#MeaningMaking

[livingwellnessblog]

SEE GOD (love) IN EVERYTHING

Experience the profound impact of interpreting things as love or not love on your manifestation journey.

SEE GOD (love) IN EVERYTHING Interpreting things as love makes your manifestation! Manifesting LOVE The “love everything” method, means is to love everything including that which that you actually hate, or want to suppress, or would rather not feel, rather than trying to change or to feel better, or to improve, but instead to love the feeling exactly as it is for what it is. By everything, I…

[gatheringbones]

the thought that keeps coming up is that I see my whiteness and my desire to betray, corrupt, and corrode whiteness as intrinsic to my lesbian experience. I want to be part of why white lesbian is spoken with a combination of dread, suspicion, confusion, and pity. I want to drag down white lesbianism and make it vulnerable in ways that are intolerable to it, like a mongrel dog with its jaws locked in the hamstring of a deer. I see both white lesbianism and myself as an animal of ritual sacrifice that must be continually destroyed and remade in an orgy of sacrilege and meaningmaking, and the more dismay and repulsion I hear from the white lesbians around me the better and weirder and wilder I feel.

[talenlee]

Gdcn't #1 — Understanding Others

This week, from the 18th to the 22nd of March, it’s the Game Developer’s Conference. This is an event in which Game Developers from across the industry give talks and presentations on what they do and how they do it to their peer group. In honour of this, I’m presenting articles this week that seek to summarise and explain some academic concepts from my own readings to a general audience. In deference to my supervisor, I am also trying to avoid writing with italics in these articles outside of titles and cites.

There’s an association with academic reading that fundamentally, academic writing and thinking is about a disconnected experience of reality that is explicitly not practical or realistic. ‘An Academic Point’ is a term we use to describe a thing that isn’t connected to any kind of realistic experience. I want however to talk to you about an idea from academia that gave me words to describe something I found important for living my life and being a better person. It’s an idea, it’s a tool, it’s a pitfall, and it is, importantly, a story.

It is a story that starts with the technique I use in my research called ‘autoethnography.’

What I do, generally speaking, is work with the academic toolset of autoethnography.

Autoethnography is a process of engaging with an experience, recording that experience somehow, then academically and critically engaging with the recording of that experience. I like to point to a number of forms this takes in general media – movie and game reviews, for example, are autoethnographic texts, where the experience of the reviewer is shared to an audience in a way that seeks to make that opinion a thing people can meaningfully engage with. Autoethnography is powerful for giving writers a way to share individual experiences that are not necessarily in forms that research can conventionally access. Quantitative research is very good at reducing averages and statistical trends out of large sets of data, with larger and larger sets of data being able to have more and more confidence – but how does that toolset handle addressing information that has happened to small numbers of people, and with access to an even smaller number of those people?

I like autoethnography and I like a lot of the researchers who use autoethnography. This is partly because they bring the tool to bear on ideas like the experience of being a closeted queer person or the emotional challenges of being an adopted parent. Partly it’s because it is a form of research that strives to respect the writer as part of the writing, and therefore what they experience and who they are is worth sharing and explaining. You know a little bit about me, hypothetically,

Autoethnography is — well, autoethnography is new. It’s also very old. The term autoethnography has been considered an academically useful term with a specific meaning since 2004, but prior to that its use is ambiguated by the people who were using it. Autoethnography isn’t a recent field, really, nor is it a recent word. If you want to point to the time in history where it first gets coined in the terms of the specific process of academic writing I’m doing, you look at the work of Carolyn Ellis, along with her cohort of fellow storytellers and meaningmakers, in the book Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research, 2015. By this timeline, Autoethnography is an academic discipline younger than Shrek 2.

If you want to step back through the timeline there are earlier works from other cultural writers talking about the idea of autoethnography, but not in those words. Ethnography, the study of culture, is something we’ve been doing for a long time, and by ‘a long time’ I mean ‘pith helmet and shooting people’ times. Autoethnography is an attempt to do this kind of cultural analysis that’s aware of the non-objective nature of the ethnographer. This idea that ethnography is not object is the result of numerous critics of the form, but one critic I want to highlight is a man who is responsible for coining the phrase key to this whole story.

Let’s call him Dwight, for now, because, y’know, that’s his name.

