Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day to all mothers...as well as all women who have been creative through other avenues, like poets, painters, potters, musicians, planters, and pet owners!

Bathing a newborn - unknown photographer 

My name is Barbara Booth

the daughter of

Mataley Mozelle,

the daughter of

Mozelle Booth,

the daughter of

Eugenia Almeda,

the daughter of

Eugenia Almeda, (yes there were 2!)

daughter of

Susan Elizabeth,

daughter of

Elizabeth...

This is my lineage of mothers. To their spirits I send wishes for Happy Mothers Day.

My grandmother Mozelle Booth and myself (maybe age 3). Grandmommy was a single mother most of her life, and supported herself as a seamstress, working mainly on society women's beautiful gowns for dances and weddings and other events in San Antonio TX. She made the coat, leggings and hat outfit for myself. It was tan wool with a brown velvet collar.

My Great Grandmother, after whom I was named. A cousin had been given her first name as her middle name, so when I came along, I was told, I received her maiden name. Later I noted that my grandmother had also had Booth as a middle name, so I didn't mind quite as much. Living in Texas until I was 8, I never knew a thing about John Wilkes Booth until moving to St. Louis and learning that he killed Lincoln, who had actually been pretty unpopular with the south. I have copies of letters from ancestors at the time he had been elected just before the Civil War...those Texans sure didn't like him. However, as an adult I've traced my Booth family lineage and find no direct connection to the Booths of theatrical fame, nor to the assassin, John Wilkes.

"Gummy" my grandmother (visiting from Houston TX), my father (her son), and my mother. This was our first owned house in St. Louis. My mother worked full time at the private school, Principia. My father did also. Gummy was a Christian Science practitioner, and greatly influenced my parents to bring my sister and myself to Principia, the Christian Science school grades K-12 and college in Elsah IL. It was a dedication which they gave us, and we never appreciated it as much as they hoped, both of us leaving the religion shortly after quitting college in our 3rd years.

"Dear Nan" Zulieka, my great grandmother on my fathers side, holding my father's sister who died young.

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Yearbook picture of my mother

Studio type photo with same hairdo of my mother

Two good friends who share day trips and conversations over coffee often, where our children, grandchildren and books are often the topics discussed.

My grandson Michael and Amanda who will be having their baby this October, my first great grandchild! So Amanda is also wished a happy almost Mother's Day.

And again, to offer wishes that all creative mothering energies are appreciated! Nurturing and creativity are not at all passive feminine acts. 

I am learning a lot about women's energies from "Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World" by Tyson Yunkaporta. The following is a quote from this book, from "Kelly Menzel, an Aboriginal woman from the Adelaide Hills (Australia) and keeper of ancestral Indigenous Knowledge. She is a nurse by Trade and a healer by vocation who is completing her PhD and working as a university lecturer." The question is whether to reverse the domesticated state as evident in our present society's way of defining women's and men's relationships.

This mother gifted herself with a fresh haircut for Her Day!

International Women's Day

 How do you celebrate the efforts of half of the population? And the incredible history of womanhood to make life better for themselves and the whole world?

Party!

Remember!

Post a few wonderful photos accumulated through time of women!

In the Pagan tradition, the maiden, mother and crone.

Rebecca West, English journalist

by Susan Seddon Boulet

Energy cannot be destroyed, but it can be changed and transformed.

The great goddess from Çatal höyük, 6000 BC, sitting on a throne flanked by two felines. She is later known as Matar Kubileya, Kubaba or Cybele. Found at Çatal höyük, 45 kilometers south of modern Konya, Turkey

Ruth Bader Ginsburg painted by Joan Baez

Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.

RUTH BADER GINSBURG

Virginie Demont - Into the Water! 1898.

The efforts of thousands, through many lifetimes, to get equal voting rights.

Eco-feminist Joanna Macy

by Sally Hewett, U.K. Ectomy, 2017.

Greta Thunberg

Poster 1920

What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together.

ROBIN WALL KIMMERER

Maybe the Angry Women -2

 

Sheela-na-gig!

A 12th-century Sheela na gig on the church at Kilpeck, Herefordshire, England

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Why is Sheela Na Gig making her comeback now?

written By Debra Hall

You’ve been called the witch in the wall, castle hag, whore,

Evil eye, devil incarnate,

a hideous historical oddity,

a medieval sermon against sin,

the “grossest idea of immorality

and licentiousness”

to ever be placed on a house of worship!

You’ve been reviled by Patriarchy,

destroyed in your hundreds by puritanical Christianity.

