Honoring those who've gone before

Today is Mother's Day here in the US

Poppy, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1927

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Sharing a short video which I saw on another blog yesterday. Thanks Love is a Place!

Story by Gabriel (Brian) Andreas, with art by Matthew Andreas

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I think I'd like to remember some women who influenced me through the years, who are no longer with us.

Maternal great grandmother, after whom I was named (Barbara Booth.) She raised her 4 daughters, and then helped raise my mother when my mom's father and then step-father died before she was 10.

Let's not forget the religious persecutions of women in my family. I recorded more details on my other blog, "Three Family Trees" about the 1692 witch trial of Mary Lovett Tyler, (1651-1732).  She was my 7 times great Aunt, married to Hopestill Tyler (1646-1734). It's an interesting and convoluted story, but basically she and her husband had to move out of town to live in New London CT, instead of Andover, MA.

I use this photo to designate an individual who was accused as a witch or was an accuser. Some individuals who were accused were eventually found not guilty, some were cleared, but some were hung. It's quite possible one of the judges who decreed the women to hang had also been an ancestor!

Center is my grandmother on paternal side, known to her many granddaughters as "Gummy." She lived a lot of her life in Houston TX, died in 1964. The little girl to the left in the photo is my sister, who died in 2017, and myself to right and hoping not to die for a while yet! Gummy was very much a matriarch of the Rogers family for her 78 years.

My family of origin...sister Mary Rogers Miller (1946-2017) myself and my mother, Mataley Rogers (1917-2003), taken by my father probably in 1959.

Yet another woman artist who influenced my life was Mary Cassett. 

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And then for my pottery muse, Mary Caroline Richards - (Blog post in 2011)

Mary Caroline Richards (July 13, 1916, Weiser, Idaho – September 10, 1999, Kimberton, Pennsylvania) was an American poet, potter, and writer best known for her book Centering: in Pottery, Poetry and the Person.

 Educated at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and at the University of California at Berkeley, she taught English at the Central Washington College of Education and the University of Chicago, but in 1945 became a faculty member of the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina where she continued to teach until the end of the summer session in 1951.

 It was her teaching experience and growth as an artist while at Black Mountain College that prepared the foundation for most of her work in life, both as an educator and creator. Later in life, she discovered the work of Rudolf Steiner and lived the last part of her life at a Camphill Village in Kimberton, PA. In 1985, while living at the Kimberton Camphill Village she began teaching workshops with Matthew Fox at the University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland, CA during the winter months. Mary Caroline Richards died in 1999 in Kimberton, PA

A wonderful film about her life.

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Today's quote: 

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.

Amazon Goddess figure.