January 17, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

I have had the Peaceful Time of my Life

Hello everyone. I am home and feeling so relaxed and happy. It was a wonderful trip. The light, sounds, smells, and textures of the trip are filling my heart and mind. I met many wonderful people and laughed a lot.

I think if you breathe in love and exhale peace, you see the world as it “really” is. I am so grateful that I won this trip and every day was an adventure. Music, hot tubs, beaches, waters colored by the hand of heaven. My sister and I were walking down a hallway on our way to breakfast. I suddenly thought, wow, I hardly have any clothes on and it is January. It kind of became a motto,”We are doing —–and it is January.

I believe I could have stayed forever except for a few excursions to New Orleans. My favorite city is New Orleans, actually French Quarter.

Peace was woven into our lives during this trip. I heard nothing but reggae music and laughter. People went out of their way to be kind and thoughtful. I heard not one voice raised in anger or hatred. People never were inconsiderate. Neither staff or passengers.

As a person on this planet, I realized that we are capable of kindness, discussion, manners, laughter, thoughtfulness. We are able to live on the One World with love and peace.We can look out for others, care about their troubles and give smiles and laughs rather than hatred and violence.

Walking on deck in the evening .Photo by Barbara Mattio

Abstract sculpture
Photo by Barbara Mattio

January 9, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

One Week

One World, one love and one life for all of us.

I am going out of town for a week and will be not be blogging. I will be back in a week with more stories and photos. Take care and I will be back soon.

January 8, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

Our Passion for Justice

Justice is part of the foundation of our civilization

Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling, not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being “drawn toward.” Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one’s friends and enemies. Love creates righteousness, or justice here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf of women, blacks, lesbians and gay men, the aging, the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. I think also that sexual lovers and good friends know that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering bonds.

For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called “love.” Love is a choice–not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity–a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.
——Excerpted by Carter Hayward from Our Passion for Justice

Sunset Black Mountain, North Carolina Photo by Barbara Mattio

January 8, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

Life for women is absolutely going the wrong direction.

January 8, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

I am not Ashamed to be a Woman

What Women Want

I feel that I have to apologize to all of my followers. I want to be writing about my love for The One. I want to talk about the passion of creativity and peace. I am going to continue to write about these subjects but I have to draw attention to what is happening to women in the world. Forty years ago, I thought it was pretty much a finished subject, and I was wrong. I have to begin to assist in our cause because it is the way I am made. I probably can’t march and picket like the old days. I intend to hopefully be one of the voices that inspire younger women to action.

I have been reading articles about the young woman, Jyoli Singh, who was raped and tortured for two and a half hours. I will not get graphic here but this was a beautiful and intelligent medical school grad. She and a male friend got on a bus to go home. For two and a half hours, the driver. his assistant and four passengers used a rod on her and her male friend. They were dumped out onto the side of the road.

She was in and out of consciousness, spoke to her father and the police. They had to remove her intestines. When her Father speaks of his grief it is almost unbearable.

Rape is not a crime of sexual lust or passion. It is an act of power and humiliation. They did everything possible to humiliate and demean her.Why? Because she was a woman. In the hospital, she spoke a little of the events using mostly gestures. Her friend has filled in the details. He was just a friend and was also beaten with a rod, but is alive.

Activists and caring Inkian citizen protest the rape and death of “India’s Daughter”

Women speak out against the rape of Ms. Singh

I have tears running down my cheeks and yet I must address this awful crime. In India, if the six men are found guilty, they will be hung. People in India are now calling Ms. Singh “India’s Daughter.” She has been marytred and she will inspire change in India. Yet in hospital she whispered to her father that she wanted to live. She was called home.

So, life goes on, and in the world women are raped and abused every day. Sexism encourages men to reduce the status of women to objects or possessions to own and use whenever the man wants to use them.

Indians express anger at rape and death of a young medical grad.

So, I feel that I have to write and let men and women know what is really going on and how women are being treated like they were lamps or chairs instead of human beings and children of the Universe. I pray for Ms. Singh and I know she is one woman who will never suffer again. Blessings to all of the women who are survivors of rape or abuse.

In memory

Ms. Singh whispered to her Father in hospital that she wanted to live.

January 8, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

Important reading

January 7, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

The Quiet but Worsening War on Women

Betty Freiden wrote the Feminine Mystic

Every day I hear another story about women and what is quietly happening to the rights we already have, after a great deal of work. I also hear about what is happening to prevent our legal equality. Congress did not pass the Violence Against Women Act. It is a law that must be renewed every five years. Congress just decided not to renew the law. This law protects women from Domestic Violence, slapping, punching, kicking, pushing, being burned, having a jaw broken and worse. A woman is battered every 11 seconds. Congress, those guys who love their constituents so much voted no.

Some of them may be batterers, some may have come from families where violence was common in the home. Some think women need to be controlled and punished when they don’t do what the man in their lives. Violence will increase against women. Sexism and misogyny worsen every day. The answer is to have laws to protect us. Men need to treat us as equal partners. We need Congress to pass the law to make us legally equal.

I suggest you write, email, call your congress people and the White House. I do it. More women and feminist men need to let these people know how we feel and that we won’t settle for being second class citizens. Raise your voice with pride. “We are women, hear us roar.” –Helen Reddy

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Often abuse begins when a woman becomes pregnant.

Often the abuse begins when a woman becomes pregnant.

January 6, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

This is part of the war on women. It is very important for as many people to read it as possible.

January 5, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

I think this is important information.

The Fifth Column

The Huffington Post

1. The Deficit Has Grown Mostly Because Of The Recession

The deficit has ballooned not because of specific spending measures, but because of the recession. The deficit more than doubled between 2008 and 2009, as the economy was in free fall, since laid-off workers paid less in taxes and needed more benefits. The deficit then shrank in 2010 and 2011.

2. The Stimulus Cost Much Less Than Bush’s Wars, Tax Cuts

Republicans frequently have blamed the $787 billion stimulus for the national debt, but, when all government spending is taken into account, the stimulus frankly wasn’t that big. In contrast, the U.S. will have spent nearly $4 trillion on wars in the Middle East by the time those conflicts end, according to a recent report by Brown University. The Bush tax cuts have cost nearly $1.3 trillionover 10 years.

3. The…

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January 5, 2013 by IdealisticRebel

Dear Mother Earth

Autumn blooming clematis

Autumn blooming clematis

Cleveland Metropolitan Zoo

Botanical gardens

Raptor center, Charlotte, NC

Blue Ridge Mountains

” Life has always seemed to me

Like a plant that lives on its

Rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome.

The part that appears above ground

Lasts only a single summer.

Then it withers away–an ephemeral apparition.

When we think of the unending growth and decay and life and civilization,

We cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity.

Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures

Underneath the eternal flux.

What we see is the blossom, which passes, the rhizome remains.”

————————C.G. Jung

“The soul of the whole of creation is one, the life behind all these ever-moving phantoms is one. Meditation on this truth and the awakening to it will harmonize the condition of the World.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan