a bit of history and some yard work

Panel installed, circles with stars delivered. When I delivered the circles I got to see for the first time the railing that they are accents for in the little theater in the Texas history museum at the San Jacinto Monument, the battleground where the Mexican General Santa Anna was captured by General Sam Houston of the Texian army and as a result of which Mexico eventually forfeited about half it's territory, an area that encompassed all of Texas and parts of New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and on up into Wyoming.

We have finished all the work we had in the shop so I should be starting on some new models but I keep casting my eye outdoors. So much work to be done out there.

Last Friday afternoon I got out there and hacked back the wild space that continually encroaches on the yard. I cut down about half a dozen small rain trees (3” in diameter or less) that were leaning into the big cedar providing a bridge for the wild grape vine that was all up in it. Got all that pulled out and lugged over to my not-in-residence neighbor's burn pile since, technically, all that stuff was on his property. The cedar is on the property line so I claim possession.

This is the cleaned up shot taken from my neighbor's side. As usual it didn't occur to me to take a 'before' pic. The shed is ours, about 5' from either property line.

my side

Sunday was overcast all day so I took advantage and expanded the flower bed around the water lily pond...

the one that has the natural filter that this:

is growing in, which is called white snowflake I recently found out, and it smells so sweet. I had no idea it was so fragrant...so I could get the cutting from the heritage rose at the old city house in the ground since it wasn't doing all that well in the pot I stuck it in a year ago. The rose bush at the old house was from a cutting my across-the-street-neighbor gave me many years ago and I'm not sure where she got it. You can barely see it for the mistflower that hitchhiked along and is now blooming.

The mistflower (a native wild ageratum) is invasive and spreads through root runners and seed and it will quickly fill in any available space. I do love it anyway (though I have learned to be ruthless when it starts getting too greedy) and am glad it is getting established here. I'll put a clump over at the shop when it gets big enough and it can run wild to it's heart's content over there.

Well, I've managed to waste another perfectly good day and got nothing accomplished either outside or in. Guess I'll go take the dog for a walk.

house home

I've written many posts about this house, mostly about our difficulty in leaving it. This is the story about how I acquired it.

I bought my house in the city when I was 25. I was between marriages, though I didn't know that at the time, and was back living with my parents. I was jobless due to the fact that I had quit my job to move out on some land in east Texas with my now ex-husband in some sort of half hearted attempt to rekindle my affection for the rat bastard.

It didn't work.

So here I was at 24, back in the city, back in the house of my parents that I had married the rat bastard for in the first place to escape. And although they didn't hassle me about going out and finding work and my own place or maybe even going back to school and actually getting the art degree I had started on, I really wanted out again. They didn't keep their disapproval of my lifestyle secret.

They did allow me the space to figure out what I wanted to do though and for that I am grateful.

By the time I had got the idea to see if I could buy a house instead of renting an apartment, my most likely future abode, I had started my fledgling etched glass business and was even making a little money.

I don't remember how the idea of buying a house came up, if it was some cock-eyed thought of mine or came from a friend or my parents, I can't say, but my parents supported the idea. A friend of the family in real estate found half a dozen or so little cottages in the run down Heights area that I had selected to live in based totally on a regret mused by a friend of mine at the time who had bought a place in a different neighborhood. It turned out to be one of those serendipitous utterances that had a major impact on my life, much like the one that sent me on my career path.

I had a budget of $15,000 in mind, which at the time was a huge amount to me, a scary amount, and we looked at 3 or 4 run down cottages and then we looked at this house. It was beautiful, beautifully kept with 10' ceilings and hardwood floors and wood frame double hung windows with a pattern of diamonds across the top and a porch and deep eaves, nearly a hundred years old, but I liked that. The owner was firm on the price, $19,000. But this was the house. This one. I could live here and work here.

