BLOOM summer 2016
A COMMUNITY COLLECTIVE
Page 04 community warrior Quinn Searles
Note From the Editor BLOOM began as a pipe dream. Our team had taken a day in the heart of winter, to retreat from the emails, the meetings, and the rush, to stop, be together and dream about the year ahead. We wanted to share stories. Stories of hope and healing. Stories that challenged our preconceived notions of health, beauty, wellness, and body. We wanted to enter into a world saturated with the same harmful messages packaged in different ways, change the conversation, and invite a community to be part of changing that language. We wanted to stage a revolution against the normative culture’s rigid definitions of beautiful and healthy, and transform it into a culture of celebration, acceptance, and self-love. Someone suggested that we start a magazine, and to be honest, my first reaction was, “What now? Come again?”
I wondered how it would work. I wondered if it would work. I seriously doubted my own creative, leadership, and editorial abilities, and secretly wondered if I would ruin the project. Little did I know, the most inspiring, encouraging, talented team would fall out of the woodwork and into my lap. They brought expertise, excitement, passion, and ingenuity to the table and worked their butts off to make this dream a reality. What struck me, sitting at the table during one of our design meetings, results from our brainstorming on the wall to my right, the first draft of the magazine hanging on the wall to my left, and this incredible team before me, the mission of Bloom, the mission of Circles of Change, was being actively realized in this very process. By following this passion, by inviting others into it, by sharing our own
stories with one another, and digging into the difficult questions, I was experiencing my own healing transformation in the very process of desiring it for others. I had seen a personal shift in each one of those people. I had felt it in my own being. I could see before my very eyes, the ripple effects that were flowing out from each of us being changed and healed. I understood the power of what changing the conversation can do, even when it starts with just two people and a desire to change the world. So here it is, our labor of love. Another step towards changing the culture, and I invite you to be a part of it. I invite you as you explore these pages and these stories, to embrace and experience your own story, your own desire for transformation, and your own contribution to this change.
-Gillian
BLOOM© is a quarterly publication of Circles of Change Gillian McGann - editor | Casey Rose Frank - copy editor & feature writer | Carrie Luteran - design & art direction Steven J. Pallone - photography & digital imaging | Haley Quinn - design & contributing writer Abby Case - contributing writer | Jill Catherine - contributing writer | Shauna Diliberto - contributing writer cover photo by Steven J. Pallone taken at Onondaga Lake Park
02 | y(our) mission
Take back the summer Page 05 books we love: Dietland
Page 06 - 07 cover story: returning to the things we love
Page 08 - 09 inspiration life as a process
Page 10 perfectly imperfect: throwing a brunch
Page 11 connect with your self
contents | 03
COMMUNITY WARRIOR Quinn Searles
by abby case photo by steven j. pallone A community is the continuous cycle of care that one person instills into another, which can then be passed along, eventually creating an intricately unique and beautiful network of interwoven lives. My beautiful friend, Quinn Searles, truly encompasses this idea in our Syracuse community. With her willingness to serve others without thinking twice as well as her constant desire to learn from anyone, I would argue that we are very lucky to have her. AC: Who is your hero and why? QS: Definitely my mom. It’s because she instilled my care for other people into me and I constantly see that in the way she chooses to live her life. She has been very brave. I really think that fundamentally so much of who I am came from how she lives in front of me. Her selfless example for my siblings and I became such an appealing quality to me. AC: Where do you like to spend time in the community? QS: The VA Medical Center because it’s just such a nice community, and it uses horticulture therapy. AC: What is so special about the VA to you? QS: I love giving back to the people who served our country. I feel like these veterans are really overlooked and under appreciated. A lot of them have lost their limbs or have tough diseases, so when I visit them they are really surprised to be cared for. Having people take time to spend time with them is definitely surprising for them. It makes a huge difference in their day. AC: What kind of change would you like to be part of in this world? QS: I hate seeing a lack of healthcare for underprivileged people. That’s something I hope to change through a career in the medical field. I want to be part of changing the culture from people not caring about each other, to people caring about their neighbors.
