Solo Retrospective December 10, 2024 to January 31, 2025

On the grounds of our Historic Woodbury Friends Meeting 122 Broad Street, Woodbury, a formerly rented building had become vacant. Long story for another time. It is a flat, one story very accessible building with a lot of windows. It winds along, rancher style with a string of about half a dozen rooms on either side of a main reception area. Since it was just sitting there empty, I asked the Meeting if I could use the reception area for an Art Gallery and they agreed.

First, five of us formed a gallery committee and had a group show, a stained glass artist, Jerome and his partner Susan, who now rent a studio in the building, another Quaker artist in the Meeting, Diana, the property manager, Carleton who does a good deal of work with computers and has a 3D printer, put up a group show. (Which stayed up for about a year).

The South Jersey Artists Collective is in the process of getting a grant to rent the building from us in the Spring 2025 and their plan is to turn the Gallery into a Resource room, so I decided I had better make hay while the sun was shining and realize a long standing dream of mine to have a solo retrospective art show. My sister and my Right-Hand-Woman, helped me hang the show and I made postcards for it.

What an interesting area of emotions the show engendered in me, looking back on all the phases of my life represented in that show. Admittedly it is a modest, humble little exercise, but it is deeply satisfying to me. This is the age of looking back, the 70's, which I am about to leave in a year and enter the 80's. Heaven only knows what that will bring.

Anyhow, I chose one or two paintings or prints to represent a series of works I did in each of the decades of the last 60 years, represented in the show. It begins with two linocuts I did in the 70's before I went to college, and progresses through work I did in college, such as a lithograph I did while at Rutgers, when my major was printmaking, through the University of Arts, when I was getting my masters. it goes right up to this past summer when I had work in the most shows I could have imagined, seven group shows!

I have within me a well of melancholy and it is far to easy for the bucket to fall into the well and for me to roll it up and drink from the tearful waters. It has become a life-long practice for me to turn that melancholy into writing - whether in my daily journals, this blog, or my mamy writing experiments sitting on my book shelves, spiral bound or in looseleaf binders. It is a manifestation of the magic of the many folk tales where the beset protagonist uses her skills to spin straw into gold or to spin a fabric that exposes the arrogant king in his nakedness. My thread is ink and my fabric is the page.

For the month of December, now, I have been inviting friends to visit the gallery and see the show which is by appointment only which means I have lunch with a friend or two and in their kindness they come and see my show. I have thought about the paintings and prints and the periods of my life that they represent.

This week, for two nights, I enjoyed a 3 part documentary by Ken Burns on Ernest Hemingway. I paraphrase a quote by Edna O'Brient interviewed in the film 'writers are self-centered; we spend hours every day thinking about what we are thinking.' And that is certainly true of me. It is a trait I have criticised in myself through my life, that I am too solitary and too centered on myself and my life. But what if that is the natural trait of an artist - a writer or a painter?

The documentary gave me an idea of how to use the memories dredged up by touring my solo-retrospective, I think I will write a memoir to go with each piece! I feel an edge of excitement at the prosepect of it. I LOVE to write! This anticipation and creative urge is a boon, a gift, that makes retirement wonderful.

Merry Christmas everyone! Jo Ann

wrightj45@yahoo.com >p/> I think I will post each essay here too!

Review of Ken Burns documentary on Hemingway

One of the things I love about having this blog is that I can talk about things none of my current friends are interested in such as Ken Burns documentary on Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway had an impact on my young adulthood. I read all his books and in that period, I really loved a couple of them. Interestingly, later in life, I bought my favorite as a gift to a brother of mine and he hated it. I read my copy again and I didn't like it any more either. The point being that there are some books that fit a particular time in your life but age and experience, and changing attitudes and taste completely transform your feeling and evaluation of that book. The book was "Moveable Feast."