If you have ever bought a house, you know what a sobering experience that is. My father agreed to co-sign the Fannie Mae note which is a good thing because I'm sure they would not have given me the time of day otherwise. Being a young, female, self employed artist was as good as being unemployed as far as they were concerned. Hell, I couldn't even get a credit card.

a little rundown but in it's heyday

And so that is how I got my house. This house was my home for 35 years and our shop is still there. Over half of my life was spent in this house. It was my own safe place, Marc and I got married in the living room, we worked hard and built up our etched glass studio there, we raised our kids and pampered our grandkids in it. And though we moved from it, it has never really stopped being 'the' house and in a deep sense, home even though we like living out here in the country very much and we like this little house we are in.

The plan was to build a shop out here and move the business but we have not been able to, so far, get that done.

Our son and daughter-in-law have been living in the city house for the past nearly two years, taking care of minor repairs and, most importantly, occupying the place, breathing a little life back into it. We have our little apartment in the back corner and we seem to have settled in to returning to the city when we have fabrication to do.

We've always known we would sell the place eventually, but that's always been 'down the road'.

Only, maybe the road is shorter than we thought.

that might not have been true after all

It's been brought to my attention that I have a couple of retractions to make.

First concerning a picture of these flowers:

These are not arum lilies. They are crinum lilies. Arum lilies are calla lilies.

Second, alas, I am not descended from Danish royalty after all. You may remember this post, you can just call me Princess from now on. It seems, after further research by my sister, that the fourth generation forbear, Eadnoth 'The Staller' of Somerset, was not a son of the King of Denmark but rather the guy that was married to the king's illegitimate daughter. Which also makes the three generations before him not my forbears. Poot. That was pretty colorful.

While I am still a part of the nobility, still have the castle (though I never got around to the third post on my progenitors and the castle), I am not a princess. Darny darn darn.

So, not a princess but something even better, though not a direct line.

http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/art/241034

Fast forward to 17^th century Virginia, same family line (the Harding name begins with Eadnoth's son), to a many great uncle. William Harding was charged and convicted of sorcery* and was whipped and banished from Virginia** (though not before he pays all his debts and court fees). It's then that the family name changes from Harding to Hardin.

Edit: it has been pointed out that I am still related to the danish king even if from the wrong side of the sheets, so I suppose the 'princess' still holds.

*I found this footnote***: 'In Northumberland County in November 1656, David Lindsaye, brought accusations against William Harding for “witchcraft, sorcery, etc.'

** http://www.examiner.com/article/william-harding-convicted-witch

*** “Under an Ill Tongue”: Witchcraft and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia by Lindsey M. Newman. Page 74, footnote 217

you can just call me Princess from now on

* disclaimer: I have no idea how accurate any of this is since I didn't do any of the research. In fact, it seems unlikely and now that I've made a brief sortie into the Land of Wikipedia and Google, appears to break down with generation 4 as Eadnoth 'The Staller' of Somerset doesn't appear in any of the lists of children of Svend II that I've looked at to compare against the list I have. But it also said his supposed father had something like 20 children mostly from concubines. I am just presenting this as it was presented to me. Unlikely as it probably is, I'll just live the dream anyway.

Generation 1 -

My most ancient forebear, Thorgils Sparkaleg Stybrjornsson, born 967 in Sweden had a son, Ulf, born 1000. Thorgils claimed to have been the son of Styrbjörn the Strong, a scion of the Swedish royal house, by Tyra, the daughter of king Harald Bluetooth of Denmark and grandson of Olaf Bjornsson (see the previous post). However, Thorgils' parentage may have been invented to glorify the royal dynasty founded by Ulf's son, Sweyn Estridson. 

Generation 2 -

Ulf Wolf Thorgilsson joined King Canute The Great's expedition to England and in 1015, married Canute's sister, Estrid, and was named the Jarl (Earl) of Denmark to rule when Canute was absent. He was also the foster-father of Canute's son Harthacnut.

When the Swedish king and the Norwegian king attacked Denmark in Canute's absence, Ulf convinced the freemen to elect Harthacnut king, since they were discontented at Canute's absenteeism. This was a ruse on Ulf's part since his role as Harthacnut's guardian would make him the ruler of Denmark.

When Canute learned what had happened, he returned to Denmark and with Jarl Ulf's help, defeated the Swedes and the Norwegians. Ulf's assistance did not, however, cause Canute to forgive Ulf for his coup.

At a banquet, the two brothers-in-law were playing chess and started arguing with each other. The next day, Canute had one of his housecarls kill Earl Ulf. However, accounts contradict each other.

Ulf was the father of Sweyn Estridsson, and thus the progenitor of the royal house that would rule Denmark from 1047 to 1375.

Generation 3 -

Svend II, Estridsson Ulfssonn 'King of Denmark', born 1019 in England, died 1076 in Denmark. He married the Queen of Denmark.

Svend grew up a military leader, and served under the king of Sweden for a time. He pillaged the Elbe-Weser area in 1040, but was caught by the Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, who released him shortly thereafter.

Svend was made Jarl under Danish king Harthacnut, and led a campaign for him against Norway, but was beaten by Magnus I of Norway. When Harthacnut died in 1042, Magnus claimed the Danish throne and made Svend his Jarl of Jutland. Svend fought for Magnus, won a great reputation and had the Danish nobles crown himself as king in Jutland. He was defeated by Magnus and fled to Sweden.

The war between Magnus and Svend lasted until 1045. In 1047 Magnus died, having stated on his deathbed that his kingdom would be divided: Harald would get the throne of Norway, while Svend would be king of Denmark.

Generation 4 (don't worry, I'm not going to do all 36 generations, I just think these very early ones are so interesting. To me anyway, probably boring the hell out of all my readers) -

Here is where we leave the direct royal line as my next forbear was not a first son. Also, while I have been briefly trying to corroborate some of this, I could not find anything about him being the son of Svend II. I did however find one reference to him as a son of Ulf (Svend's father), making him Svend's brother, which would actually make this generation 3 rather than Svend.

Eadnoth 'The Staller' of Somerset was born about 1030 in Bristol, Somerset, England and died about 1068 in Stamford Bridge, Yorkshire, England.

Eadnoth, "the Constable" of Somerset, was "Staller" to King Harold and to Edward the Confessor. He was also called Elnoth or Alnoth.

He appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (1067) as Sheriff in 1057 in an account of an invasion from Ireland against Somersetshire and Ednoth, master of the horse, fought against them and was slain.

Names were fluid that far back, with many spellings for the same spoken word and the name Hardin or Harding doesn't come in until the next generation (gen 5) with his son Harding 'of Bristol' fitz Eadnoth and his son (gen 6), Robert fitz Harding, becomes the Baron of Berkeley.

My next (and last post) on the subject will be about that.

gettin' in the way back machine

My sister does a lot of genealogical research on our family, helped along by people in other branches of the family who are also into genealogy. She recently received a lot of new material from a different branch of the Hardin family than ours. Our line split off from the Hardins through a daughter that married into the Storms family in Kentucky in 1832. She moved to Texas with her children sometime after her husband was kicked by a horse and died.

Two generations later, our line jumps again through her granddaughter who married into the Sims family, and again through her daughter to the Bace family, and again through her daughter who married into the Abbott family, to me. I'm still an Abbott but my children jumped again, taking their father's name, Leva, and again as my daughter's children are Russells.

Obviously, not much work has been done on the male lines. My sister keeps hitting dead ends. Our own paternal family name, Abbott, dead ends with my great great grandfather. Some big rift during the Civil War era and names possibly changed, with no further documentation of my twice great grandfather. And the same trends true for the other previous male lines, ending after several generations.

The Storms line went back the farthest, to 1600 in Germany. The Halls, a close second, went back to the 1600s in England. My female line of the Halls married into the Storms in the mid 1700s.

