Mary Day Celebrations

Mary Day Celebration Candle

Every year some women friends and I celebrate the Goddess with in us on the 15th of August. It is the Catholic holiday set to commemorate the Assumption of Mary, the Mother of Jesus as she is whisked into the Heavens. I pick this day not because I am particularly religious but because it reminds me of my childhood. When I was a child, living in Bavaria, in southern Germany, Maria Himmelfahrt  was a really big deal. As I have written in other posts on similar topic, on that day of celebration, the whole town comes out, children in traditional costume and crowns of flowers on their heads.  The statue of Mary is carried through town from the Abbey to the main church. It is a beautiful spectacle and I always see it first and foremost within that childlike vision.

I especially always loved the way kids adorned their favorite cows with wreathes of herbs and flowers accenting their beautiful long eyelashes and luminescent big pink noses, gentle nature.

Cow & Friend

In the last 10 years it's been a way  to connect with women friends that are dear, share stories - some of them about being women, some of them childhood memories, others are myths we know or half know and want to explore.

Our Lisa is the story teller and fascinates us with her memory of women stories, both learned and intuitive.

We read our coffee cups and have  wine, let our daughters join us in the lighting of the candles and writing of secret messages on little scraps of delicate paper that we then send up in smoke to the sky, hoping that our daughters too will find some fascination in the mysteries and bounty associated with the Mother.

Interview @SloMo with Carlo Petrini

The Slow Money Gathering  winding down on Tuesday morning in Boulder, Colorado,  Carlo Petrini, Founder &Visionary, Slow Food and Woody Tasch  of Slow Money meet with Journalists for an 'intimate' Coffee Kvetsch session ahead of the day's agenda. I wrote about the last Gathering in San Francisco and the Denver News invited me to follow up on this very important event in my monthly Go Green column. 

This video is from the Walk the Talk Show, produced by Waylon Lewis of Elephant Journal fame and I think that it sums up a lot of what was fantastic about the 4th Annual Slow Money Gathering 

Slow Food is about Food, but not just.  Carlo Petrini talks about civil society and how we must do our part in making the world a better place. As often my focus is on women in business and otherwise it was up to me to ask about the role that women play in this forward looking movement.  At 28:50 you can hear his answer to that question.

{Video recorded by and property of Elephant Journal}

A Story of Love

And for Valentine's Day, I have the most beautiful story for you. Related by Gular Orgun, in a lovely little film by the same about her multi cultural family heritage. These kind of stories make my heart beat faster and with happiness, because I have always been proud of my family heritage & marriages -  cross cultured and tolerant.  It is my pleasure to relate the creativity of others & share that point of view.

Here is -  "A Turkish-Jewish-Muslim Tale:

                                     film is 18 minutes long w subtittles

Enjoy and leave your comments below, I would love to start a dialogue here.

Please also visit Tara Agacyak's website  where she relates her own multi cultural marriage and how this expanded her world view in so many positive ways and then go over to GlobalNiche where good discussion is up about the same.

Ascension Cup

The Trinity - Shadow, Transformer and Dream Queen with the Son at her feet

Virgin by the Sea

Virgin by the Sea

Dove

Vladimir Golub.....

Was reading up on Summer Solstice and found a painting by Vladimir Golub on another blog site and fell in love with the art.  Fascinating images of women...

From the Attic

Clearing house. Always good but sometimes difficult. And so often surprising. I had forgotten these days in Milano when I first set out on my own. These are treasures because it's really all I have from that time.  The 'book' with all the tear outs and beautiful pic's was lost as soon as I came to the States. Maybe in the back of someone's car, in the drawer of a jealous boy, who knows. It was a long time ago.

Foto - Fabrizio Gianni

Foto - Fabrizio Gianni

Contact Sheet - Fabrizio Gianni

 These pictures are from a shoot for a magazine, I don't remember which, maybe Amica or Elle that Fabrizio Gianni 's  wife, a starkly beautiful person was modeling in. We had friends in common. I ended up using the pictures as 'provini' to put into my show 'book'.  Since Fabrizio was a very celebrated photographer, it was a really big deal for me. They were both very nice to me from what I can remember of that very warm summer day in the middle of the city. I remember that on that shoot one of the models was telling horror stories about another very famous photographer who had a very vicious way about him. I took it all in thinking I would probably not like that sort of treatment, no, not at all.