The Ken Burns documentary is 6 hours long and I binge watched it yesterday. I had a really good day, went to Woodbury Friends Meeting and afterwood had lunch with two of the Friends at the little Woodbury Train Station Cafe' which is cheery and festive. One of the Friends came back to the WFM grounds to visit my solo-retrospective art show (more on that in another post).

By the time I got home again around 2:30, I was chilled to the bone and everything ached. As my sister said "Now you know why old people move to Florida!" We are in a cold smap and neither the WF Meeting-House, nor the gallery were warmed. It was like sitting in a refrigerator.

So. I put on a warm hoody, my slippers and got under my electric lap blanket and tucked in for a nice winter's viewing, after I fed the pets, of course.

As I have often said in posts, I was a book worm my whole life. I have loved books with my whole heart since I first laid hands on one. My house is filled with them literally fron floor to ceiling in wall shelving I had installed. I have been in the midst of moving them along for the past 3 years to the Free Books Project.

When I read Hemingway, I was a young adult. I had cut my teeth on a lot of antiquated literature in the vocabulary rich style of the late 1800's and turn of the century. Hemingway said he wanted his books to be able to be read by anyone with a high school education. I could read books by people with a college education by the time I was ten and had read Dostoevsky, Turgenev, deMaupassant, great British authors like Dickens, and the classic American greats like Mark Twain when I was a child. In my late teens, Hemingway seemed like a revelation. I mention these other books because it is the context in which I evaluated the writing and the stories. Hemingway's novels formed my early fantasies of what a literary, bohemian life would be like. It made me want to go to Europe!

The most interesting thing to me in the documentary was the pure high quality analysis of the great critics and authors Ken Burns recruited to talk about Hemingway's writing including one of my favorites, Edna O'Brien. Burns brought on board a couple of Hemingway's biographers whose works I had read over the years. I read everything about him, the magazine articles, the biographies, the criticisms and the praise.

One of the things I went to college for in the 1970's was to learn literary criticism. I didn't learn much. It is a big big subject. I did a huge amount of reading in my major, and I had a few really marvelous professors among them, James Thomas Farrel who wrote the Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Basil Payne, the great Irish poet. What I enjoyed was the ability of the interviewed critics in the documentary to delve below the surface in the writing and to compare and describe the writing itself as well as to bring out the critiques of the period when Hemingway's books came out. And most especially what I enjoyed was the panoramic context of the times because they were my times!

I am a creature of the twentieth century and Ken Burns does a masterful tour of it. All my influences, other writers like John Dos Passos, the burgeoning crop of women journalists like Martha Gellhorn, the Paris art and literary scene, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein. Part one I found enlightening and enjoyable; part two I had to do some fast forwarding because over my lifetime my sensitivity to the killing of animals has increased and I was horrified and sickened by the slaughter of animals, not to mention the extreme cruelty of bull fighting. I saw a bull fight in Spain and it was deeply depraved. The animal was frightened and tortured. he tried to escape by jumping over the walls but they were too high. After they tortured, weakened and tried to enrage the terrified creature, they stabbed it to death. It made me cry. I had never seen anything so depraved before. I know the laws are changing all over Mexico, South America and Europe in regard to bull fighting - it isn't really fighting, in fact, it is torturing and murdering in reality. The animal has no chance. These creatures are raised and fed and have no reason to suspect what is about to be done to them by human beings who up to this point haven't been a danger. The thoughtless, wasteful and cruel slaughtering of African animals by Hemingway and the people of that time is always profoundly upsetting. How he could pose over the carcasses of creatures murdered for no other reason than his entertainment is worth pondering. It is an outward sign of Hemingways wholesale giving over to his worst indulgences of violence, intoxication, and unrestrained lustfulness. He seems a slave to his appetites which in the end destroy him.

The one door for me to compassion for him was the obvious mental illness from which he suffered, and which he obviously inherited from his father, and which his own poor sons inherited from him. The suffering went on, generation after generation. Indulging his unrestrained greed for excitement, novelty, adrenaline drugged experience broke him - broke his skull, his bones, destroyed his liver and his brain and his constitution. It made him so sad and sick that he had to kill himself to end the suffering. It was an almost biblical portrait of the wages of sin.

Just recently in the news, President Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 federal death row inmates. The three he didn't commute were mass murderers who committed hate crimes like Dylann Roof. At the same time there was the story of the man Trump had put forward to head the Department of Justice, Matt Gaetz. The security check on him showed he had spent tens of thousands of dollars hiring prostitutes and had been seen buying and using multiple kinds of illegal drugs and had even been accused of sexual exploitation of a high school junior. He denies all of it, of course, but the report released to the press details the evidence behind the accusations. He resigned from the senate and took himself out of the running for the DOJ position. His excuse is that it was the bachelor life of a youth and that he is a different man now.

In the end of Hemingway's life, he was the tortured and murdered bull who couldn't escape the ring, and he was the shark shredded marlin as well as the old fisherman defeated in his triumph (The Old Man and the Sea). He studied death and practiced it and it turned out to be the indulgence that got him in the end. But he was so obviously suffering from what we now know as CTE chronic traumatic encephalopathy from his 4 or 5 concussions as well as the inherited tendency to depression. The alcoholism was the slippery slope down which he slid to his final suicide. Four of the 8 people in his family died by their own hands. It was a portrait not only of art but of dissolution and degenerate despair.

Was the documentary worth watching! Yes! If you read, you will learn so much about writing, and if you study the human condition, you will find a rich repository of observation. If you like history, you will find a great traveling companion through the twentieth century.

Happy Trils! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Mini Christmas Outing 12/21/24

This morning I had a minor mishap - I dropped a bottle of 200 teeny tiny blood pressure pills on the floor. This was worse than it sounds because I have bad vision from my cornea disease and a bad back from degenerative disc disease, so I couldn't really see the teeny tiny white pills and I had a terrible time trying to bend down to pick them up which I did using two pieces of paper. Then I tried to separate the pills from pet hair and other debris despite the fact that my sister had mopped the kitchen floor the day before. I did it but I am a bit germ phobic and I didn't want to take my pills.

A neighborly kindness - my neighbor around the corner walks my dog for me because he is an avid daily walker and his wife and I have been friendly over the years. She is the one who phoned to tell me about the little house for sale in which I have lived for 40 years! He suggested that I call and ask the pharmacy to replace my prescription which I did. They phoned my prescription plan and it was approved! So I put Uma in the car and we went to the drive-thru pick-up. It is so cold out after our snow and freezing rain last night that my windshield was encased in a frozen layer of snow and ice.

While we were out getting the prescription, I decided to get gas as I was below 1/4 and my father always advised me to never get below 1/4. I had a happy chat with the gas pumping guy - an old white whiskered man in hat and hood. We were observing the guy ahead of me who had no hat and his ears were bright red! The old fella said he had pumped in winter for three years and he knew how to dress. I said, "With age comes wisdom." We wished one another a Merry Christmas and I decided to drive to Knight's Park to see the snow around the beautiful trees.

It was pretty, and on the way home, I realized I had money left on my thank you gift care from my Seniors Group, so I stopped at Dunkin Donuts and got a hot chocolate.

there I was, sipping hot chocolate, listening to B101 the Christmas radio channel, looking at the snow icing on all the lawns, glittering under the sunshine! I felt happy! And I thought how easy it can be to make yourself happy - a ride, a chat, a hot chocolate! Now I am hope and making my lunch, but I am in a very cheery mood and I have my high blood pressure pills replaced and my attitude adjusted! I am having a nice vegetable soup that I get from the Chinese take-out restaurant i Woodbury called The Golden Palace.

Make your days merry my friends! Happy Trails - Jo Ann (as always, don't bother with comments, it is polluted by spam - if you want to contact me here is my e-mail wrightj45@yahoo.com)

On Retirement and what to do when your schedule is removed!

I retired in 2006 from both my jobs, my full time public school Art teaching job in a middle school, and my part time job as an adjunct professor at the (now closed) University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Pa.

It is am intoxicating feeling being free! The only time we are that free is when we are small children before going to school or in the summer when we are in school. I watched what other retirees did and noted a few were kind of adrift, lost, aimless. Some had other kinds of jobs. At first, I did take a part time job as a school-visiting history storyteller for Camden County Historical Society. It was fun but exhausting, hauling that travel chest full of historical artifacts up the steps of the many elevator-less publis schools in South Jersey, not to mention doing the majority of my presentations on Black Hitory Month and Women's History Month, February and March, the snowiest (in that period) times of the year.

Then I decided to pass the job along to another interested retired teacher and I took a full year when I determined I would do nothing but what I felt like each day. What I felt like was taking a drive. I had a nice New Jersey map book and with a full tank of gas in my Saturn station wagon, I would pick a back road and follow it to its end. I began with Kings Highway (which is where I live) and I followed it until it disappeared into other names and roads. My favorite and most fruitful destination was Greenwich on the Delaware Bay. There was a historic Oyster Ghost Town there and it was the dock for a historic tall ship named the Meerwald. I met the folks there, took a tour, hiked the trail through the salt hay marsh and fell in love with the locale. I became a volunteer. Every couple of weeks, I would drive an hour down to the Maurice River area, to the Bayshore Discovery Project and do some volunteer tour guiding. Once, I gave a tour to a man who turned out to be someone I went to high school with! His family had been boat engine mechanics and had a shop on the ghost town's main street: Hettinger's Motor Repair.

I kept on taking drives and following interesting roads and discovering history mysteries such as Fort Elfsborg, an original Swedish settlement fort now vanished except for road signs and a beautiful patterned brick historic house hidden in a floody estuary which made me interested in patterned bruck houses, I attended a lecture on patterned brick houses by an author of a book on it which was held at Bass River State Park. What an interesting place that is! From that, I began to visit the State Parks I could drive to.

Also, around that time, I had joined an Outdoor Club and went hiking and kayaking regularly all over the rivers and forests of South Jersey and met man interesing people including a group of geocachers, and an author who became my best friend, Barbara Solem. She had written a book on The Forks, and another called Ghosttowns and Other Quirky Places in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. We hiked all over the woods together and we still have lunch every week or two. History became my passion.

Another passion that had been lying dormant but for which I now had the time was family history! I joined ancestry.com and began to research some family mysteries such as what happened to my biological grandmother. Her sister, Lavinia Lyons had been my grandmother all my life and it came as a shock to learn that she was actually my great-aunt. She was a quiet and secretive woman by nature and intensely private so she clammed up whenever I tried to find out anything about my mother's biological mother, her sister, but I had two photographs of her and a name. Ten years later I had solved the mystery and made a family tree which I had photocopied and which I framed with frames from yard sales and gave to my four siblings for Chritmas. Also it inspired my continuing interest in cemeteries, a half dozen of which where my ancestors are buried, I have visited

My long rambles and my family history crossed at the Civilian Conservation Corps. My father had been in the CCC in his teens before he joined the Merchant Marines and then the Navy. I had run across the CCC in my forest ramblings and in particular at Bass River where there is a series of signs giving some history, as there is at Parvin State Park which is a great place to hike. So many great CCC stories emerged from the woods that I was inspired to write a book called White Horse Black Horse taking two fictional characters, a photographer and a writer on the CCC State Guides project in 1937. Then I gave some talks on my book and sold a few copies, but most I gave away to volunteers I met at historic sites.

Other historic sites that captured my interest were original settler log cabins and I attended a great lecture, again by someone who had written a book about them, at the Greenwich Harvest Festival held each September. On the grounds of the festival there is one of the historic log cabins.