Confused yet?

Believe me, it can be very confusing.

The new documentation and information takes the Hardins all the way back to Olaf Bjornsson (ca 970 – 975), a semi-legendary Swedish king who co-ruled with his brother Eric the Victorious, according to the Hervarar saga.*  When Olaf died of poison, his brother, instead of naming Olaf's son, the prince Styrbjorn the Strong, co-ruler, he named his own unborn (if it was a) son. It was, indeed, and that son became Olof of Sweden.

Styrbjorn the Strong married Princess Thyra of Denmark and sired Thorgils Sparkaleg Stybrjornsson in 967 in Sweden, farthest 'official' generation.

From Thorgils Sparkaleg Stybrjornsson to me is 36 generations.

The next several generations are pretty interesting and I'll post about them next.

* disclaimer: none of this may be true

lessons

The wheel is turning towards fall though you'd never know it based on the temperature. As usual, we down here rely on other indicators that fall is nigh...the shortening days and crop harvest.

Being the born and bred city folk that we are, living out here in an agricultural community has been very interesting and educational. I'm sure the kid that hays the 13 acre field behind us thought we were crazy the first time we saw him do it, standing out there gawking while he mowed, raked and baled. Great entertainment for us and our lesson for the day.

This past weekend it was the cotton in the fields.

I think the farmer that works these fields at the end of our street must have a day job. I only ever see him out there evenings and weekends. Mostly weekends. He started harvesting the cotton Saturday evening working late into the night long after full dark.

field full of cotton (the plants are sprayed with a defoliant a week or two before harvest)

these small harvesters scoop up the cotton leaving what's left of the plant behind

when the harvester is full it disgorges it's contents into a container where it is compressed

and then ejected somehow leaving a giant bale of cotton ready to be loaded up on a truck and carted off

After all the cotton is scooped up, another device goes over the fields cutting the stalks of the plants a couple of inches above ground level. I don't know what they do with those but they weren't left on the ground.

At some point what's left will be plowed under.

And that's your lesson for the day.

One of the first years after we bought the country house but before we were living out here full time, the grandkids were with us for the weekend. It was August, the cotton had popped and driving by on our way over to my sister's house to see her and the chickens somehow we were having a conversation about slavery. Oh oh! They had learned about that in school (they were still in elementary school then).

Later in the day, I took them over to the edge of the cotton field in the middle of the hot hot sun day. Standing there on the edge of the field that went on as far as they could see, full of cotton I told them this:

That had they been a slave in this country they would never have enough to eat and would always be hungry.

That the food they did get would be the cheapest and least quality available.

That they would be barefoot and dressed in rags, clothing no one else wanted.

That they would live in a hut with a dirt floor.

That they would own nothing, not even their children.

That they would have to get up at dawn and work in the fields til dark every day of their lives.

That they would have to carry a gunney sack and pick every bit of this cotton by hand in the hot sun hour after hour and day after day and if they did not work fast enough or long enough they would get a beating.

That they might get the beating anyway.

Standing there on the edge of that field in the hot hot sun in the middle of August looking at all that cotton, I could see in their faces that right then, they got it. You could see the enormity in their eyes.

And that was their lesson for the day.

E is for...

E is for...energy, embroidery, egypt

E is for Egypt.

Egypt is, perhaps, the oldest nation on earth emerging sometime around 3150 BCE with the unification of the Lower and Upper Kingdoms. And Egypt is, of course, in the news right now and rightly so. But it is not modern Egypt that I dream of.

It is ancient Egypt, the Egypt of pharaohs and pyramids, of mummies and temples and scarabs, of stele and hieroglyphics. It is the Egypt of Isis and Ra and the exotic pantheon of gods that captured my attention and fascination. I don't know how old I was, maybe early teens, when I discovered Egypt or even how it came to my attention. Probably through something my father was reading at the time. He had an interest in archeology for a while and I remember reading Gods, Graves and Scholars by C. W. Ceram.

