January Debut: Amy Indira Dio Ramdass UPDATE

Amy Indira Dio Ramdass

Coming Soon

“Amy’s Worlds!” on “LLAW’s Worlds!” 

Postings from Amy’s own delightful and unique Goddess Thoughts, including charming selections from her hundreds of appealing and inspiring poems published in her large book of the same name, along with short-story accounts of many of her delightful and hilariously fantastical relationships, run-ins, and the remarkably humorous reactions of her own, as well as her muse-like critical “Editor” of Amy Dio’s tales and conversations with her personal world of ancient (and often not so old) gods and goddesses, angels and fairies, of mythology and fantasy and how to this day we are influenced by the “reality” of a wonder-filled world of magic, mystery, and memories from the pantheons of the gods and goddesses from the days of yore.

Amy Dio in her garden with Aphrodite

Amy Indira Dio Ramdass is  a mythology/goddess poet and an author of mystery/romance novels, including not only her big beautiful book of “Goddess Thoughts”, but also her delightfully enchanting, but chillingly sinister, debut novel “River Bound Secret Swept”, a magical yet mysterious tome of a story, full of romance and intrigue, set in the tropical beauty of her own native Guyana, and on to Houston, Texas, and her own adopted Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is working on her second novel, draft titled “Avatara”

Previously Published by Amy I. Ramdass. . .

Amy is a highly respected and well-followed expert on the ancient deities and pantheons of Greek and Roman philosophy and mythology.

You can find her at her own principal website at https://www.facebook.com/amy.i.ramdass

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The “Me Too!” Blue Wave

This political cartoon in the Reno Gazette Journal this morning did my old heart good! If the election wasn’t a high-tide blue wave for Democrats, it certainly was a tsunami of a “Me Too!” blue wave as liberal women “grabbed” congressional seats away from cowardly old Republican male incumbents who were deathly afraid of Trump.

Trump should be running scared from now on. He knows the Resistance will force him to pay the price for his white supremacy nationalism, bigotry, racism, xenophobia and misogyny ~llaw

A Message to Mary Magdalene, our Lost Goddess

Mary, John, and Jesus (from Da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’)

Mary, I’m not sure why I love you
Or why my heart yearns so intensely
Nor what created our strange milieu
Or my soul-indulgent fantasy

But my mind is filled with thoughts of you
That consume my nights and all my days
With such hopes and dreams that shan’t come true
Since we live our lives in disparate ways

What might have been is all that I have
To comfort me in my sad despair
When with my Muse I find words to salve
My heart for mending with Wisdom’s care

Your bright eyes reveal your inner light
Illuminate your divinity
You are our lost Goddess in plain sight
Sent from Pleroma’s infinity

You are Mary of old Magdalen
Reborn through divine androgyny
Sent to awaken the souls of men
To errant ways of misogyny

Old Christian clerics rewrote the Books
Turned the secular world upside down
In order to reverse the spiritual looks
From Sophia’s smile to Yahweh’s frown

Priests stole the Texts of the Gnostic times
Perverted the role of the priestess
From goddess of love to harlot’s crimes
And scribed the myths of that god they bless

They burned those Texts and switched the places
Of women and men and life and death
They moved the holy dwelling spaces
To far distant realms beyond our breath

Those priests hid the Truths once known so well
While Yahweh with hubristic grandeur
Led the world into the depths of hell
His archons draped in unctuous splendor

Eve was impugned for Adam’s weakness
Beguiling him of the ways of life
By eating from the Tree of Gnosis
And Yahweh cursed them to lives of strife

When Jesus was sent to right the world
Bursting with our sins and corruption
He found the Truths and tried to herald
That Yahweh’s way was blind deception

Christ was forsaken and left to die
While Magdalene with love’s treasure trove
Grieved at his feet knowing the lie
That the clerics with their archons wove

They tore Hypatia the lovely mind
To pieces in the Egyptian streets
Because she told of the truth behind
The lies of the Coptic Christian priests

Our Joan of Arc the Maid of Orleans
Burned at the stake by ecclesiasts
For heresy though yet in her teens
Made a martyr for their priestly castes

Mary, I am called to help you learn
And instruct you of your destiny
To inform the World of your return
And of your gifts for humanity

Now for us all with your heart laid bare
Our Lost Goddess has arrived once more
To right the wrongs for the ones who care
To conclude this Patriarchal War

~  from your loving John, for just one more of those ten thousand lifetimes during which I shall wait for you

. . . a poem of hope by Lloyd Albert  Williams

First Women in HIstory Admitted to Acclaimed Deep Springs College

Deep Springs College 2018 freshman class includes first women in school history. 10 women and 5 men are admitted to first co-ed class.

For the first time in its 101 year history, Deep Springs college, a highly regarded, but remote and isolated junior college in eastern California, about 40 miles southeast of Bishop near the Nevada border,  has enrolled its first female students. Ten women and five men make up the new class of 2018. The  two-year school’s normal total enrollment is between 25 and 30 students. The large  number of incoming women was to provide at least a 1/3 voice in the student body, who have a significant role in the administration of the college, including student activities and discipline.

