Sepia "Sunday?"

 I knew I had some interesting old homes to share, but it took a while before I could plug in the external hard drive to search for them.

Sepia Saturday says: "We've always been proud of our houses. Once affordable cameras became available to the general public, we have highlighted that pride by having our photographs taken outside our houses. It doesn't matter whether we are talking about mansions or cottages, caravans or terraces: we want our photographs taking whilst we are lined up alongside them. This week on Sepia Saturday we are celebrating houses and you are invited to share your old photographs by posting them on or around Saturday 11th April and leaving a link ..."

I love this neat old house...when it was not brand new, but the yard was established with flowers and a tree had been planted, as well as a big bush by the front steps. That could be the man who did most of the hard work leaning against the wall.

Google street photo of my Geat grandfather, Alexander John Swasey's home, where my grandmother grew up, Galveston TX.

Alexander John Swasey, 1853-1913. I don't know much about GGranddad Swasey, as there are just dates bookmarking his life. His wife was a Christian Science practitioner, as well as my grandmother when she grew to adulthood.

GGranddad Swasey was born in Charleston SC, just before the Civil War, while his ship-captain father was imprisoned for the duration 1861-65. His father returned from Massachusetts prison to die in Charleston in 1866.  How  did John (as he went by that name) get to Galveston? That's probably where he met his wife, who he married in 1881. My grandmother Ada Swasey Rogers, was born there in 1886.

She married George Rogers and he built a house, which was still standing in the 1970s. I'm searching for photos that were taken then.

House built by George Rogers Sr. in Galveston, TX

I've posted a bit before about Galveston and my family which came from there.
my-family-from-galveston

Our front steps were often the site for family photos...my mother on the left, and obviously in love with my dad centered, with grandmom the next step down ...San Antonio TX. My parents married November 1936, and lived with his parents for a while. 

Mother and dad, with baby sister, and myself standing in front of my first home in Dallas TX 1946.

Christmas 1954 in St. Louis, my sister Mary on left, and myself on the right in our poodle skirts and dolls. At 12, I was a bit old for a doll. But loved the faux collar of red velvet with bead work.

----------------

Liberty leading the people by  Delacroix.

Thanks to unknown photographer.

Update on my health...progressing healing along at home again. Whoopee!

Friends have kept me going!

How we lived back then...

 Our ancestors, that is.

Model of home in settlement of Çatal Hüyük; (from Turkish çatal "fork" + höyük "tumulus") It is a tell (a mounded accretion resulting from long-term human settlement) of a very large Neolithic and Chalcolithic proto-city settlement in southern Anatolia, which existed from approximately 7500 BC to 5600 BC and flourished around 7000 BC, Turkey (Thanks Wikipedia)

See a post earlier about Archaeology, one of my interests! 

Clay goddess figurine from the Early Chalcolithic period ca 5000-4500 BC, found at the archaeological site of Durankulak, Bulgaria.

It's interesting to see what has been made of clay, stone and bone. Fiber arts, even clothes of skins, unfortunately just don't survive through  the ages.

The Columbus Hypocrisy (and all Western European explorers/invaders).

Justice is often difficult to find.

But just look at all your ancestors!

You do the math...we're all related!

To seek understanding before taking action, yet to trust my instincts when action is called for. Never to avoid danger from fear, never to seek out danger for its own sake. Never to conform to fashion from fear of eccentricity, never to be eccentric from fear of conformity. 

-Steven Brust, novelist (b. 23 Nov 1955)

Arundhati Roy once said, “There’s no voiceless, there’s only the deliberately silenced, you know, or the purposely unheard.”

Wednesday

 

Loving living in Black Mountain, here the Dripolator Coffee Shop on State St.

Downtown Black Mountain on Jan 31, 2026 with Trailhead Restaurant open on right.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sharing with Wordless Wednesday

Encampment of Gypsies with Caravans, August 1888 Van Gogh

----------------------

-------------

The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook is a 100% free newsletter. Check out the latest post: 

Keepers of the Flame A Call to Action for Curators, Historians, Archivists, and Cultural Workers

by Scot Nakagawa Feb 3   It's a newsletter. ---------------------- On considering systems changes I've posted some of the steps that were taken by intelligent people in the past over on Opening Yesterday's Pages.  I posted about Eleanor Roosevelt and the UN Declaration of Human Rights. ------------------------- The chocolate chip banana nut bread. Yes, I cut it too soon and the chocolate chips smeared all around...it's very very sweet!

The skies and our ancestors

 Let's start with Skywatch Friday!

Some dawns give interesting features...heavy frost (which I had to scrape off my car windows before going to an appointment that morning - but Barry our maintenance man helped!). And the fog rises from the river valley between my hill and the mountains to the south.

The mist changes second by second!

----------------

Our connections to the past:

 "Long ago, in shamanic cultures, we knew how to communicate with the Life of the Earth: with the spirits of the plants, the water, the mountains, the animals, and with the Life of the Cosmos — the sun, the moon and the stars in the night sky. We also knew how to communicate with the ancestors and their wisdom. Today, we have lost those skills and are increasingly losing the skill of communicating with each other, listening to each other, respecting each other.

All this has come about because, over centuries and millennia, the visible, material world has become separated from the invisible one. We have lost the thread of Ariadne that once connected us to our cosmic Source. Belief, directed by powerful priesthoods, became a substitute for direct shamanic experience of the Source. We have lost touch with our soul — even the awareness that we have a soul. Cut off from soul, our mind has become impoverished, rigid, dogmatic, and inflated. In compensation for the loss of relationship with soul, it has become driven by the need for ever more power and control, which is why we find ourselves in the extraordinary situation we are in today when millions are suffering the effects of wars and from physical and mental illness, and we are threatened with becoming inducted into a technology that could replace our species with a transhumanist one created by AI, which could bring our species to an end. We need urgently to find our way back the way we have come, towards nature and the ground of our own nature."

-Anne Baring, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit: The Forgotten Feminine Face of God.

Posted in Girl God Books from Norway on FB

Art by Jakki Moore

Sharing with Sepia Saturday - a week late on the needlework! Sorry, no musicians this week!

----------------------

Today's goddess:

In the unique ancient art of Cyprus, the female form of the Goddess is often associated with prayer and birth. It seems to be the birth of the world, the birth of trees and nature. Before Bronze Chalcolithic Limestone Praying Goddess, Cyprus, 3000-2500 BC.

The goddess smiles.

Thanks Jenny Mendez FB site

---------------

Winter Solstice is in 9 days

---------------

----------

New header (for phone reading where headers are cut!)

A bit of blurry Santa's sleigh, with the various cars to give juxtaposition across the street further in the distance. Taken through the Peri Social house window.

Honoring those who've gone before

Today is Mother's Day here in the US

Poppy, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1927

----------

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

------------

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. 

-------------

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.

--------------

Today's quote: 

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

Amazon Goddess figure.