Books We Love: Dietland words and photo by casey rose frank Plum is waiting. Waiting for her “real life” to start, the life she will live as Alicia, the thin woman inside her just waiting to get out. Living in a constant holding pattern, rarely diverging from her work routine or spending time outside of her apartment. Plum’s past and her future slam together in the present when she reads a book by Verena Baptist, the daughter of the woman who pioneered “The Baptist Plan”, the equivalent of the real world Nutri-System. Plum spent her teenage years following the plan, eating the tiny pre-packaged meals and attending meetings where followers are given “When I’m Thin…” journals and encouraged lose weight above all else. Verena’s book exposes the lies and hideous truths behind the now defunct company, citing interoffice memos that include information like the fact that the daily meal plans only add up to a total of 850, not the already low 1200 that the program lists, and that women who only imagine themselves to be fat is the company’s greatest asset and that more
should be done to encourage this body dysmorphia. Plum has the opportunity to meet Verena and in speaking with her, enters into an agreement called “The New Baptist Plan” that will decide how Plum truly lives the rest of her life. While Plum is navigating her complicated feelings there is another larger story at the center of the tale, one about a woman or women operating under the name “Jennifer” who are exacting their own vigilante justice on those who injure, degrade, and otherwise diminish and exploit women. The bodies of rapists are left on the side of the road, media outlets are made to swap naked women for naked men in their usual news and displays and men everywhere are outraged, one sharing that the difference is “that women knew their place”. As a reader, this level of
“I saw myself as an outline then, waiting to be filled in.”
revenge is both tantalizing in its fiction, and horrifying in the sense that this kind of retaliation doesn’t make things better or equal. The biggest problem in both “Jennifer” and Plum’s eventual experience and expectation of women is that they don’t allow for a true spectrum of women, women who are naturally tall and thin, women who revel in their sexuality, or find some part of their female identity in having boobs. But Plum isn’t done growing as a person, as a character yet, either. In discussing the realities of the way that women are sexualized the book is full of the all too real words and images associated with that experience. Those who are uncomfortable with discussions about rape in particular may not want to pick up this book. But for anyone who is willing to treat this as fictional exploration that it is, they will be happy to follow the trajectory of a character who no longer wants to apologize for taking up space in the world, and the women who are tired of being objectified.
books we love | 05
Returning to the Things We by casey rose frank feature photo by steven j. pallone childhood photos submitted
LOVE
When it comes to conversations about positive growth and change, it can often feel like much of the focus is reflecting on all the negatives that we are actively moving away from. With clarity, there’s even a sense of incredulity that we used to do something. “I can’t believe I let myself get burned out, I can’t believe I treated myself so poorly, I can’t believe I let that person manipulate me.” There is a long list of errors trailing behind you, and if you let it, it can be all that you see of your past. But you don’t have to suffocate
under the weight of mistakes, chances are you already learned something from them: let them go. If who you were has the power to shape who you are going to be, why not mine your personal history for something better.
06 | returning to the things we love
Instead of allowing my greatest hits list of mistakes and moments of regret be the only thing that informed how I made decisions and planned for my present and my future, I asked myself, “When were you happiest?” I mean the kind of happy that when you think back on the moment, the event, the idea, you feel the kind of glow reserved for romantic flashback scenes in movies. Something you know for a fact, deep in your core, made you happy, not something you think should make you happy. People think going to the beach should make you happy, and for most people it is in fact, pure bliss. But for me my tendency to burn should anyone even whisper the words “direct sunlight” near my bare shoulders and my preference for
cool weather, keeps me from enjoying the beach. So I don’t embrace someone else’s version of joy, I embrace my own. For the record, “Should” can be really terrible word. It’s an albatross of obligation, a word used to admonish when someone is using it against you, a word of shame when turned against yourself. “I should pick a career with more money, I should want to get up and do that, You should grow up”. The putting away of childish things is perhaps an idea best left behind. My first answer to “When were you happiest?” was the summer nights I spent reading well past midnight, the longlasting sun making the evenings longer, and the free hours that only summer vacation allowed making the enjoyment of the book that much sweeter.