However it came about, my fascination with ancient Egypt blossomed and continues to this day and though I am by no means a scholar on the subject (I have probably forgotten more than I remember), I have read quite a bit about it. Each new archeological discovery rivets my attention once again until the story passes out of the news.

Oh Egypt, strange and familiar, so compelling, it calls to something in me. It is my past buried in the sand. I know those cryptic shapes, have carved them in the stone.

If I ever leave this continent, if I ever cross the ocean, it will not be to the capitals of Europe that I go. It won't be to France or Italy, not to Portugal or Spain or Germany. Not even to wild Russia or Poland.

It is Egypt that beckons.

noble house

When we first bought the country house, and even before when we were just contemplating moving, I thought I could never leave my house, the one in the city. So much of my life happened there. I bought that house when I was between, between one marriage and the next, and I was just starting out on my life as an artist. I had already met my real husband when I moved in though we weren't yet living together.

It was a beautiful house in an old inner city neighborhood. An old house, nearly 100 years old on pier and beam but well kept up with it's little porch on the front, it's hardwood floors, it's 10' ceilings, it's diamond pattern double hung windows with weights, it's claw foot tub in one of the bathrooms and the single wide porcelain sink and tile counters in the kitchen, it's deep eaves that shaded us in the summer.

I bought it from the widow of the man whose father had built it way back when. During WWII, she had divided it up into a duplex straight down the middle, turning the one big bathroom into two and making the kitchen smaller in the process and adding another bedroom on the back of one half, off the kitchen. The utility room/mud room became the second kitchen of the smaller side. I had two back doors then. It had been converted back into a single dwelling by the time I bought it.

It had it's charm but it also had it's quirks. Like really old plumbing and really old electrical wiring. It was not uncommon to blow the breaker when I vacuumed if too many other things were on. Like the shiplap and molding that was so old and hard that you couldn't drive a nail into it without drilling a hole first. Like no closets except for a very small one in the most recently added bedroom off the kitchen and a storage closet also off the kitchen. And if you were in the back of the house on one side, you had to go all the way to the front of the house to get to the other side, unless you wanted to go out one back door and in through the other. Oh, and it was drafty in the winter with no insulation. We spent a lot of time huddled around the space heater.

Eventually we made our own changes, enclosing the small back porch to make a hall that connected the two halves of the house in the back. We took out the more modern tub in one bathroom and had it replaced with a tiled stand alone shower. We got rid of the the storage closet, making the boy's room a little bigger and giving him a way in that didn't include having to go through his sister's room. We laid insulation in the attic. We planted the magnolia tree in the front yard.

So much life. So many memories. We got married in that house. We raised our kids in that house. We made art in that house. It was our home and our studio. It sheltered us and our kids and sometimes our friends. We buried our pets there. We loved and fought there and fought for our love there. We welcomed our grandkids there, their other home. It was a sanctuary for all life, a no kill zone inside my fence.

Eventually, the kids grew up and made homes for themselves, the grandkids were growing up and making lives of their own that didn't revolve around us. The neighborhood we knew and loved was changing. And we, we were older and realized that if we were ever going to do something new, something different, now was the time to do it. So we cast about until we found the country house.

Pulling up my roots was a slow and painful process and set adrift we bounced back and forth for nearly three years. We sorted through all our stuff, took most, left some behind. Now when I go back, when we go back to do the fabrication on jobs, it's depressing. It only contains the left behind stuff and I see how run down the place had become, something that was well hidden when it was full of our life. The paint is stained and peeling inside and out; the wood floors, so beautiful when we moved in, are now worn and dirty. The cords holding the weights in the window frames have all rotted and the weights have fallen so that now the windows need to be propped open. The skirt on the outside of the house, removed when we had it leveled, was never replaced and shows the foundation on the piers. The plumbing is so clogged now in the kitchen it backs up quickly. And termites are slowly eating it up.