Dwight is responsible for writing the essay I Am A Shaman: A Hmong Life Story With Ethnographic Commentary (1986). I’ve not the text on hand, but that’s not too important here. The important thing is that with the title ‘I Am A Shaman’ the writer positions himself in the middle of the story of Hmong shamanism, set in the context of Hmong refuees in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in northern Thailand. Dwight came from Thunder Bay, in Canada, and spent years in this research becoming part of the community, approaching it authentically, and bringing what he could understand from the community in his research. This set something of a trend for this guy – he also worked researching the Chicago tenements, known as ‘Little Beirut,’ and then worked on American attitudes towards the death penalty. Generally speaking, I understand Dwight’s work to be well-regarded, respectful, but also, importantly, deeply involved in the communities he was researching.

In his work, Dwight describes four attitudes towards the other that are problems when writing about culture. He describes them as:

The Custodian’s Ripoff. This is when a researcher appropriates cultural traditions in order to enhance their own projects. Imagine a museum curator who wants something interesting to build their repertoire of artifacts.

The Enthusiast’s Infatuation. This is when a researcher is really into a superficial impression of the culture, which means they tend to ignore the differences between themselves and the other, and speak for them in ways that don’t appreciate the depth of meaning there. It’s fanboying for the culture you’re researching, as it were.

The Curator’s Exhibitionism. This is when a researcher is trying to sensationalise and astonish with what they report, wanting to show the exotic, the primitive, and the culturally remote.

The Skeptic’s Cop-Out. This is when the researcher just gives up and becomes detached from the research, suggesting it’s impossible to learn about, nor perform, as persons who are different from us.

It’s this last one that stands out to me. The Skeptic’s Cop-Out. The idea that while trying to learn about something, you find it too hard to find your own emotional connection with it, you find it too difficult to imagine being another person or a person of another perspective, and just give up and assert nihilistically that these things are impossible. This is a perspective you might see a lot in your everyday, with ‘I just don’t get it’ responses to queer ideas from non-queer spaces. There’s a cousin to it, too, in those queer spaces – you know, ‘cis people can never understand.’

Don’t take this the wrong way, by the way: People saying stuff like ‘cis people can never understand’ are probably basing that on some pretty meaningful personal experiences about not being understood by cis people. That doesn’t mean they’re right though.

I write about trans and gender issues pretty regularly. This isn’t because I am trans and have gender issues — it’s partly because I find them interesting, and I find the way they get talked about rarely intersect with the things about them that I engage with. For me, how to represent a trans character in a game matters a lot – no trans people are going to ask me how to expresss their being themselves in their lives, and nor should they. This got to a point where, a few years ago, someone asked me why I bothered to talk about it so much, because why would I if I wasn’t part of the community? Was it my place?

This is one of the first times I apparently made it clear that I’m bisexual in any space online, because I felt like I was being asked to show my queer papers. It was an unpleasant experience, but it came with it an unstated and slightly sad assumption I could see in the shape of the question:

Why would you try and understand or relate to trans people this thoroughly, if you weren’t one of them?

And that’s messed up, right? That’s a deeply sad assumption to have to deal with in your everyday life? Trans people aren’t the Black Speech or the Pattern Screamers, they’re not something where understanding them poisons your mind. They’re people. They have their own jokes about hoodies and salt licks and bananas just in the same way that tiktokkers have their own jokes about air friers and gotta-hand-it-toing Osama Bin Laden. They are people who have a cultural experience and that cultural experience has both shared signifiers (being trans) and they have unrelated experiences (most of everything in their lives that isn’t part of being trans).

I think as long as people are sharing information about who they are, that is information you can engage with. You can listen and you can ask and you can, if you are willing to, come to recognise why things are the way they are, because none of this is being built out of a magical, or spiritual perspective on reality. You don’t have to feel a thing to understand when someone else tells you how they feel. All it takes is being willing to listen to the people, remember what you’re told, and treat the telling with respect.

Here’s the big thing that sticks in my brain, that makes this list so easy to bring to mind, because it’s such a weird detail. Dwight, the guy who had these really serious thoughts about access to critical and ethical spaces, this guy who wanted us to think about who we were and how we can, if we are willing to try understand one another on a deeper level than these, had the name Dwight Conquergood.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[assaultmystic]

materialism is integral to my conception of magic. the understanding of behaviour as condemned to meaning, where meaning is a matter of modes of living (on a practical level, as an expression of and reproduction of what might be called biopolitics) is fundamental to my practice. consciousness of this fact casts magic as a deliberate intervention in the fabric of the socius to either interrogate or reinforce the bounds set on possibilities of meaning (what can be intelligibly done with a body). magic i guess would involve a deliberate rejection of straightforwardly causal, utility oriented assumptions implicit in the discourse. magic as the seeing of and proactive elaboration of other ways behind their prohibition. a self reinforcing process of empowering expression by affirming autonomous elaboration of meaningmaking.

