Lot's Wife and seashore pictures

Preparing for a project for my Seniors Group, I was looking for seashore photographs. Two years ago, I had come into posession of a box of seashell frames, very nicely done, eight of them, just enough for the Seniors group at that time.

Since that time, our group has grown to 13, but not all of them come all of the time due to their own disabilities (one has cancer treatments, one has a daughter with cancer treatments) and their family members' needs.

I had sent out postcards asking the members to bring seashore snapshots because one of the things we like to do is to show and share. We have done several projects with photographs.

All of my life I have been an avid photographer of my daughter, our world, my family, just about everything I encountered. It was almost as though I loved it all so much I had to find a way to fix it in time and hold on to it. Therefore I have one entire wall from floor to ceiling lined with shelves of photo albums and a good number of wooden boxes as well.

s Because I was so reliably in love with photos, my parents and one grandmother gave me theirs and I have them too.

What I found, when I went looking for my seashore photo to show and share at Seniors was a little artful invention of mine from 1984, a flat canvas bag with two strap loops for hanging at the top. On the front of the canvas bag were sewn three clear plastic bags into which were placed seashells from a day at the shore and a strip of those photo booth black and white pictures that were once so popular and cost 50 cents. In the strip of photographs are my one year old daughter, Lavinia, with me and her father, Karl. But It wasn't that photo object that broke me, as sad as you could imagine it might be since her father and I broke up later that year and my daughter is now 40, and I am now old and I shuffle when I walk and my hip hurts dreadfully when I go up and down the steps. In that strip of photographs, I am smiling and young and pretty and I have no idea how difficult the next decades are going to be - all the stress and overwork and anxiety and heartbreak.

But, then, I got out one of the wooden photo boxes and in there were all my loved ones now gone, my mother and father, my grandmothers, my father's brother Bill. All the years flipped by in color beginning now to fade a bit, the holidays, the vacations, my whole adult life which is now coming to an end, that was the one that broke me. But I shouldn't say 'broke' because what actually happened was I got a lump in my throat and two eyes filled with salty tears and a familiar ache in my heart. I looked back and turned into a pillar of salt. It isn't that I would ever want to go back, I don't. It was all too hard. I am just sad that it is all gone forever.

It made me think of how other old people like me have murmured sadly that the young people don't want any of our old stuff like those albums. Just a couple of weeks ago, my sister was walking my dog for me and she came across several trash cans filled to overflowing with family albums, saved newspaper special sections on the moon landing, and JFK's assassination among other major events. What happened to the old lady who lived in that house I don't know. Maybe she died, maybe she went into a nursing home, but her children threw everything away - first all her furniture (the week before when I walked the dog) then the photographs. Even her formal wedding photograph, and there they were, bride and groom, young and slim and beautiful. A young husband home from World War II proudly married in his uniform and his wife in her long white gown with the train spilling around her feet like a pedestal. My sister and I put the wedding photo into a bag and hung it on the door knob to give them a second chance to keep it.

But perhaps they are right, those implacable offspring who threw it all away. Looking back makes you sad. However, when my mother died and my brothers and sisters and I were there for a week in West Virginia, we distracted ourselves briefly from our grief by putting all the old photographs that my mother kept in Strawbridge and Clothier department store boxes, into albums, each of us taking home those that were mostly our families. So they had a purpose, at least briefly, after their owner could no longer be brought to tears looking at them.

How I marveled when I was a child, at the photographs of my then stout old parents taken twenty years before when they were newly married and staying in Florida while my father was deployed in the US Navy. They were so beautiful, young and slim and smiling and happy. Where did that beauty go? I wondered how they had been transformed, and whether that was going to happen to me?

Of course, now I have the answer, it happens to all of us. We may not all get stout (I did, beginning with pregnancy) but we all get stiff and wrinkled and gray haired and splotchy with the brown finger prints of death and decay pressed onto our arms and faces. I realize, however, as I type this, that the inside world remains beautiful, even more beautiful than it was back then when it was manifested outwardly, at least my inside world.