This once beautiful house that has stood for over a century is slowly crumbling, fallen into such disrepair. This house that sheltered us from storms and gave us refuge needed more care than we could give it.

yee-haw!

(This is a re-post from last year. I don't think I had much of a readership then, having only had my blog for a month or so, so I feel fairly certain that most of you haven't already read this.)

Put on your boots and hat and fancy duds because today is Go Texan Day in Houston. For the uninitiated, this is the day all the trail rides end and come into town for the start of the rodeo. They all end up at Memorial Park and party hearty all night. For those of you who don’t know what a trail ride is, it is a week or two of following one of the old trails for getting your cattle to market. Participants truck their horses and wagons to whichever starting point and then spend the next however many weeks riding those same horses and wagons back to town. I had a friend in high school who would get a leave of absence from school every year so she could participate. I think the one she went on was only a week long. Back then, schools would let you do that.

The rodeo and livestock show start tomorrow preceded by the parade downtown. There’s also a carnival that sets up and a huge vendor show as well. Houston has one of the largest rodeos with associated events in the country. Maybe the largest. The livestock show (we called it the fat stock show back when) is the competition, exhibition and auction of the animals that kids from elementary school through high school raise and groom through the Future Farmers of America programs at the schools. Mostly the rural and suburban schools now. I don’t know if the schools in the city still sponsor these programs.

I haven’t been to the rodeo in many years. I guess the last time was when the kids were small. Marc and I tried to go a couple of years ago. A friend gave us a pair of tickets. We got there in the afternoon, took our time looking at all the animals, browsed through the vendor show and then headed over to the stadium since the rodeo was getting ready to start. Well, it wasn’t getting ready to start, it was ending. We had never looked at the tickets and turned out they were for the afternoon show. So we went over to the carnival and Marc tried one of those fried twinkies. Gross.

The thing I remember most about Go Texan Day is that it was, when I was growing up, the only day of the year that girls could wear pants to school.

it's broken, people

Schism I by Lydia Lynaug

The State of the Union speech is tonight.  We turned it off when the talking heads started analyzing the coming speech based on the color of Michelle’s dress.  seriously?  

Personally, I don’t think it makes much difference what the President says.  The two party system doesn’t work anymore.  We have outgrown it only no one’s really realized it yet.  My friend John Kurman over at Random Walks did an excellent post today, Wither America .  He has an interesting perspective.  Most people in the country don’t vote for either party, they vote for None of the Above (see John’s post).

This country is so deeply and irrevocably divided that even when you get someone who genuinely wants to do something to fix the underlying problems, it is impossible to actually do anything.  Immediately the party not in power spends all it’s influence and resources undermining the party in power.  And, if the politician strays too far to the center in order to attract support to actually accomplish something, then his own party arrays against him.  Good ideas never enter the picture because it’s not about actually fixing anything, it’s about being in power.  In this, both parties are exactly the same.

The thing is, if we as a people don’t rise above this division, then the people are going to be wishing things were as good as they had been in 2009.  2009 will seem like a picnic.  Because if this continues, we’re all going down.

I was telling Marc earlier that I think the only way to reconcile this country is to divide.  

“Oh, you mean like Pakistan and India?” he asks.

Well, I would hope we would be a little more civilized about it.

He thinks, though, that our generation will have to die before any compromise can take place, before the country can heal itself.  That the division, the schism that occurred in the 60s is too deep and too ingrained for us, the baby boomers, to be able to rise above.

A pretty sad legacy for the summer of love.

and in the end...

   

photo by Kathleen Kimball-Baker 

I wish I could say that my journey took me to exotic places but it did not.  I didn’t go on retreat to India nor to Tibet.  I didn’t go to Macchu Picchu or climb the holy mountains.  I didn’t even go to Native American pow wows.  I was married to my first husband then and I had to work since he would not.  So, although my body did not travel, my mind soared.  I read.