I can’t always recreate those summer nights, I live in a place where it’s winter for over half the year and I sometimes can’t stay awake past ten o’clock. But I can recreate the permission I gave myself to indulge in something I loved. Now I embrace the days when I read for hours in the middle of the afternoon, emails being ignored and the occasional task getting pushed into the next day. If a book is that good, I honor the writing and let it sweep me away. What genuinely makes you happy doesn’t have to feed all aspects of your person. But embracing that joy should allow you to have better experiences with the other aspects. What I mean is,
when I am reading, it is feeding my intellect, and sometimes my soul. It is engaging my brain in the delight of being entertained, discovering a new way of thinking. It is not doing anything for my body. Even when I am not sitting on the couch, when I am out walking and listening to an audiobook, reading/ listening itself has nothing to do with nourishing my body and everything to do with satisfying my intellect and my soul. It’s often easier to embrace those childhood joys first, the ones that had little to do with how you felt about your body. Even my greatest moments
of self-doubt in regard to my body have rarely influenced the way that I embrace and celebrate the absurd. This is why when my niece celebrated her tenth birthday with a fairy themed party there were a pair of fairy wings for every child and one for Aunt Casey. But admittedly, strapping on fairy wings had little to do with being comfortable in my own skin, as in my time sitting on the floor with the girls I still noticed how much more space I took up than their tiny bodies regardless of the difference in our ages. I was recently on vacation in Florida, staying in a hotel near a water park. While it wasn’t on our original agenda, my husband asked if I wanted to go. I sat there blinking for a moment. I realized that water parks had become like social security buildings and bank headquarters; I knew they were there, my brain acknowledged their physical presence in the landscape, but because I couldn’t imagine ever going in, they had to some degree ceased to be real. Which is the exact opposite of how I felt about water parks as a kid. I was the kind of kid who felt that there should be emergency bathing suits stashed everywhere, ready to be deployed at the faintest whiff of chlorine. I was even the rare teenager that when the only swimwear option on a broiling hot day was an aunt’s too large frilly skirted suit, I slipped it on without hesitation so that I could submerge myself in the cool water of a public pool. At some point I decided I was too disgusting to be seen in public in a bathing suit. And once I made that decision water parks became a thing of the past. So much so that in traveling to Florida it didn’t even occur to me to pack a bathing suit; something that the child version of me would have found absolutely absurd to the point of needing to fall to the floor in an overdramatic faint. I don’t know if I will find water parks as enjoyable as I did when I was a kid. I find crowds more overwhelming
now than when I was five, and the concentrated amount of children all in one place threatens to overwhelm, but in an effort to recapture the delights of my youth, especially in conjunction with my desire to have a better relationship with my body, I’m willing to give it a try. It boils down to this: it doesn’t have to be revolutionary to choose what makes you happy. Those outside voices who have their own idea of happiness don’t have to live with you day in and day out-you do. You are the master of your own happiness. And if returning to your childhood to rediscover joy makes you wary, even my mother who grew up in a difficult home said to me, “A lot of bad things happened in my childhood, but not one of them happened while I was out walking with my dog.” As an adult she walks with her dog every day. Pure delight can be something simple. Finding joy can be as easy as looking to the things you’ve already done right and well. And bliss may be as close as your nearest lawn sprinkler.
returning to the things we love | 07
In every issue we ask members of our community a question. compiled by abby case at Cafe at 407
If I were not afraid, I would...
08 | inspiration
LIFE AS A PROCESS
words and photo by haley quinn Author Anne Lamott so elegantly stated, “Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid?” I read those words and I feel them deep in my bones. Their profoundness resonates in my mind and their truth leaves an imprint in my heart. And in the moment of clarity those words bring, it dawns on me that human souls often forget that life is a process. I think too often we get trapped waiting for our stars to align in the
hopes that ‘this degree’, ‘this weight’, ‘this relationship’, or ‘this place’ will be the epitome of happiness, success, and worth. I think when we force ourselves into this way of thinking, this all or nothing attitude of a single destination, we discount the change, growth, and glory of actually living. We forget that it is okay to take risks and make choices that seem uncomfortable. We forget that happiness is a state that can be found in the smallest of moments. We forget that our bodies are the homes that hold our souls and the beautiful souls of those we love. We forget that our priorities are allowed to change and we are allowed to want something new or different. We forget that compassion and self-love is the ultimate act of courage. We forget that change is the only constant. We forget that it is okay to fall apart and rebuild
yourself as many times as you need. We forget that our path is our own, and that we cannot compare our own struggles to another’s triumphs. We forget that, just through our existence, we are enough. We forget that bravery is small acts of patience and forgiveness. And most importantly, when we try to force our lives to fit in a box or stay on the straight line, we forget that life is actually meant to be lived. We would rather destroy everything within and around us than accept that where we are right here and right now is okay, just as it is. We are all in the process of becoming. We are all in the process of life. It is incredible, incomprehensible, messy, and magnificent, and you should never forget that whatever version you and your life are right now, you are always enough.