This is a great step for gender equality at a school that has spent the past seven years in litigation over whether or not women should be admitted, not to mention pressure from institutions and individuals close to the college for several years before that, including the Telluride Association, which granted (with low interest) the school $1.8 million in 1988 to remodel the main campus building, but with the covenant that it would have to repay the gift as a loan if women were not admitted by 2019. The school managed to beat the deadline by a year. Deep Springs College has had its fair share of problems over its long history, despite its shining reputation as one of the best collegiate prep colleges in the nation, as attested by its remarkable placement of graduates in the most acclaimed Ivy league schools such as Harvard, Yale and Brown, as well as Oxford, Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT, the University of Chicago, and many others, even though it is, by design, a school that is a cattle and hay ranch, and a dairy farm that provides a free education for its students for their hard labor in the pastures, fields and dairy barn.

In a 2006 article, the New Yorker had this to say, in addition to  apparent homosexuality problems, that “Every major change at Deep Springs has been opposed by the students,” said Christopher Breiseth, former college president. Deep Springs’ s all-male self-enclosure allows its students to feel wildly, hedonically free. The shock of returning to the world of social norms can be profound. In 1994, the college voted against coeducation, but the controversial subject has created a fissure in the school’s relationship with the Telluride Association, where women have been members for 45 years.”

Perhaps the reticent and grudgingly awaited arrival of women students at Deep Springs this summer will provide a new cooperative attitude between the school’s board and the student body and instructors, raising the already sterling reputation of the school to the stratosphere of highly regarded and most reputable of America’s institutions  of higher education.  ~llaw

The Most Vital Aspects of Sustaining Human Life

A friend asked me a while back if there was anything more important than politics, money, corporations, religion, and philosophy concerning the fate of our future on the planet. This was my response: “There are three things–respect for science and the feminine way, and hope like hell for help from above.”

There are many apolitical and economically frugal things we can do to improve all of our lives, both individually and collectively, but the most important issue right now and on into the foreseeable future is to reverse our environmental relationship with Mother Earth before it is too late for politics, religion, money, or anything else to matter.

The summer months in the northern hemisphere over he last five years (2014–2018) comprise the five warmest June through August global temperatures recorded in scientific history, and the entire 2018 year was globally the fourth warmest ever, only cooler than the three previous years. We know that the cause is because of human activity despite what climate change deniers and conspiracy theorists (like our president, his administration and sycophants) would like you to believe.

We are fouling our own nests here on earth, not to mention the natural sanctuaries andrefuges of our innocent victimized fauna and flora. We are on the verge of making our planet uninhabitable. Why and how are we doing this? The answer is simple. We have lost touch with our once natural affinityto respect and love our Mother Earth, long forsaken in exchange for insatiable greed and unsustainable personal comfort. We have given virtually nothing back to her, failing to recognize her for all that she has given us to prosper and thrive. But our constant abuse of her for the sake of  human consumption, coupled with our growing lack of thought, appreciation, or consideration for the critical balance between humanity and nature, has resulted in her rebellion, not because she is vengeful or unwilling to help, but because she is ill, infected by viral hordes of human parasites, so she has no choice but to fight back against us in order to survive.  Yet the wealthy tycoons, the arroghant politicians, the behemoth corporations and their minions pay no attention except to ignore, refute, hide, or destroy the scientific warnings, evidence, and data..

As global warming continues to heat up, mainly from carbon emissions, we are faced with growing pollution of air, water, and soil (even the ocean has become a contaminated waste dump), rapidly rising sea levels, wild atmospheric conditions including more severe droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, forest fires, freakishly intense any-season storms, and unbreatheable air. And all this is happening at a rate almost exponential from climate change models of just a decade or two ago. No longer can we  afford to ignore or deny climate change or global warming r, yet the Trump administration is feverishly rolling back environmental regulations, deleting EPA, NOAA, and NASA historical records, and purging scientific data from government records, libraries and websites.

If we are to survive as a species here on earth–and not take down millions of other species right along with us–our most important mission, bar none, is to reclaim that old natural affinity of respect and love for Mother Earth and hold her in the highest esteem because she is the only one who ultimately provides us with a home that allows us to continue to exist and even thrive on her soil. But if we continue rebukng, procrastinating and ignnoring her modest expectations, we–according to  our most recent scientific evidence–face extinction in the imminent future. We are already feeling the effects, and science is telling us that global warming may be irreversible in less than a decade. Keep in mind that this planet is the only home we have and we cannot survive Mother Nature’s wrath if we continue to despoil her–unless we are  somehow awakened, blessed with a highly unlikely epiphany of some kind– or maybe even a tough-love intervention by a wiser life form from somewhere else in the universe. What are the odds? ~llaw (updated 05/10/2019)

Trump’s Cruel Immigration Policies

Trump’s Immigration Policies are Inhumane, Illegal, and  Definitely Unamerican

Since Trump’s  absurd and cruel “zero tolerance immigration” policy went into effect, I have followed the disturbing news, actions, and events that have gone on down at our southern border, and what I have read, seen, and heard is inhumane, illegal, and unamerican. To put it in people-speak the elements of it consist of kidnapping children from those families seeking sanctuary, trafficking many of these children all over the U.S. for who the hell knows what purposes (say illegal adoptions, sex, slave labor?), and imprisoning others in a cage-like environment at numerous detention centers. All of this is apparently illegal under international law and is surely not protected by America’s laws and our constitution. Public pressure has forced Trump to amend his “zero tolerance order” into something more duplicitous and ambiguous, but provides that the children and parents are to be reunited when possible. And there seem to be a lot of impossibles, including excuses, lies, and no records.