And I also took a guided tour of One-Room Schools offered by the 'then flourishing' Burlington County Hisorical Society. It was marvelous, and being a retired teacher, my heart was touched by the early efforts of teachers to convert colonial children to literate citizens. One school in particular was fascinating because it is where the teenaged Clara Barton went to teach in Burlington in a one room school you can still visit. She lobbied to have the tuition school turned public so the poor children could learn to read and write as well as the ones whose families could afford to pay tuition. She succeeded so well a male administrator was hired to take over and in disappoiment and resentment at this unfair result, she went on to found the Red Cross during the Civil War!

So you can see how one trail led to another and one story ignited another. But as the years went on, things began to happen to me physically which was a shock because I had always been so healthy and active AND a vegetarian! But genetics plays a big part in the age story along with lifestyle and like my father and mother before me, I developed arthritis in my spine and knees so there was no more hiking up frozen waterfalls in Jim Thorpe, Pa. or 8 hour kayak trips on the Winding River.

By then, being a natural storyteller, and having gotten the hang of writing a book (I had started out as an English teacher in my education career) I had written and independently published three books. I tried using a contact given me by my author friend but he wasn't interested in historical fiction and the interview was too depleting for my sensitive writer's soul so I gave up on traditional publishing and found a commercial printer (not online - an actual building with people). I wrote a relationship novel, a memoir of living in a van in Europe for a year, and gave away most of my books.

In my travels, I had become interested in old train stations. Most historic towns around South Jersey had one and since I am old enough that I actually rode trains when passenger trains existed, I was still entranced by the romance of the train. At one of the old train depots, I found an Art Gallery: Eiland Arts Center, Merchantville, NJ. It was in the town where I had gone to high school, and I got to chat with the gallery/coffee cafe' proprietor, Nicole Eiland. She put me on the mailing list and I began to get notifications of upcoming group art shows. I was invited and inspired and I began painting for the shows! My work was accepted and a whole new avenue opened up for me. I couldn't hike anymore but I used the photographs I had taken of my favorite hiking places as resources for my paintings. And I began to make paintings of some of my favorite historic spots. I sold 4 paintings of historic sites in Maple Shade, 2 paintings of the woods, two of rivers, and a scattering of other subjects over the next decade.

So, the interests that had grown out of the seeds of driving and visiting were: Genealogy

Historic site volunteering

Hiking and kayaking

Writing books

Painting

Quaker Religion

Almost forgot - Seniors Group

And the most recent one which was to emerge from an emotional crisis. A family event occurred which caused me unresolvable emotional pain and I decided to visit a Friends Meeting for Silent Worship. Many years earlier I had attended Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Quaker version of church. I liked it, the freedom of conscience, the peacefulness, the practice of meditation. The closest Meeting was Woodbury Friends Meeting, ten minutes from me. I went on a snowy morning and there was only one Friend there but I stayed and two years later became a member. It is a small group of generally half a dozen in person and a few others on zoom. I like the intimacy and the peace. They were hit by an unexpected event when a drug and alcohol support facility renting a building on the grounds of the historic Meeting went bankrupt. The building (located on the other side of the parking lot) was abandoned. A year later, I asked if I could clear out and paint the reception area and turn it into an art gallery. One of the other regular members is also an artist and I had introduced her to the group shows at Eiland Arts Center in Merchantville. We both had paintings to put in a show of our own and we did! At the same time, a former high school student who had become a stained glass artist was looking for a studio and he rented two sections of the abandoned building, so now we had a stained glass studio, and a gallery! I paid the stained glass guy to pain the gallery. Currently the South Jersey Artists Collective is working on a grant to rent the rest of the building.