With no records kept

from when you manifested

between the twelfth and early seventeenth centuries

your meaning is shrouded in mystery.

You’ve been projected on endlessly.

You’ve been a birthing stone,

your mound rubbed smooth by women praying for their wombs to be filled

and labour eased.

You are fascinating and confronting,

humorous, terrifying and comforting.

You are an exhibitionist, vulva splayed,

bony ribs, a face like death, rows of tiny teeth,

breasts pointing to your knees

you are a carnival of grotesque

opening your flaps

like a circus tent.

You are the juice, the feist,

the guardian of the land

and the land itself.

You are a survivor, a shapeshifter, a shamanic prayer.

Your Earth magic and apotropaic powers are rivers in spate.

You are Priestess

of birth, regeneration and death.

Creator and destroyer.

Entrance into the Mysterium.

You are a direct descendant of the neolithic frog goddess,

of vulvas on cave walls

the most prevalent motif

of creativity and creation ever known.

As we rewild ourselves

you are an icon of our potency,

a vital pulse of feral energy

actively suppressed for millennia

but never lost.

You give us freedom, permission to be ourselves,

to inhabit our bleeding, birthing,

menopausing, ageing and death-bed bodies,

to lead with wisdom, joy and resistance.

You mirror our Earthiness, our innate wholeness,

the atavism of our imaginations.

We are claiming, reimagining

and making you in a multitude of media.

Originally carved by masons

You have always belonged to ‘the folk’

and now we are taking you to our hearts again

and wearing you there.

Sheela Na Gig,

You are trending.

Why are you making your comeback now?

What do you want to tell us?

Sheela Na Gig speaks:

I have coming back because time is running dry.

Femicide, Ecocide, Mass Extinction and Global Poverty are all intertwined.

The Earth needs a Hera

and so do women and girls,

the trees and creatures

and everyone else

who does not fit the white, heteronormative, Imperialist mould,

who is treated with the same violent disregard,

who urgently needs a voice.

I have come back to help you

take back the hallowed ground.

I am a bridge

to bring the ancient back to yourselves

from the deep well

of your collective consciousness

when Culture thrived.

I am a demand

that history and art history go back far enough

to the time when societies were peaceful and just.

when Colonialism, Hierarchy and weaponry did not exist

So that you may know your truest roots

and provenance

Far, far deeper than fake news

and distorted norms

that told you to include yourselves

in the false belief that ‘Mankind’ is inherently violent,

Wars inevitable,

Women and men ‘as bad as each other.’

Archaeology, science and statistics-

Nothing supports it.

I have come back

when you need me most

My message is this:

Power to kill, enslave, destroy and dominate is nothing.

Potency to share and create from the heart of the Earth,

with the Earth

and all that is all life

and the life of life- Love

is everything.

Wikipedia gives this:

Feminist scholarship has reinterpreted the concept of the sheela na gig especially in terms of the image as evil or embodiment of sin. Feminists have adopted the image as an icon with feminist authors viewing the sexuality of the sheela na gig more positively as an empowering figure. Reverence for female sexuality and vulvas can be seen in the art of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party and The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler. In Wide-open to Mirth and Wonder, Luz Mar González-Arias argues that the creative re-imagining of this medieval female figure can "encourage contemporary women to stop perceiving their own corporeality as a heavy, awkward and shameful burden of guilt".  Irish writer Molly Mullin's essay Representations of History, Irish Feminism, and the Politics of Difference claims that the image of the Sheela na gig has almost become emblematic of Irish feminism as a force for hope and change. Scholar Georgia Rhoades argues that for many contemporary feminists the gesture of the Sheela's unapologetic sexual display is "a message about her body, its power and significance—a gesture of rebellion against misogyny, rather than an endorsement of it".

SOURCE: Rhoades, Georgia (2010). "Decoding the Sheela-na-gig". Feminist Formations. 22 (2): 167–194.

Ecuador heraldic woman and Irish Sheela na Gig

Hail Sheela na gig!

Big moon energy

Sheela-Na-Gig

Strange History 

This is a Sheela-na-gig: a type of statue or carving found on European Christian buildings from the Central Middle Ages showing a naked woman overtly displaying her vulva. Whatever messages they were intended to make — fertility blessing, pagan remnant, or grotesque ridicule — contrasted with the high value of female virginity promoted by the Church and aristocratic moralists. So important was virginity to a woman’s value that we can find a variety of Medieval sources telling a woman how she could fake her virginity.

First of all, you could just *act* like a virgin, which one text says would mean showing “shame, modesty, fear, a faultless gait and speech, [and] casting eyes down before men . . . .”.