[minim]

The Archives of Disrepair 90 | The Layers of Meaningmaking

[danelysegoviano]

For me, writing poems is an art. The goal is to paint a picture with words not color. #pictureinyourmind #visualsoflife #meaningmaking https://www.instagram.com/p/CSsCu5eJaf6/?utm_medium=tumblr

[cherylebannon]

Growing into stories Where curiosity ignites spaces of joy and growth. Layers hold a space for dreaming worlds as I dance between the layers. The question is always when to stop and when to allow something new. Sometimes it means recreating a story and covering most of it and leaving glimpses of the original piece. This is what happened here. I do love how the old story shapes the new one as it guides the colour play. So many questions looking for answers as my curiosity takes me deeper into these images margined story worlds. . . . . . . . #imagine#storyworlds#artprocess#owlstories#wellbeing#artlifebalance#wildsoulcreativity #owlart #mixedmediaowls #madebydyslexia #curiosity#meaningmaking#visualsyorytelling #artlayers#owls#melbourneartist#naturelover #owllover (at Melbourne, Victoria, Australia) https://www.instagram.com/p/CkXBMFAP2vS/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[progressivejudaism]

hello what are the rules for shabbat in progressive/reform judaism? what is forbidden? i heard using phones is forbidden is that true?

Hi there,

This is an extremely great, but complicated question that I cannot easily (or rather fully) answer fully in this space.

It’s important to understand an underlying message within Reform Jewish theology:

“Reform Jews today base their religious choices not so much upon appeals to reason, science, and aesthetics, as upon the language of religious and spiritual meaning. “Meaning,” as we know, can spring from any number of sources, and one of the most important of these is tradition. True, the fact that a particular practice is “traditional” does not guarantee that a Reform Jew will find it meaningful.” (Mark Washofsky, Jewish Living: A Guide to Contemporary Reform Practice, Pa. 9)

In the Reform Movement, we generally refrain from language such as “forbidden,” but instead understand that what might be forbidden in one person’s understanding of Jewish Law might be embraced and cherished in another person’s interpretation.  As Reform Jews, we strive to find meaning in the choices that we make - choices based on our understanding and education in Jewish tradition and our textual tradition.

For example, one Reform Jew might find that shutting social media off on Shabbat and holidays helps them to rest and reflect in a way that staying connected might not allow.  Another might say that disconnecting from social media is a silly practice, as Facebook and Instagram allow them to stay connected with friends and family on Shabbat and holidays- a connection that is most holy to them.  Some might believe that using their phones or computers in any way is not meaningful, but others might choose to use technology in order to enhance their practice.

What it boils down to is meaning: how can we best have a comfortable, compassionate, and meaningful holiday and/or period of rest.

Have a great night!

PJ

[livingwellnessblog]

SEE GOD (love) IN EVERYTHING

Experience the profound impact of interpreting things as love or not love on your manifestation journey.

SEE GOD (love) IN EVERYTHING Interpreting things as love makes your manifestation! Manifesting LOVE Manifesting Love An instruction I often use in coaching, is the “love every feeling” method, especially for individuals who are out of touch with their bodies or emotions. What this means is to love everything including that which that you actually hate, want to suppress, or would rather not…

[hugoyogui]

Eagle pose - Garudasana Improves concentration, strengthens the muscles amd loosens the joints of the shoulders, arms and legs and good for the upper back. .. . . . . . #yogapractice #garudasana #yogamen #meaningmaking ##mooladharachakra (at Fort Lauderdale, Florida) https://www.instagram.com/p/CJUWr2yAmyX/?igshid=9hwfur9rlptq

[radearthcrew]

Happy Summer Solstice! 2nd photo is my demonstration to my children of what happens during an eclipse. 📍 Stolen Catawba tribal lands #juneeclipse #juneeclipse2020 #teachyourkidsscience #science #astronomy #meaningmaking #ecologicalmindset #sustainabilityeducation #sustainableliving #re #radicalearth https://www.instagram.com/p/CBuAkRoBmXy/?igshid=dqovmse3y3bs

