Maybe the Angry Women - 8

Moonlit Dance by Sheryl Luxenburg

 Today's goddess:

MACHA

From Girl God Books FB 2024

Art by Lucy Pierce

"The Great Mother Goddess Macha vanished from the stage of Irish history following her downfall at the hands of the king and his warriors. The disappearance of Macha symbolized the elimination of the possibility of any woman-centered social system, philosophy, or religion. The Male Word, rather than Female Womb, would take responsibility for ensuring the continuation of the social order, albeit that this Word was reinforced and sustained by a discourse on, and the threat of, death rather than life...

The Triple Goddess would be replaced by the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a Trinity created by means of will, and obedience no longer dependent upon the fertility of womanhood to fulfill its designs. As Christianity took hold in Ireland, it would make alliances and compromises with the warriors and provide alternative occupations for the old male religious leadership. But women and the energies they represented were a fundamental threat to the new religious consciousness...

Remember in the Macha story we heard her final cry, 'A mother bore each one of you.' To a matricentered society this would have been the ultimate plea...this plea recalled people to their responsibilities toward their creator and their common origins through the Great Mother."

~ Mary Condren, "The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland"

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I ask for justice.

Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed a US citizen, Renee Nicole Good, Jan 7, 2026. There is not enough  legal effort going  on to examine his actions still!

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Last week, on Jan. 22, was the anniversary of passage of the Supreme Court's

... landmark Roe v. Wade ruling (1973). The plaintiff was “Jane Roe,” a woman who was forbidden to seek an abortion in Texas, but couldn’t afford to travel to a neighboring state. The defendant, Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade, argued that life begins at conception and therefore the state had a compelling interest in protecting that life.

Justice Harry Blackmun, who had once served as counsel to the Mayo Clinic, wrote the decision. He wrote: “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.” Therefore, the court based its decision on the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments and the right to privacy, and ruled seven to two in favor of Jane Roe.

The decision forbade states from outlawing abortions in the first trimester and set limits on regulation of abortion in the second and third trimesters. The court also required that exceptions to any regulations be made when the health of the mother was at stake.

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The Walk for Peace continues

In Charlotte NC

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Grateful eyes look at each thing as if they had never seen it before and caress it as if they would never see it again.

BR. DAVID STEINDL-RAST ---------------------- "Please join me and many others in making the six compassionate vows of: environmental sustainability, gender equality, socioeconomic justice, participatory governance, cultural tolerance, and nonviolence and peace." Barb Rogers (Thanks, Robertson Work for stating this first.)

Peace on earth

 

Peace: A Gift for All Beings

"May peace flow like a quiet stream through all hearts and across every corner of the Earth.

May it touch the wings of birds, the breath of animals, the souls of humans, and the roots of trees alike.

Let kindness be our language, compassion our gift, and understanding our bridge—so that all beings, seen and unseen, may live in harmony, free of harm, embraced by love."

posted on FB Serendipity Corner in 2024

by Anna Speshilova

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Where we've been, historically speaking:

As published in 2020, a Timeline of World History!

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Environmental news

Australian good eco-news! That's ecology, not economy!

The Australian government has just announced that beginning next July, residents of three of the country’s six states will get three free hours of electricity every day, with the rest of the country to follow in 2027. This is because the country has put up so many solar panels that at midday, when the sun is highest, they’re producing truly massive amounts of power.

The free offer is a way to get Aussies scheduling their lives a little differently to take advantage of the surplus—one imagines that many of them will be programming their washing machines to run midday, and charging their EVs then, too. It’s a good moment to be selling ever-cheaper household batteries too, since Australians can fill them on the cheap power and then run their homes all night.

In the largest sense, this is truly remarkable news. For at least 700,000 years humans have worked hard to get energy—first by gathering firewood, more recently by scraping together the money to pay power bills. But now—thanks to our new understanding of how to generate energy from the sun—we can be relieved of that burden.

It’s potentially an epochal moment—in some ways as remarkable as the invention of agriculture or the Industrial Revolution. Back in the 1950s, the nuclear industry literally promised electricity “too cheap to meter.” Now, thanks to the largest nuclear reactor in our corner of the universe, that is entirely possible.

Thanks Katharine Hayhoe

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So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.

