Lifelong Learner

Bis Vivit Qui Bene Vivit

[bencraigsmith]

First Five _________________________

Your Words

https://soundcloud.com/bencsmith/your-words

~

Forlorn Love

https://soundcloud.com/bencsmith/forlorn-love

~

The Abyss

https://soundcloud.com/bencsmith/the-abyss

~

The Saints Are Silent

https://soundcloud.com/bencsmith/the-saints-are-silent

~

Know (For the One Who Knows)

https://soundcloud.com/bencsmith/know-for-the-one-who-knows

~

[bencraigsmith]

On a Plate, by Toby Morris (The Pencilsword #10)

[tiredbiplantlady]

random dirty windshield kansas sky pics. im no photographer here, i just took them at times i saw something i felt was beautiful and didn’t want to forget. 

[i know they’re not good but they’re still mine, so please don’t remove my caption] 

[bencraigsmith]

Photos from circa 2014 by m0nstergrrrl.

[bencraigsmith]

Fiery sunset over Medicine Lodge, Kansas. Photo by me.

[bencraigsmith]

A pathway in Pennsylvania. Photo by me, taken more than a decade ago.

[bencraigsmith]

Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day, / And tell the world that everything's okay, / But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back. / 'Til things are brighter, I'm the man in black.

Johnny Cash, “Man in Black,” Man in Black (1971)

[bencraigsmith]

I wear black on the outside / Because black is how I feel on the inside.

The Smiths, "Unloveable," The World Won't Listen (1987)

[bencraigsmith]

Can you please stop time? / Can you stop the pain? / I feel too cold, / And now I feel too warm again. / Can you stop this pain? / Can you stop this pain?

Morrissey, “Life Is a Pigsty,” Ringleader of the Tormentors (2006)

[bencraigsmith]

This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

[bencraigsmith]

Tom Cruise (as David) in Vanilla Sky

[bencraigsmith]

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

[bencraigsmith]

I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else. Take my dear friend Louis, who is a brilliant, progressive man. We would have conversations and he would tell me: 'I don’t see what you mean by things being different and harder for women. Maybe it was so in the past but not now. Everything is fine now for women.' I didn’t understand how Louis could not see what seemed so evident.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

[bencraigsmith]

And then we do a much greater disservice to girls, because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of males. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls: You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man. If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, pretend that you are not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

[bencraigsmith]

All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not to be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists (I would add that there are plenty of online guides for men which purport to show them how to trick women into bed....)

[bencraigsmith]

“It Goes, Boys”

This is Lynn Hill. She was a professional rock climber in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Rock climbing is one modern sport in which, all else being equal, women and men have a chance to compete fairly, at least partly because the ratio of strength to weight is what matters most. Hill specialized in free climbing, which means she would use climbing aids only for safety, not for actual assistance in scaling the rock face.

Hill was well aware that she was representing women in a sport currently dominated by men. She told John Steiger in an interview for Climbing Magazine (August 1987), "Society's contrived image of what a woman should or shouldn't be is something I've never agreed with. Developing muscles is something people look down upon. You see women who have definition and your average American will say, 'Ooh, she looks too muscular.' You look at the Miss America Pageant and all of them have pencil arms. There's just no definition. The classic American beauty has no muscle tone. What does she do all the time?"

In an interview for Rock & Ice (May–June 1992, as quoted on her Wikipedia article), Hill recalled the sexism which ran rampant in the sport: "I remember asking about the disparity between prize money for men and women. The only response I got was, 'If the women climb without their tops, then we'll pay them the same.'" (This disparity still exists in many sports, including soccer, in which members of the wildly successful women's team earn only about a quarter what their male counterparts earn on the men's team, and the men’s team is mediocre at best.)

Undaunted, Hill continued to climb both personally and professionally. The famous French climber Jean-Baptiste Tribout, who in 1989 had become the first climber to free climb the Masse Critique in France, boasted soon afterward that a woman would never be able to climb the Masse Critique. Hill proved him wrong in 1990, scaling the rock in fewer attempts than Tribour had needed.

In 1993 she achieved what is arguably the high point of her career, becoming the first climber (nota bene: not just the first woman, but the first human, period) to free climb The Nose on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. This endeavor took her four days, but a year later she did it again, this time in just under one day.

After completing her historic ascent of El Capitan, she uttered what was to become one of rock climbing's most iconic phrases, a challenge to the men of the sport from the woman who was every bit their equal, if not their better: "It goes, boys."

[bencraigsmith]

Lynn Hill is the perfect example of what everyone should aspire to, male or female.

Yosemite climber Roger Breedlove, According to Dianne Chisholm in "Climbing Like a Girl: An Exemplary Adventure in Feminist Phenomenology," Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 23.1 (2008)

[bencraigsmith]

In 1993 Lynn Hill made the first free climb of the long, overhanging Nose route on Yosemite’s El Capitan in four days. The next year she did it again — in just twenty-three hours. No one else has managed to repeat the ascent since. Once a simple climb was pejoratively called 'an easy day for a lady.' That designation has been eclipsed by the statement, 'Someday a guy’s going to free climb El Cap.'

Arlene Blum, According to Dianne Chisholm in "Climbing Like a Girl: An Exemplary Adventure in Feminist Phenomenology," Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 23.1 (2008)