Before they take over the building, I grabbed the opportunity to have a Solo-Retrospective of the artwork I have done since my college days in the 1970's. My youngest sister who is 20 years yonger than I am, does work for me a couple of times a month, and she helped me hang the show. I had cards made for the show at Bellia Copy Center in Woodbury, very friendly helpful people and very reasonable in price. This has given me a great sense of satisfaction. By the way, showing my work at Eiland Arts gave me the confidence to show work in other local shows and this year I had work in 7 exhibitions, Cherry Hill Annual at Croft Farm, Haddonfield Fortnightly Annual, Camden County College Seniors Show and four group shows at Eiland Arts. Not bad for 79!

I can't believe I almost forgot to mention that walking around town I noticed our fire dept. had been turned into a Senior Center that nobody seemed to use to I wrote a proposal to the mayor to hold a group Meeting once a month. Six years later we had a dozen regular members. Each month I invited a speaker or provided a project, and what I found they enjoyed most was Show and Tell. We brought items or photographs and told our stories. The town has taken over the building and expanded with a grant to provide five days a week of programs for the seniors of our town.

Looking back on it today to write this blog post gives me a great sense of satisfaction in how rich and productive my retirment has been. The moral of the story is to get moving, go places and talk to people and things turn up and passions get ignited! I met so many retired people who volunteer at local historic sites and they have made new freinds and generated interests to pursue in their lives which enriched their time. It is a great gift to be free! And a great gift to share your time and talents.

Happy Trails Retirees! Jo Ann

wrightj45@yahoo.com

Walking motivator Dec. 17 2024

This morning, two friens and I were talking about improving our daily walking habit. I had read an article from Journal of American Medical Association about how 5000 steps a day can improve symptoms of depression. I know this and I know it improves EVERYTHING, flexibility, cardiovascular health, and generally I walk my dog each day to the railroad tracks and back, but this autumn I had a couple of falls and got sick a couple of times and a neighbor walked the dog for me. I said I would walk on my own anyhow, but I didn't. I am a sedentary person by nature and would rather sit curled up on the recliner sofa and read or watch movies or paint or draw or do anything you can do on a recliner! So I really did need motivation.

Some years ago I saw two interesting artists' projects - one was a walker who took a photo at the same spot every morning for months at exactly the same time, the other was an artist who collected everyone's sunset photos and made a giant collage of them!

Our project is very simple, each walk we will take one photo of something we like it can be a plant, a leaf, a lawn decoration, anything we like. It doesn't have to be spectacular but it has to be one of us taking the photo, not an old photo or a photo someone else took. I am looking forward to taking my photo and also seeing what my two friends take on their walk. It really has made me more enthusiastic about walking my dog Uma today. She is patiently waiting as always!

Update: I did my first group text from the dog walk and I took 7 photographs of Santas on the lawns around town! It was so much fun!

Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Collosal Olmec Heads and Christmas

Naturally, it being mid December, I have been thinking a lot about Jesus Christ's teachings and about the man himself. A couple of weeks ago when my little Sunday School (called First Day School in Quaker tradition) had reached the Roman Empire in our chronological approach to the history of religion, a youngster asked this most intelligent question: "Is there proof that Jesus actually lived?" and as it happens, there is! First of all I saw an episode of the "Naked Archaeologist" that explored the writings and sites associated with the actual physical presence of a man called Jesus Christ. He was a tiny mention, a footnote, in the writings of contemporaneous historian/philosophers like the Greek Pliny, and the Roman Tacitus, among others.

Archaeology is a great interest of mine and just a night ago I saw a wonderful three episode British program from 2019 called Lost World & Hidden Treasures that looked at three great archaeological discoveries: The Sutton Hoo Anglo Saxon burial in Suffolk, the Lion Man wooden sculpture from German cave, and the Olmec Heads. The narrator, Janina Ramiriz

Something that occurred to me after re-acquainting myself with the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount was that one of the MOST Revolutionary things about the teachings of Jesus Christ was his focus on humility. When Jesus said "blessed are the poor in spirit" he has been variously translated as meaning, by the word 'poor' - humble, not deprived or lacking in spirit.