I read about the Findhorn Garden and the amazing communication that went on there.  I read The Secret Life Of Plants by Peter Tompkins which served to confirm my experience that trees and plants were sentient beings.  The empty slate of my belief system began to fill with love and respect for the earth and all the forms of life on it.  I became committed to an organic lifestyle, to nurture and protect instead of use and abuse.  I stopped killing things.  Creatures who found themselves trapped in the house were caught and released.  When I began to garden in later years, I was mindful, letting the plant go through it’s entire cycle.  I read up on herbal medicene and, much later, alternate forms of healing.  

A fan of science fiction, I had read Microscopic God and More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon, Nightfall by Issac Asimov, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.  I had started reading Greek Mythology when I was in the 3rd grade and continued with myths and legends of many cultures.  I checked The Golden Bough out of the library repeatedly.  I read about Hinduism, Buddhism and Zen, Taoism and Native American beliefs.  I embraced karma and many years later, reincarnation.  I read Life After Life by Raymond Moody.  

When I became pregnant at 26 I became even more interested in religion.  Having seen many kids get sucked into cults when I was in college, I wanted a foundation for my own whether they stayed with it or not.  Since I had married a Jewish man, I went to conversion classes to educate myself and was surprised to find that most of what I heard, I had already come to.  I liked that it was was a religion that focused on life, not death as Christianity did, that you lived a good life because it was the right thing to do, not for the reward of heaven or fear of the punishment of hell if you did not, neither concept being a part of Jewish theology.  I raised my children as Jews and went to Torah study.  It was a good home for me while I continued my journey.

I became very interested in the origins of religion, the religions of ancient cultures and the evolution of religion.  I read Sarah The Priestess by Savina Teubal, When God Was A Woman and Ancient Mirrors Of Womanhood by Merlin Stone among others.  I railed against the Patriarchy, embraced the Matriarchy, learned how inheritance rights shaped religion.  I read in the Kaballah.  I pissed off the old men in Torah Study.  Eventually I grew away from Judaism as well.

I read about the millions murdered and burned who would not convert, the millions killed and burned in the name of holy war.  I learned that religion was a man made institution whose purpose it was to control men and most especially women.  I learned that when conqueror’s came the first thing they did was demonize the local dieties, destroy the holy places and usurp the holy days for their own ends.  I learned that the dead and risen god was ancient long before christianity came on the scene.

I read Carl Jung and finally found equality.  I read Joseph Campbell.  I read The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light by William Thompson, I read about the power of the sub-conscious mind and New Age mysticism.  I read about Theosophy and The Consciousness Of The Atom.  I read Jane Roberts’ amazing channeling of the spirit Seth.  I read about how we create physical reality, not only our own but the nature of physical reality as well, that there is no Evil in the world, only things we do not fully understand or comprehend, that some thing that is good for one person, can be devastating for another.  I learned that thought is energy and energy becomes manifest.  That what you put out there is what you get in return.

The specific books mentioned are, of course, just some of the very many.  Through 30 years of reading and perusing, questioning and pondering, my understanding evolved, my belief system emerged.

So what DO I believe?  This was my comment on Bonnie’s post :

Here's the thing. God is the sum total. God is the good AND the bad. As compassionate beings we should try to relieve suffering when we come across it. But God cannot 'do' anything about evil or suffering since it is part of the sum total. The All That Is. And the all that is is the full range of existence. God is existence, from the smallest mite to the grandeur of the cosmos and everything in between. It is the black as well as the white.

There is so much more, of course, to what I perceive to be the nature of god/dess and the universe from grand concepts to the smallest details but it would take many more pages.  We are the Dream.  We, and by we I mean every mote of physical existence, are the Avatars by which the Source is manifest.  It is to this Source that we return when we are done on the physical plane.

...the love you take is equal to the love you make.