Month: January 2015

Sheryl WuDunn and Women of the World

On By MaryIn strong womenLeave a comment

I’ve been wanting to do more here about strong women. Apparently Sheryl WuDunn’s is also very interested in highlighting the accomplishments of strong women.  Ms. WuDunn has a good bit more focus and discipline than I do however. She has written a book “Half the Sky” that investigates the oppression of women globally. Her stories can be shocking. They can also be exhilarating. Her emphatic conclusion? Only when women in developing countries have equal access to education and economic opportunity will we be using all our human resources and will there be any hope for social and economic justice and human rights.

So, please by all means give her book a read.

If you need a bit more motivation, so hear her TED Talk, where you can hear her tell stories like this one:

So, let’s start off in China. This photo was taken two weeks ago. Actually, one indication is that little boy on my husband’s shoulders has just graduated from high school. (Laughter) But this is Tiananmen Square. Many of you have been there. It’s not the real China. Let me take you to the real China. This is in the Dabian Mountains in the remote part of Hubei province in central China. Dai Manju is 13 years old at the time the story starts. She lives with her parents, her two brothers and her great-aunt. They have a hut that has no electricity, no running water, no wristwatch, no bicycle. And they share this great splendor with a very large pig. Dai Manju was in sixth grade when her parents said, “We’re going to pull you out of school because the 13-dollar school fees are too much for us. You’re going to be spending the rest of your life in the rice paddies. Why would we waste this money on you?” This is what happens to girls in remote areas.

Turns out that Dai Manju was the best pupil in her grade. She still made the two-hour trek to the schoolhouse and tried to catch every little bit of information that seeped out of the doors. We wrote about her in The New York Times. We got a flood of donations — mostly 13-dollar checks because New York Times readers are very generous in tiny amounts (Laughter) but then, we got a money transfer for $10,000 — really nice guy. We turned the money over to that man there, the principal of the school. He was delighted. He thought, “Oh, I can renovate the school. I can give scholarships to all the girls, you know, if they work hard and stay in school. So Dai Manju basically finished out middle school. She went to high school. She went to vocational school for accounting. She scouted for jobs down in Guangdong province in the south. She found a job, she scouted for jobs for her classmates and her friends. She sent money back to her family. They built a new house, this time with running water, electricity, a bicycle, no pig.

We are so lucky

On By MaryIn Awareness, happinessLeave a comment

We have all made it through the crazy hecticness of the holidays. We’ve started a new year.  Life is sweet. Or at least it should be. But then many folks are back to work with too many demands pulling in too many directions.  Sometimes we just need to be reminded to take a deep breath, to inhale, exhale … and repeat as necessary.  I found this story. It invited me to smile.  It invited me to take a deep breath, to inhale, exhale and repeat even as I smiled. Because if we are still breathing, we are so lucky.

 WE’RE SO LUCKY

“Honey, would you drop the kids off at school this morning? I’ve got a lot of shopping to do and errands to run.”

“Well, dear, I’ve got a pretty hectic day myself (sigh) …  OK I’ll do it.  But hurry, up kids!”

So Dad and his children jump into the car and they’re off. The busy father glances at his watch. “Why is traffic so slow this morning? Certainly people should drive safely, not speed, but this little old man in front of us must be sight-seeing! I’ll pass him as soon as I can… take a short cut maybe … Oh, no!!”

Wouldn’t you know it! The car approaches a railroad crossing just as the lights begin to flash and the safety gate comes down. Dad’s first thought: “Darn it! We’re going to be held up by a train and be late.”

So, as Dad is fuming in the front seat, anxiously tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, reviewing, in his mind, how to make up some time … a sweet, childish voice calls out from the backseat: “Daddy, Daddy, we’re so lucky! We get to watch the train go by!”

Source | Based on a story told by Jerry Braza, Moment by Moment
(Tuttle Publishing,1997) page 3

 CONSIDER THIS

Awareness of the present moment is always a wonderful reminder to stop and enjoy what the journey has to offer along the way. Often the “now”, called by some “the sacrament of the present moment” or “the Sacrament of the blessed present”, is filled with many gifts if we have the eyes to see, the ears to really listen.

From Philip Chircop’s Wisdom Stories to Live by

 

A Tale of Beatrix Potter

On By MaryIn strong womenLeave a comment

Better than half of the human beings in our world are women. Women work hard and long. And yet, far too often our stories are not told, our contributions to the life and well being of our communities, countries, and planet go unrecognized.  So, I say, let’s celebrate women and our accomplishments, for better or worse, and more often than not for better. Today I would like to celebrate Beatrix Potter.

Many of you will know Beatrix Potter for her Peter Rabbit books. Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter were early joys and first friends for many of us. And for that contribution alone we owe Beatrix much. Her drawings still adorn pottery, clothing and an array of home goods. Her animals are both realistic and unthreatening, they are downright cute. And Beatrix Potter was so much more than that.

