual representation of our idea of perfect garden and interior design? Or, has our home been turned outward? Are we spending more time at home looking outwards, than in? It’s easy to…

It all seemed like a horrible nightmare to me, and I expected that I should suddenly awake, and find myself at home, with the dawn struggling in through the windows, as I had now and again felt in the morning after a day of overwork. But my flesh answered the pinching test, and my eyes were not to be deceived. I was indeed awake and among the Carpathians. All I could do now was to be patient, and to wait the coming of the morning. Just as I had come to this conclusion I heard a heavy step approaching behind the great door, and saw through the chinks the gleam of a coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the clanking of massive bolts drawn back.…

Antonia Case:  Antonia Case is Editor-in-Chief and Creative Director of Womankind, and Editorial Director of New Philosopher. She was awarded the 2016 AAP Media Professionals’ Award for excellence in the presentation of philosophy in the media. Her forthcoming book Flourish will be published by Bloomsbury Sigma. Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore: Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore is a British journalist who lives in New York. She writes for New Philosopher, The Guardian, The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Statesman, New Internationalist, The Huffington Post, and Time magazine. Jennifer Kunst: Jennifer Kunst is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, working in private practice in California. She is a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of California and an adjunct associate professor at the Fuller Graduate School of Psychology. She is…

You were practising to be a professional ballet dancer, and then you changed directions into fine art photography. What inspired you to make this change? I was practising to become a dancer and the shift to photography didn’t come overnight. First came the understanding that dance would not be my path. It took years while I studied subjects that I knew were not right for me and worked in different occupations. Photography at first didn’t seem like something I would love to do, only when I discovered that I could create these more surreal worlds, I realised that this is more for me than anything I had previously done in my life. I had completely gotten my dance background out of my mind and accepted that it is not for…

When British writer Sara Maitland decided to live in silence and solitude in a house that she built on the ruins of a shepherd’s hut in an isolated region of Scotland with no mobile phone coverage, she was met with both criticism and incomprehension. It’s a paradox that despite our hyper-individualistic culture and a fetishising of personal identity, we refuse to extend to solitary people the tolerance of difference. Maitland suggests that this stems from deep cultural confusion about solitude. Solitary individuals have long been seen as outliers: misanthropic, mad, bad or sad. A woman who prefers solitude to sociability attracts particular disapprobation as it implies neglect of her traditional role as a nurturer responsible for other people’s wellbeing. If single and solitary, she’s cast as lacking legitimacy, lonely or…

I was born in Vălenii de Munte, in 1948, on a beautiful day. It was a holiday. I was born at 11 months, it is written in the documents. I weighed 5 kilograms and 200 grams, I had hair, and nails. My mother said, “You were huge.” Giving birth to a five-kilo monster is not easy. But, unfortunately, I was born at the same time as the republic, in 1948, in sad times. But in the family, of course, a universe is created and my family tried all sorts of things to preserve our childhood. But it was always, “this is not possible”, or “this cannot be done”. Maybe I wanted a toy or to go to a fair, these were things we couldn’t even dream of having. But I…

Details Closing date: 31 APRIL 2021 Format: One photograph per entry. Applicants: Open to all amateur and professional photographers. Entries must also include a separate photo of an edition of Womankind. File size: Please send large file sizes (larger than 3,000 pixels wide, 300dpi). Entries must be provided in file sizes suitable for publishing. The theme of this quarter’s award is Inspiration, meaning forces of influence - either people, places, ideas, experiences - which inspire you to do something in life, and to be creative. Win $500 and get published in the next issue of Womankind magazine OPEN TO ALL READERS. For full details visit: womankindmag.com/award Send to: award@womankindmag.com…

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice.” T.S. Eliot Exit into History Eva Hoffman In this intimate narrative Eva Hoffman, author of acclaimed Lost in Translation, returns to her Polish homeland, as well as five other countries - Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the two nations of the former Czechoslovakia - historically transformed by the demise of Communism. The result is a penetrating personal odyssey across the ‘other Europe’ and a vivid portrayal of a landscape in the midst of change. Hoffman captures the texture of everyday life in a world in flux. The Green Parrot Princess Marthe Bibesco In The Green Parrot, Princess Bibesco’s finest novel, the daughter of an aristocratic Russian family in luxurious but isolated exile in Biarritz searches…