Considering our world political situation currently, you cannot help but be struck by the HUBRIS/Arrogance and self-centered pridefulness of the worst and largest of the world leaders such as Trump or Putin or Netanyahu, to name just three.

In the episode of Lost Worlds that explores the discovery of the 30 ton Olmec heads in the jungle which had swollowed up the huge Olmec civilization of Southern Mexico and Central America, you see the concrete manifestation of this pridefulness. The giant bounder heads all sport the same sour, angry implacable expressions. An additional sculpture found in further exploration of the buried civilization depicts the ritual sacrifice of babies. The toddlers are depicted crying and clinging with their arms around the high priests carrying them to the blood letting death they will endure.

So much of a certain kind of display of what is taken to be strength has to do with emotionless, pitiless and implacable determination. Empathy and compassion are considered weaknesses. Domination and power are the halmarks of what are considered the GREATS of the ancient world such as Alexander the Great, who was, in fact, Alexander the Destroyer. All that mahy of these later described as great leaders were actually accomplished in was large scale crime. They invaded other people's lands, destroyed their buildings and crops, looted their temples and homes and kidnapped them into human trafficking slavery and prostitution.

So, how did we come (most of us) to view these things as evil rather than laudable? Through the teachings of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ preached lover over hate, kindness over cruelty, and respect and care for the- a smallest and the weakest. These were not qualities valued at all in the empires of the time of Jesus Christ, or indeed, the empires of today. Yet Christianity rose and spread throughout the world, although it can be seen that often what is labeled Christianity is far from anything Jesus would have considered a manifestation of his teachings. What we have in many of the most popular contemporary mega-churches is ostentatious display of wealth and power, exploitation of the weak for the financial profit of the leaders, and, often as displayed in scandal after scandal, sexual exploitation of the weak.

Jesus, the humble, the kind, the one who shared, who saved those who were being judged and persecuted, who washed the feet of his followers wouldn't recognize most of the churches that call themselves Christian today. Jesus rebelled against the manifestation of the Jewish religion of his own time; he turned the tables and ran the money lenders out of the temples! What would he make of the giant tv screens through which loud calls for donations and promises of wealth are shouted by so-called ministers and the lavish mansions and luury automobiles of these leaders of the mega-churches in the mid-western US or the Catholic churches everywhere.

I mentioned to a friend over lunch that the Roman Empire expanded and thrived upon Extortion. They attacked, too over, and taxed the lands of their neighbors in an international pay-for-protection scheme. I just remembered a bit in the crime series, the Sopranos, where one of the characters says, "The Romans are back, we are the Romans." And it was true, their extortion rackets were based on violence, intimidation and cruelty, lack of compassion or empathy or any respect for justice or mercy. That is the contest in the world today.

The Olmec Heads, the Roman Empire - Power, pride, crime for the accumulation of wealth, despising justice or fairness as weak - a will to win at all costs, drive for domination, destruction in a kind of grab-all-you-want-and-all-you-can side versus:

Jesus Christ, Justice, compassion, qualities of character as greater than display of wealth, sharing, protection of the weaker and the dependent, stewardship and respect for the natural world, humility and patience, the traits of the other side, the traits of Jesus Christ's teachings.

these are my Christmas thoughts in December 2024 Merry Christmas Friends! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com

Christmas in the Pines 2024

If you are looking for that old time, Contry Christmas feeling you might want to visit Vatsto Village in the Pine Barrens. I love Batsto at any time of the year, but at Christmas you will enjoy hot chocolate and cookies, tours of the Mansion, carriage rides and my personal favorite, walking through the historic villaage and taking the nature hike alongside the lake. Also, don't forget the Christmas vintage trin show at the American Hitory Museum at what used to be the andaloro Farm, at Andaloro Way in Deptford. You will need to check the web for both sites for times and days to be sure of availability.

Happy Trqails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com