[sweetgeorgiapam]

Free download on my website. here’s the snapshot of the intel. Focus on these elements in a dream you’ve had. . DM me with questions . I’ve heard from many people that they’re starting to have more dreams, more vivid dreams, or experience more nightmares since the pandemic began to effect daily life. . Your dreams are helping you process your emotions from this sudden upheaval. . Dreams come to help you learn from your troubles. It may not be time to make meaning from it all yet and that’s okay. . But if you’re curious and if it is time for you to understand why you’re dreaming about a certain thing, lean in to that curiosity and let me help you. I offer dream interpretation but it’s not what you think. It’s not me telling you what your dream means; it’s me showing you how your dreaming mind thinks and being with you as you uncover the meaning for yourself. . I just call it dream interpretation because it’s the easiest to understand. . #dreamsandnightmares #dreammeanings #meaningmaking #deepthinking #hsp #sensitiveseeker #spiritualseeker #sweetgeorgiapam #vividdreams #nightmares #dreamanalysis #jungianpsychology #jungian #innerwork #whatyourdreamsmean https://www.instagram.com/p/B-ptMvzpUYo/?igshid=1rziqa6tmsqeu

[karlymichelle1]

One A Week Psalm Project

Psalm 40

Layers upon layer.

The layers of colour build up, some parts turning to brown because of the mix of colours, some completely hidden, some just slightly peaking through.

It’s not as pretty as the beginnings when there are less colours interacting, and there’s less going on but it has a greater weight with the layers. It feels more substantial. Maybe that’s just justification for something that didn’t quite work. But I also don’t think it’s untrue.

The layers build depth even if they end up being hidden. The bits that are scratched off offer a tiny glimpse underneath. The white over the top highlights the peaks and shallows.

This time is a time to practice, to try out, the way it is easier to begin and practice spiritual disciplines in those times of life that are more stable, except that we more commonly clutch at them when things go badly, surprised at how difficult they are.

[life-weavings]

Fascinating seeing dead testaments to war. Their lasting influence reminds us of the cost of decisions. #war #humanprogress #lovenotwar #meaningmaking (at Bunkers at Fort Worden) https://www.instagram.com/p/B4K9gEtgAQi/?igshid=166974yeqiugp

[cherylebannon]

Sometimes learning fe shifts around us and we choose to take that next step and the next. She wouldn’t settle for awhile as the images around her kept shifting and reforming until she found her point of focus. The words played in the background barely seen. A whisper of possibilities. This little owl in her garden world stands looking forward. She is facing left imaging her world as she steps forward. Purple flowers spring up around her as she walks towards the flowers and the yellow light. Words are seen faintly in the background. Something feels as yet unwritten. She is shaping her own story and claiming her uniqueness. The eyes are wide in expectation and hold a softness of the dreamers gaze. Bright and full of potential. What bright dream are you walking towards. #brightstories#smallowl#owldreaming#curiousowl#whimsicalowl#wildsoulcreativity#mavacollective#inagalleryfarfaraway #owl#owlart#owlstories #mixedmediaowl#artprocess#intuitiveart#artlifebalance#layeredstories#owlart #mixedmedia #throughthelayers#meaningmaking#melbourneartist (at Melbourne, Victoria, Australia) https://www.instagram.com/p/CkW_3TfPi-H/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[toxicseminar]

Artifact: Bio-intimacy and Indigenous Studies

Weston’s ideas regarding bio-intimacy (the idea that “bodies and ecologies are not distinct… bodies are their environments” (79)) made me think of a reading I did in my Native Food Sovereignty class last semester: Mishuana Goeman’s Land as Life: Unsettling the Logics of Containment. In this writing, Goeman explains how through capitalism, we have subjected the meaning of land to property, when really the relationships between humans, land, and water can be physical and metaphysical (Goeman, 72) ; there is intimacy in the process of meaning-making place. Disruptions in land and water (or lifeblood) are disruptions in human life. 

Quote/ Idea Sources:

Weston, K. (2017). “The Unwanted Intimacy of Radiation Exposure in Japan” in Animate Planet: Making Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World. Duke University Press.

Goeman, M. (2015) “Land as Life: Unsettling the Logics of Containment,” in Native Studies Keywords, eds. Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle Raheja. University of Arizona Press. 

-JJ