Modeling days? I don't know. The truth is that I was not 5'10" and my body too voluptuous for any serious type of 'high' modeling jobs. After a bit of running around like all the girls in Milan,  I looked into studying languages at the Instituto and directed my interests to culture instead.

It was a dream but not the dream to become a model. Soon, I only occasionally worked in that field, mostly make up and TV commercials and instead  concentrated on my studies and writing my impressions of the wild and interesting people around me. It was, and probably still is, a crazy mess of rich men and ambitious young girls, overtly beautiful and  some terribly debauched characters in between, all dancing on the same dance floor. People in the modeling business are infamously predatory and often wildly unkind. If you don't have the constitution of a rock you can get pretty messed up. I met a lot of gorgeous, doe like creatures with track marks on the back of their legs,  living on a leaf of lettuce a day. Not all, but many. With support from a fiercely loving mother,  I thankfully divined that this was not my path. Pretty pictures and incredible memories remind me that I am still whole and healthy, the way I started out.

Mary Day 2011

Mary Day Celebration

Every year some women friends and I celebrate the Goddess with in us on the 15th of August. It is the Catholic holiday set to commemorate the Assumption of Mary, the Mother of Jesus as she is whisked into the Heavens. I pick this day not because I am particularly religious but because it reminds me of my childhood. When I was a child, living in Bavaria, in southern Germany, Maria Himmelfahrt  was a really big deal. As I have written in other blogs, on that day of celebration, the whole town comes out, children in traditional costume and  with crowns of flowers on their heads, favorite cows adorned with wreathes of herbs and flowers and of course, the statue of Mary carried through town from the Abbey to the main church. It is a beautiful spectacle and I always see it first and foremost within that childlike vision.

In the last 10 years it's been a way  to connect with women friends that are dear, share stories - some of them about being women, some of them childhood memories, others are myths we know or half know and want to explore.

Our Lisa is the story teller and fascinates us with her memory of women stories, both learned and intuitive.

We read our coffee cups and have  wine, let our daughters join us in the lighting of the candles and writing of secret messages on little scraps of delicate paper that we then send up in smoke to the sky, hoping that our daughters too will find some fascination in the mysteries and bounty associated with the Mother.

Some Women

Questioning Stable Life

From my Window

I am proud to announce that I am featured once more with a new guest blog post at Anastasia Ashman's expat+HAREM website. Be sure to read it and then browse the rest of the site for fascinating accounts from women all over the world describing how they successfully integrate their art, work and play while living the expat life far from their countries of origin. 
(painting by Albert Shvilly)

Gorgeous Primps Herself

 This is a copy of a gorgeous painting by Gustave Moreau via the extremely interesting and informative blog by a woman named BWS. The blog,  It's About Time has every post filled with luscious pictures, lots of details and well researched information on America, Art, Painting, Women. To describe her writings, BWS says in her profile that there is 'a little museum in each blog -- no travel necessary'. I loved the sound of it and it can not be more accurate.
I spent an enormous amount of time on the American colonial posts but as is often the case became enraptured with the Orientalist paintings under the title 'Turquerie'. Et voila.

Women living the Global Life

I just spent a good piece of the late morning on a very cool website that I go to often. I start reading the expat + HAREM website totally intrigued and by the time I know it I am browsing amazing blogs written by the women that are featured there.

Anastasia Ashman, who is the creator, writes that her site is 'a neocultural hub for global citizens'. I will read a few of posts on the site, armchair travel through some personal blogs and pronto! I am swept away to different worlds.

The posts are populated with women from all walks of life, with 'hybrid identities' and as they relay their stories, communicating their love and at times, frustration with assimilation, expression and setbacks of living life in a country other than their own, I get a glimpse of something very personal and real.

Having traveled and lived abroad (meaning non USA) much of my life, I never really felt I belonged to any country with whole heart and soul. It is possible that is why I find the stories at expat intriguing, familiar and admittedly, I often succumb to a questionable form of travel envy!

I love that expat +HAREM is inventing new spaces to tap into for those of us that crave to be or who live in cultures that are different than our own.  The editors create interest by exploring the voices of the women who are building businesses, raising children and adapting to work conditions abroad. Everything on the site is easily accessible and engaging.  Anastasia writes about women finding a personal 'global niche', appropriate to the fast changing, social media infused lives we live now.

Next time you are in the mood to see what it is like to live and work in an 'exotic' country where 'challenging situations' are sometimes a matter of everyday life, check out the lives of 'global hybrids' and 'culturati' here.