John Lewis

Today's goddess

Dogū Goddess. Ebisuda site in Tajiri, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, 1000–400 BCE. Dogū are analogous to the stone figurines that were made by people throughout the late Paleolithic and Neolithic eras.

Thanks Jenny Mendes Ceramics on FB

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Today's quote:

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. HOWARD THURMAN I love the idea of a cease to all conflict and war. That doesn’t mean I don’t want consequences for the behaviors that have hurt others. Yes, I can be angry about injustice, and want resolution of harmful acts through legal civilized means, but not by becoming as hurtful as those who are being judged. Others may feel justified in wanting revenge. I won't go there, as it just perpetuates violence. My doctor visit yesterday was uneventful. I'm grateful that my migraines just give me auras, and no pain. I do continue to be sensitive to light following them, and it's so frequent suddenly that I wanted to address the problem. For the last 30 years or so I've only had a couple a year. For the last month, almost daily. So I'm being referred to a neurologist (who I already see for the essential tremor in my hands and neuropathy in my legs) an eye doctor to check that my visual nerves are ok, and a CT scan to see what's going on in my brain. No drugs, since she said they would have worse side effects than not taking them. Anyone on social media should have become aware by now of the Monks walking in the Peace March from Fort Worth TX to Washington DC. They are now in Georgia I believe.

Today, and maybe tomorrow.

I enjoy reading a lot of other blogs (as you can see by my lists over in the right column. So I found some things that I like to keep track of, by sharing them on my own blog.

For today, I saw these photos of a wall in a gas station in Canada.  Here's the blog site, and here are some of the photos. I like that Jessey Pacho made art from words...much as graffiti does. He's celebrating the front-liine workers during the pandemic.

I shared them on Facebook also, in honor of my friend Teresa, and cousin, Cynthia. Thanks to Junkboat Travels blog.

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And here's an animated video that helps us consider, imagine, and perhaps have some hope for the future...

A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It is somewhat dated, but you'll get the idea.

It echoes my own fervent hopes for a brighter future after our election.

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I've started the pulmonary rehab (same gym, and classroom which we used for the Ornish cardiac rehab. But different leadership...all with a slightly fun competition.

I'm focused a bit differently in my hour of exercise, and will have a different slant on the education as well...and I must try to remember it all to tell my friends who are also interested in improving their lung function.

My first real impression is that there are an awful lot of people coming for this rehab. My group is only 5 who are called Freshmen. Then there are Seniors (and I don't know how many there are of them.) And then there are about 15-20 people that come as maintenance. And in 2 weeks there will be 30 of us. 

How does this effect the gym?

They ran out of sterile wipes today, for each piece of equipment is cleaned after each person finishes with it.

They are on order, we were told.

Today's quote:

"Bless what there is, for being." Whatever it be, bless it because it exists; you need no other reason.

BR. DAVID STEINDL-RAST

Whew!

I've had trouble finding a place to walk these days...and I should be doing 30 min. every other day, or maybe 15 min. each day. The lake is nice to walk around, but sometimes crowded, and I noticed it had a small landslide from recent rains blocking the path. So I decided to start where I live. And it's on a big steep hill.

I start out in the middle, which is grand, and I walk downhill in the shade most of the way.

 This is Walker Rd, looking uphill. It's hard to tell when there's nothing horizontal to compare it to, but believe me it's also steep.

 I was grateful for the bamboo forest which provided a little shade.

After just making it half way this morning (my first try, after all), I turned and started back downhill. These sweet little yellow flowers caught my eye on the bank.

 A big old oak with many vines covering it stood in the forest.

 Going downhill, there's Old 70 at the bottom of the hill, but I turned off into our driveway.

And having gone uphill halfway, I stopped to take a photo and catch my breath.  This whole walk only took 15 mintues! But with the hills, I felt that was quite enough for today!

Today's Quote:

May we never forget the crippled, wind-beaten trees, how they, too, bud, green and bloom. May we, too, take courage to bloom where we are planted.

BR. DAVID STEINDL-RAST

Springtime lovely food dishes

I fixed one of my favorite dish combinations for the spring. Salmon, roasted garlic and asparagus, and sticky rice. Silly camera got the plate upside down, but I'm leaving it that way. The food is just a memory now.

Today's Quote:

May we never forget the crippled, wind-beaten trees, how they, too, bud, green and bloom. May we, too, take courage to bloom where we are planted.

BR. DAVID STEINDL-RAST