More Clothing... Metamorphic Versalette!

I'm not trying to raise funds for the women whose video I play below (they posted this on Kickstarter)... I just really like this design idea—it reminds me of the incredible metamorphic abilities of natural/physical/biological intelligence. Natural/physical/biological intelligence knows all about using the same cloth/material to create different form/function packages.

Nature is...the ultimate in versatility.

The video about the Versalette is 2:18 in length, followed by Swedish caterpillars demonstrating their metamorphic abilities in a time lapse video that's 2:25 minutes long. The Swedish caterpillars turn into amazingly beautiful Swedish butterflies that I've never had the privilege of seeing before.

Pleasure... True or False?

I use the word pleasure a lot.

By "pleasure" I mean enlivened feelings that are in alignment with my life purposes and my physical vitality.

Many so-called pleasures lose their allure when considered from this larger context.

When we consciously work with natural/biological/physical intelligence to gain guidance on how to embody our life purposes and increase our energy and vitality, our pleasure expands steadily, along a balanced, non-addicted path.

To me, this pleasure is valuable beyond words, because it is a whole-body experience, that extends from the atomic and subatomic particles that make up my internal organs, to the outer reaches of my electromagnetic structures. When we experience pleasure, we rightfully want more of it. We start noticing which ways of living dampen pleasure, and which ways of living strengthen it, and our creativity is sparked—we work on figuring out how to create more pleasure.

If all of us insisted daily on experiencing more pleasure, pleasure that enlivens us, many grave and potentially disastrous problems on Planet Earth would be solved quickly. 

For example if we were seriously committed to our own pleasure, I doubt many of us would want to wear clothing whose manufacture involved suffering. And as the singer in the video below reminds us, there's a fine line between pleasure and pain! What looks so good on the rack might not be as appealing if we researched who made it and how. Deception, secrecy (when's the last time you found a clothing tag with a picture of the factory on it?) and seduction are very powerful forces when combined with an anticipation of pleasure—"that dress is gonna look great on me!"

Please don't misunderstand me. I take great pleasure in seeing and wearing beautiful clothes. What I'm exploring here is the question of what pleasure and beauty look like when we take the whole of a situation into account.

This video is of a group called the Divinyls, recorded in 1985. For full details, see http://youtu.be/_aYzQb6cc5E

Clothes are Nature Too, All Too Often Caught in Exploitative Patterns

The paradigm I'm working in is that everything in our physical world is part of natural/physical/biological intelligence.

That includes your clothing.

In the United States, where I live, the weekend following Thanksgiving is when all kinds of stuff is discounted heavily. People who've spent days preparing the Thanksgiving party then chase deals. Hours-long line-ups (some last all night long) and intensely crowded shopping conditions are the norm on "Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving. Sometimes violence erupts.

The retailers offering these discounts claim we'll save money if we shop at these sales. And... my time, energy, and calm are all very valuable to me. In fact, the state of my time, energy, and mood impacts my earning power. So I never participate in this shopping ritual. I just don't think the potential dollars saved are worth my time, energy, and stress.

Then there are the people who participate from far away—they usually live in neighborhoods middle class buyers don't often visit, and they're the ones who pay for our discounts.

They're the ones who, for instance, make clothing for less and less pay. The clothing that sits on our skin all day... and has been touched with hands of fear (will I be able to feed my loved ones?) and anger (this is unfair!) and shame (is working for peanuts so that richer people can dress themselves cheap all I'm good for?)

I embrace the truth held in the fear, anger, and shame of people who've been backed into a corner.

And what about us, the people who wear these clothes? Natural/physical/biological intelligence does not discriminate. It accepts and reflects all thoughts, all human choices. While we may not often give thought to the suffering of cotton or polyester, these materials do have intelligence, as does all of physical reality. I'm certain that cloth would prefer not to be caught up in a web of exploitation either. And—if your clothing has been made by a person who's exploited, then you are bringing the energies of exploitation home to your own skin every time you wear that clothing.

I invite you to stop training your body to accept exploitation. Avoid putting clothing filled with exploitative patterns on your skin. 

One of the world's few fair trade clothing retailers, Fair Indigo, has here an insider analysis about the reality of who pays for clothing sent to you via free shipping:  http://fairindigo.blogspot.com/2011/11/high-price-of-free-shipping.html

p.s. Let's consider "the hypocrisy factor"—here I am inviting you to do something. So what do I do?... I am a fairly low-income person at this point in my life. As a result, I buy about 85 to 90 percent of my clothes secondhand, and anything new I buy, I expect to last at least a decade. So my clothes are mostly one step removed from what was probably unfair beginnings. The money I spend on my secondhand clothes goes to support a local hospice. My eventual aim is to make enough money that I can afford to buy all my clothing, in fact, all my "stuff," newly made at fair trade prices. I'm working on it!