Beatrix Potter was born Saturday, 28 July 1866. She grew up in Manchester England with all the comforts of a home with its own staff of servants.  One of her earliest fascinations was with sketching the pets and small animals that populated her home and surrounding lands.  By the time she was seven her drawings had an individual personality to them.  By the time she was 31 she had submitted a scientific paper to the Linnean Society in London. By the time she was 35 she had produced almost 300 water colors of mushrooms and fungi which are now in the Armitt  Museum in Cumbria, United Kingdom.

But it was her ‘picture letters’ that she looked to as a way of earning a living. She produced the Tale of Peter Rabbit herself as a Christmas gift for family and friends in 1901. Shortly after that Frederick Warne & Company in London began discussions with her about printing it.  By 1902 the Tale of Peter Rabbit was published, and she had The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and The Tailor of Gloucester ready for publication as well.

One thing led to another and in July 1905 Beatrix and Norman Warne were engaged.  But on August 25, 1905 Norman died of pernicious anemia.  Beatrix was grief stricken. She left London and moved to the Cumbria where she had already been planning to buy a small farm, Hill Top. There she continued to create characters and to write, and she began to develop merchandise that would make her a woman of considerable means.  She steeped herself in the land and the community. She became a champion of farming causes. And she began to buy tranches of the beloved lands around her, gathering together as much as four thousand acres, all of which she left to the National Trust.

In 1913, eight years after Norman died, she married William Heelis, the country solicitor who worked with her to acquire the lands around her Hill Top Farm.  Frank Delaney tell the story of Beatrix Potter walking along the road near Hill Top Farm when she came upon a tramp walking along road. The tramp assumed that she too was a homeless traveler, and he greeted her, “Brave hard weather for the likes of thee’n me, missus.”  Delaney says that she had in that moment done the thing she most desired, she had merged with her countryside.

Indeed, Beatrix Potter merged with her countryside, she lived its life, told its quiet hidden stories, and left it better than when she found it.  What a marvelous legacy.  What a delightful contribution to the dignity of all living beings.

Doris Haddock, John McCain, Robert Lessig and me

On By MaryIn strong womenLeave a comment

It is not very often that I find John McCain and myself admiring the same woman, and yet here I am about to write about a woman who McCain called a true patriot and a blessing to our nation. Something felt a little fishy … but, it’s all Lawrence Lessig’s fault.  You see, in the 2014 Thanksgiving issue of Time Magazine, Lessig was asked to comment on who he admired and was grateful for, and he waxed enthusiastically about Doris Haddock.  So, of course, off I went to find out a bit more about Mrs. Haddock (I am just trying very hard here to refrain from some comment about swimming up stream to find information about her, but that would be too fishy even for me, so I will try to reel myself in).

So then, what is it about Granny D, as Mrs. Haddock preferred to be called that resonates with me?  Well, I have to admit that now that I am retired, there are days when I look back at my life and think, I did OK, but . . . but there are so many things that I wanted to do that I never quite got around to trying, things I started and never quite finished.  And I am inspired by an 88 year old woman who looked around, said to herself, something is not right here, and set out to draw attention to that!  Here’s what she did.

Back in 1995 Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold proposed some legislation to regulate campaign financing.  Short version of that story, their efforts failed.

Somehow, campaign financing caught the attention of Granny D.  The story goes that on January 1, 1999 Granny D left the Rose Bowl Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena California and set out walking.  She walked about 10 miles every day for 14 months.  She walked across California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, heading to Washington DC.  Of course she made speeches along the way and gathered mass media attention as she progressed along her 3200 mile route across the country.  On February 29, 2000 a number of the members of Congress walked the last miles with her from Arlington Nation Cemetery to the Capital Buildings on the National Mall.  And, the McCain-Feingold Act addressing federal reform of campaign financing did pass shortly after she completed her walk.

Now, you need to realize that Granny D did not wake up on New Years Day 1999 and say, ‘what the heck, I feel like taking a bit of a walk today.’  Granny D did not decide this on her own. A trek like that takes lots of preparation, planning and people.  Granny D had a team of support people, she had a community backing her up. She had experience – in 1960 she and her husband campaigned against the testing of nuclear bombs in Alaska; in 1972 she served on the city planning board in Dublin, New Hampshire, her home town.  She was well known and active in the community. And at 88 she set out on a 3200 mile walk to raise awareness.

Granny D subtitled her autobiography, which she coauthored with Dennis Burke, “You’re Never Too Old to Raise a Little Hell.” That’s my kind of woman!!  So, let’s go out and raise a little bit of hell today in the spirit of Granny D!.

 

Granny D AKA Ethel Doris Rollins Haddock

Born January 24, 1910 in Laconia, New Hampshire, U.S.

Died March 9, 2010 (aged 100) in Dublin, New Hampshire, U.S.

Occupation Political activist