Happy Trails, Jo Ann

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Today is Juneteenth

Today is Juneteenth and I have been thinking a lot about hidden history and my view has broadened out over the years from Women's lost and found history to include the history of Black Americans and First Peoples as well. today I read a piece in my e-mail news from NPR - a wonderful station both on the radio and in the news: "as moral philosophers have long known — no one is free until everyone is because oppression ensnares the oppressor as well as the oppressed." I do believe this and I also feel there are small and simple and personal ways we can honor the history of our American brothers and sisters. The easiest way I chose, about three years ago, was to buy and read Juneteenth, a lovely memoir by Annette Gordon Reed, whose work I admire and a couple of other books of hers I have read. Second, I made a display for our Woodbury Friends Meeting!

"Like a ripple on a pond, one truth...." I will look up the origin of that fragment of a quote and get back to you. But the meaning is clear. Even so small a thing as a personal initiative can spread outwards. So what you can do today to celebrate is to be aware of what day this is and what it meant to those who struggled and suffered in enforced slavery for two years after the Emancipation proclamation set them free because the violently enforced illiteracy and lack of communication had kept them from knowing the BIG TRUTH which was that half a illion brave people had fought and died to keep our nation whole and to end the crime against humanity that is enslavement.

Happy Juneteenth!

Opal Lee was the force behind the creation of the Federal holiday which is now about 4 years old. Her family home in Forth Worth, Texas, was burned down by a white mob in 1939, but Habitat for Humanity put the keys to a new home into her hands on the same lot where the family home had stood! As Mr. Rogers said "Look to the helpers" and in truth that is where the salvation lies.

Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Juneteenth

On Saturday, June 15th Perkins Center joins Moore Unity and Curate Noir, Inc. to celebrate Juneteenth Freedom Day. This event will feature music and dance performers, poetry, community art making, family-friendly activities, a bounce house, and food and vendor offerings from some of our favorite local Black-owned businesses.

That paragraph was taken from the e-mail events post from Perkins Art Center; please check their web site to find which location is hosting Collingswood or Moorestown and the times.

I would like to add my own thoughts on Juneteenth. Annette Gordon Reed wrote a wonderful memoir called JUNETEENTH which I strongly recommend that you read, even if you can't attend any events to celebrate. If you don't know what Juneteenth is, it is the day that Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas to tell the still enslaved people there that the Civil War had ended and the Emacipation Proclamation had granted freedom. The holiday is often called Emancipation Day and Freedom Day. Since reading and writing were punishable forbidden skills to enslaved people by the plantation owners who held them in slavery, they were not able to get the news. Can you possibly imagine the joy of a peope who had hoped for a hundred or more years to be freed from the violently enforced bond of enslavement that they were finally free? Ever since that day there have been celebrations incuding parades and parties and backyard barbecues to remember that historic day.

Happy Juneteenth all my friends and neighbors, freedom for some is freedom for all!

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Red Bank Battlefield

Sunday June 23rd is Family Archaeology day at Red Bank Battlefield. What a beautiful place for a family outing! Walk along the river, picnic in one of the shelter, restrooms clean and acesible, maybe tour the Whitall House and acquaint your youngsters with some local Revolutionary War history. There will be flint napping, displays, and other events taking place. It begins at noon!

Happy Trails -Red Bak is oe of my favorite places on earth - love the sunset! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

World Environmental Day June 5th

Today, June 5th, 2024 is World Environmental Awareness Day - Established in 1972 by the UN FOOD WASTE

The two issues that struck me were ones that I felt I could actually improve in my own life so I cut and pasted them to share with you. There were five issues in the e-mia9l nes letter that I get. One was to plant a tree which we did at my Quaker Meeting in Woodbury and have each yar that I have been a member there. Here are the the two I wanted to address:

FOOD WASTE

We’ve all been there: regretfully throwing out a bag of wilting spring mix or moldy pasta that we had the best of intentions for. According to the World Food Programme, a whopping 1.3 billion tonnes of the food produced for human consumption is wasted each year. That’s enough to feed about two billion people! It’s important to remember that the food we eat requires land, water and energy — plus human labor and greenhouse gas emissions — to make it to the grocery store. On an individual level, we can find ways to reduce food waste by meal planning and shopping from a list, supporting sustainable food retailers, properly storing food, and donating extra food to those in need. 

My idea for personal improvement is to buy fresh produce only when I am sure I am going to use it. I am guilty of buying salad items and then eating out a few times and having left overs so the salad stuff goes bad. I think I have some smelly broccoli in the fridge as I type.

