Posts from — May 2010

People say the problem with society is that we don’t treat each other with enough respect. But that starts with self-respect.  We all want to love someone else, but you are a someone too. I see too many girls (I go to a fashion school) hating on themselves- I want to tell them to lighten up because they’re taking life way too seriously.

Love is just as powerful as hate. Whichever one you decide to give yourself is what’ll reflect on what you give everyone else. A friend gave me the poem below my first year of college, to remind me that I was just as important as the person on the other side. I am definitely not a feminist, and I normally don’t generalize, but men love to live & women live to love- It’s our mother-instinct, it’s in our blood. And love is blind. And we all too easily blindly walk ourselves into the no man’s land where our self is nowhere to be found. And I’m not only talking about boyfriends. You can lose yourself in any relationship/friendship/kinship/pirate-ship..? (without a map that is). But sometimes you need a friend to slip a note like this under your dorm-room door to remind you of you:

Phenomenal Woman

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
The palm of my hand,
The need for my care,
‘Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

-Maya Angelou

Jump into risks because essentially we’re all in the same pool- just make sure you let those other swimmers know that you were hand-crafted, tailor-made, & should be handled with care.

sources: Maya Angelou, Versace, Richard Avedon, Youtube-Jenny Lewis

Love always,

Jess.

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While listening to NPR’s Selected Shorts the other night, I discovered my dream summer vacation. Starting June 6th, sixteen high school English teachers will be wisked away to Jackson, Mississippi to spend the summer exploring the city that inspired short story author, Eudora Welty… while living in her own home.

“At the Welty House, a National Historic Landmark and Eudora Welty’s home for more than seventy-five years, we will have the opportunity to see the furniture, the art work, the books, the photographs which surrounded Welty as she wrote, and we will have the opportunity to linger in the garden she so often described in her fiction… We will study key items in the extensive collection of Welty’s manuscripts and correspondence while illuminates her imaginative process. Indeed throughout the workshop, we will examine the ways Welty transformed actual places and events into a fiction that enhances both history and creativity.“

Happy Reading!

Johannah E.

C: The Eudora Welty Foundation, NPR, ffffound, weheartit, flickr

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