life as a process | 09
Perfectly Imperfect: Throwing a Brunch by shauna diliberto photos by rachel liz If you are like me you love nothing more than having your friends over for brunch, and if you are really like me then there is a moment when that brunch comes around and your brilliant idea is now a “what was I thinking?” moment. Most of this stems from that tricky idea of “perfection”. It’s easy to get so wrapped up in our desire to create a picture perfect meal and setting that we forget why we wanted this experience in the first place. Here are my simple tips for an inexpensive, no bake, no hassle brunch. (If you are offended by store bought pastries, stop reading now.) Set the table: This takes minimal effort and makes a huge impact. A tablecloth or runner immediately dresses up any table and defines the space. Don’t have a tablecloth? Use cute printed wrapping paper or even craft paper. Add cloth napkins. If they’re not already in your arsenal try vintage hankies or even fabric scraps cut into squares. A simple bouquet of flowers are the perfect addition to your table and can come from your own summer garden or for a few bucks at the grocery store. Buy food: Do not spend any time in the kitchen if you don’t want to. A chic brunch can be store bought. Pick bright, fresh foods like summer strawberries or fresh melon and serve on interesting dishes. I love the idea of a few different kinds of cheese and meats being served on cake stands. Stack up pretty glazed donuts on butcher blocks. Pull apart a bakery fresh baguette, and spoon jam, jelly, and honey into decorative bowls or teacups. Raise a glass: I love having one signature cocktail at a party. A simple champagne cocktail is my go-to. For the teetotalers offer sparkling water with a large fruit wheel in a champagne glass. Don’t feel like you need to offer a full bar. Tea and coffee are nice to have on hand but not totally necessary. Also, have a bottle or pitcher of water at the table as well. Take a moment: Take a breath and look around at the people you’ve invited to your table. Celebrate their presence and the shared experience of laughter, tears, and genuine connection of your tribe.
10 | perfectly imperfect
Connect With Your Self by jill catherine photo by jennifer wolsey If we didn’t have a body we wouldn’t actually be here, alive, in the world. So it might seem strange to think that we’re not in our body. Technically, we are, but are we connected to it? Are we connected to the feelings and sensations running through us? Or, are we living in the chatter in our head, detached and devoid of this phenomenal, feelingcentered instrument designed to guide us through life? Our minds can analyze, rationalize, and talk us into or out of anything. Yet our bodies hold the truth, speak our truth, and contain all the wisdom we need. There’s a reason why we say, “trust your gut.” The next time you’re struggling with making a decision, or feeling disconnected from your self and your truth, try one of these strategies for tuning into your body:
1) ASK Take a few moments and ask yourself the questions: When I was a kid,
how do I remember myself to be? What was I like? What way of being has always come most naturally to me, then and now? We all have a way of being that is most natural to us. We are adults now and no longer have to be something or someone that we’re not. Stop fighting against yourself. Our true natures aren’t meant to be shunned, but shined upon. Claim the way of being that comes most natural to you and lean into how that feels in your body.
2) IMAGINE Close your eyes. Bring your focus down through your head, neck and shoulders, into the heart space. Feel your breath in the chest. Imagine a person, place, or thing you purely love. See it. Extend love to it. Feel the love you have for it inside of you. Shower yourself in this pure love. Let it wash over you. Connecting with the feeling of love in your body is a powerful way to ground, release tension, and find peace. It
can affect the way you respond and react to what’s happening in your life, bringing more ease to the present moment. It can also guide you in making choices that best suit your true nature.
3) STRETCH Lift your arms above your head. Interlock your fingers with your palms facing up. Extend your torso up from waist, to the sky, and then drop your shoulders. With your fingers interlocked, bend over to the right, come back to center, then over the left. Next, let your body do next whatever it naturally wants to do after this stretch. Don’t overthink it. Feel where it wants to go. Simple stretches can go a long way. We don’t need a full-blown power yoga class to get a good stretch. Placing your hands on parts of your body that are tense, while focusing on your breathing, and mindfully telling yourself that everything is going to be okay and that you love you, is another way to find peace and bring ease to the moment.
connect with your self | 11
WE
ARE
COMMITTED
TO
CHANGING THE CONVERSATION AND THE CULTURE AROUND HEALTH, BEAUTY, AND BODY IMAGE
CIRCLES OF CHANGE IS A MOVEMENT TOGETHER WE CAN SHIFT THE CULTURE FROM ONE THAT SHAMES OUR BODIES
TO ONE THAT CELEBRATES
THE BEAUTY AND PURPOSE OF OUR INDIVIDUALITY
RECL AIM
H E A L T H REDEFINE THE NARROW DEFINITIONS OF BEAUTY RESTORE OUR LOVE FOR OUR BODIES
CHANGE
THE
CONVERSATION
CHANGE THE CULTURE