PLASTIC

Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past few decades, you're probably aware that the Earth is dealing with a massive plastic problem. Around 91% of all plastic ever produced has not been recycled. This has led to plastic ending up in our oceans, environment, and landfills, destined to remain there for several generations. A few ways to avoid adding to the problem include: avoiding single-use plastics, wearing clothes made from natural fibers, purchasing secondhand items and encouraging your favorite brands to adopt plastic alternatives for their products and packaging. I am working on weening myself off plastic water bottles and I am planning to start buying bamboo made toilet paper to save Canadian trees. Well this is all food for thought and I hope you get some ideas on what you personally can do - oh yes, another thing: tidying up closets and drawers may show us all that we don't need to buy any more clothes! I have greatly reduced my clothing purchases by weeding out my closet and drawers and seeing how much stuff I don't wear or need and taking those items to a volunteer who distributes the to the homeless in Camden and Kensington, Pa.

Happy Trails friends - and a though ot sorrow and loss about the death of Al Horner a fantastic photographer who loved the Pines with his whole heart. I have a book of his photographs. He will be missed by all who knew him. He was far too young to die at 77 but I know that for some years he has had serious back problems and tried everthing known to modern medicine to relieve the pain so he could continue to hike the pines and take his beautiful photographs.

The Problem with Absolutes: Quakers and the Civil War

"Thou shalt not kill" - (unless I tell you to kill your son, Abraham!) All afternoon, I have been reading about and pondering the Quaker Peace testimony in the face of modern conflicts that George Fox and the early Quakers couldn't have imagined in their worst nightmares, the conflicts of the modern period, our Civil War, for example and the legal systemic kidnapping, rape, torture, murder and enslavement of millions of other human beings for nearly two hundred years. Would Gerge Fox, whose peace testimony arose as a result of the British Civil War, have stood by idly in the face of this enslavement? After all, his testimony arose at the time of the British Civil War which was a war about Royal power including religious power. George Fox traveled around the army camps talking to the soldiers during the Civil War, some of them his followers, but he, himself was inspired to his peace testimony. Could and would he have held steady in the absolute of non-intervention in the face of American slavery in the 1800's? Should he? After all, George Fox did NOT adhere to the religious orthodoxy of HIS time; he had a different calling, heard a different voice. And he followed that inner voice.

Quakers in the time of the Civil War, and again in the period of the second World War, were sorely tried in whether to hold to the orthodoxy of peace at any cost, or to take a stand against an unimagineable evil like the imprisonment, rape, torture and eventual genocide of All the European Jews. p/> Once again today, a peaceful world is forced to confront a tyrant invading and making war against a neibhor with the intent of occupying that nation. While they invade and destry Ukraine, Russian military with apparently tacit approval of officers commit hideous crimes against the people as they occupy their territory. They have approval because these horrors they perpetrate are part of the plan of intimidation. And the free world watches in fear and horror and supplies weapons to help the Ukrainians defend themselves against this crime.

Self Defense and defense of others is a complication in the idea of total peace. Should you not defend yourself or someone else in danger? That's the problem of absolutes. George Fox couldn't have imagined slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries nor could he have imagined concentration camps and the extermination of the Jews in Europe in the 20th Century.

Enough Quakers had qualms about pacifism in the face of these two great evils that Meetins wrestled with both members who chose to serve and fight against them, and the orthodoxy enshrined against fighting. What I found most heart warming was the Meetings who welcomed back their veterans with love and understanding and forgiveness. What I found disappointing was those Meetings which stripped those veterans of membership. That reaction, I find most unloving and disrespectful of the individual inner voice.

So what is important here, to me, is how we disagree as well as how absolute rules, ie: orthodoxy, should be. It is complex. We can all agree that thou shalt not kill, or steal, or lie and deceive. The rub comes in when we are called to defend ourselves or others in the face of their iminent danger of being killed.

I fall in line with the Meetings that resolved this by stating their point of view, and loving and respecting those members who heard a different voice. Also, I am touched with George Fox vising the army camps to speak with the soldiers.

As for absolutes, I think they are a challenge to the storm and complexity of human events. I guess I like the adage "Revise your Priors" as well as the advice "Adapt and Evolve."

Happy Trails, Jo Ann

wrightj45@yahoo.com (as always, if you wish to continue the discussion use my e-mail as spammers have poisoned the well of comments)