The eleventh-century Trotula (an important gynaecological text) has some more practical, if cringe-worthy, advice: “the day before her marriage [the woman who wants to fool people about her virginity], let her put a leech cautiously on her labia, taking care lest it slip in by mistake; then blood will flow out here, and a little crust will form in that place. Because of the flux of blood and the constricted channel of the vagina, thus in having intercourse the false virgin will deceive the man”.

Thanks Jenny Mendes on FB

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There are many more images of Sheela na gigs, but apparently the images aren't being published at this time. It's curious how many are at entranced to Christian churches!

To clarify in case you don't understand a Patriarchal System...

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Winter Solstice is 7 days away

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Happy Hanukkah!

Hanukkah in 2025 begins at sundown on December 14 and lasts until sundown on December 22. It is an eight-day festival celebrating the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the miracle of the oil that lasted eight days.

Wicked

 My takeout from the Wicked movie...oh take-away is the right term. I saw it a total of three times, with some stops the last time to take a photo of things that were important for me. Oh the costumes and sets were what I loved the most of the production. I'd seen the play. My friend last night said she'd started to read the book, but didn't like it. I forgot, I had also read the book after the play.

This edition is waaaay different than the play, at least as I remember it. But I have to remember it was a musical...so every chance the actors got, they sang a song, and frequently danced as well!

The one-second shot to remember the Wizard of Oz...other than the hat after Dorothy threw water on the Wicked Witch which killed her. This was the only acknowledgement that there was a connection, though of course the Wizard of Oz, Emerald City and Munchkins were also there.

The things that struck me were metaphors for our coming 2025 changes in politics. (Will I see this everywhere I look, I wonder.)

Of course the Wizard being a fallible man was part of the show, but other themes were there...basic feminism, racism confronted, and even disability and animal rights. The movie starts by the celebration of the death (I kid you not) of the Wicked Witch of the West...as confirmed by Glinda, the Good Witch announcing it to the Munchkins (mostly young people and children, no 'little people' that I could see).  

Glinda is much younger in this production!

Anyway, a child asks Glinda where wickedness came from, and the nature vs nurture questions is posed (without answer).  A bit later another young woman asked if she was a friend of the Wicked Witch, and she starts by saying yes, they were friends. Then she back-pedals and tells the story of their going to school together...which is the entire plot of the movie.

Madame Morrible welcomes students to Shiz University. She teaches sorcery.

The subplots, besides how good and "wicked" change places, are the issues of racism, and animal rights, free thinking and even a bit about disability rights. Several times I saw Glinda as a born-again Christian in the way she presents things. Fortunately it seems many gays and lesbians were able to be depicted without labeling.

The Wizard is presented at first god-like in the worshipful attitude of all. Then he becomes a bad-guy (big government, authority) with his sorceress partner, Madame Morrible, which works well with the coming-of-age theme. (Somehow he will be reinstated for the episode that became the movie we all saw with Dorothy and Toto (neither of whom are evident in this part one of Wicked.)

Elphaba is the green friend of Glinda, who has no idea what skills of magic she might have. And of course she is laughed at for her color difference. (I love that she was played by a black actor, Cynthia Erivo.) 

 I noticed every time a serious issue was presented in a noticeable way, then there would be a break to humor and another musical number. It was as if you (the audience) were given a fact to consider, but quickly you must be more aware of the fun of life. That's why I went back the third time to record these "issues that were either main plot or sub-plots," if you will.

And when people are hungry and angry...the professor of history says, "they look for..." Elphaba finishes, "someone to blame." The incredible irony is that he, a talking goat professor, would say such, when just a few scenes later the "military" arrives to take him away in a cage. Thus is demonstrated what a "scapegoat" is in our modern lives.

There's a handsome young man who becomes part of a love triangle briefly between Glinda and Elphaba, who brings great dance numbers into this musical, then kind of disappears. I hope he features further in the second installment.   I am not a big fan of the music, but the lyrics do hold messages. The dance choreography was absolutely amazing.

Fiero and Glinda dancing in the library!

The hat her "granny gave her" says Glinda as she gives it to her roommate Elphaba.

Yes, just when Elphaba steps into her power, there are the words thrown across the screen:

To Be Continued

This is my favorite song, which YouTube has as just a sound track from the movie:

Dancing through Life, as sung by Jonathan Bailey (sorry the version I have had ads...maybe you have premium if you're lucky)

Today on Open Yesterday's Pages:

Joan Baez