But the government’s crass detention and separating children policies (which began long before his initial “zero tolerance order”) were at work before any kind of formalized tracking of immigrants and their children was implemented and now the government cannot reunite many of these families. Their failure to be able to do that indicates even more serious humanitarian violations. In the meantime I have just read that they have actually lost almost two thousand children. Obviously this is inexcusable and there will be many charges against the border police and ICE that will likely imprison dozens of government employees for various kinds of dereliction of duty.

But what about the phony judges, the failure to properly process immigrants seeking asylum, and the inhumanity of sending many thousands of these people back to the very places they are running for their lives from, where they are likely to be forced to return to the lifestyles they are so afraid of, including being murdered? Who is responsible for that? I say the buck stops with the President of the United States, Donald Trump.

The American people must demand that Donald Trump resign from office., and that our courts and congress punish him for these crimes and many others that he is no doubt guilty of. ~llaw

The following heart-wrenching story is one attorney’s experience at attempting to find justice for her clients at the border. I invite you to read it and offer your comments.

Continue reading “Trump’s Cruel Immigration Policies”

Stories: The Allure of Caverns

Since caves, with all their intrigues and dangers, are very much in the international news these last several days, I thought I would offer this personal story from my younger days as a part-time amateur spelunker (along with all the ulterior motives) and how an inexplicable experience  in a Wyoming cavern changed my life.  (I have told this story before, and in the interest of brevity, have edited out some of the content in the original.) ~llaw

Gnostics say that the experience of seeing, and absorbing, what you see and experience, is far more important than formal study and education. It has something to do with nature – being close to the earth – and the natural wisdom of intuition that has all but been purged from our senses. It is the musky scent of Sophia and the deep feminine, of damp soil, dark caves and wombs, and of the fertility rites of the old pagan ways when “God was a Woman.” – from The Mystery of Being Alive, my essay of January 7, 2009

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Books: The Sweetwater Conspiracy

The “Sweetwater Conspiracy” has had two planned publishing dates over the last five years, but both have been postponed for either marketing reasons or for storyline modifications and other iterative editing. I hope to finally publish this book by this time next year at the earliest or the year after at the latest. It is a story made for release in early July, as the critical events in this historical novel took place in that month in 1889. The following is a draft of the preface to the story. ~llaw (07/08/2018)

The Sweetwater Conspiracy: 

The Legend of Cattle Kate

(An American Tragedy)

(This is taken from the Preface to my historical novel about an actual incident that occurred in the Wyoming Territory just a year before the state was admitted to the United States of America.)

“In the summer of 1889, during the settling-up of the American west a sensational news story swept off Wyoming’s high plains, making international headlines and shaking the resolve of the westward pioneering spirit.  The story told of the macabre garroting murder by hanging of Ella Watson, a young, single, cowgirl homesteader (along with her friend, Jim Averell) by an ad-hoc vigilante group of influential Wyoming cattle barons.  According to the press, the precocious settler was strung up for stocking her new homestead with cattle by trading sex for cows.  Nothing could have been further from the truth, but the myth justified the means. They hanged Ella Watson and her boyfriend, but was someone else guilty? Or was it all a conspiracy?

This grisly incident, involving wealthy cattlemen and indigent homesteaders in Wyoming’s Sweetwater Valley, became a vital spark in the incendiary run-up to the infamous Johnson County War, leading to martial law as well as subsequent modifications to the various federal land grant acts that were profoundly influenced by that conflict.

The incident’s key role in the volatile triad of the federal government (trying desperately to equitably settle the west), the territorial government of Wyoming (in the middle of its transition to statehood), and the Wyoming Stock Growers Association (then, the most powerful jurisdictional and lobbying organization in America) must no longer be misunderstood nor ignored.  The criminal, judicial, political, and historical significance of this tragic event has been suppressed, subverted, ignored, and overlooked for well over one hundred years, and most of what little has been written about it has been inaccurate if not intentionally misleading. Numerous movies, such as Heaven’s Gate, The Redhead from Wyoming, and Shane have borrowed from this tragedy. But the dark underbelly of the story seems always to be avoided. Even today the Sweetwater murders are not discussed in Wyoming’s polite social and political circles, especially in the cattle ranching community.

What follows is the dark truth behind that sensational story of so long ago – a story that headlined the front pages of newspapers from Cheyenne to Chicago to New York and on across the Atlantic to London, Paris, and Berlin, but the press, influenced by the powerful leaders of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, got it all wrong.” ~llaw

Hello World!: Deep Springs College to Enroll First Female Student

A girl may be camping out at this outpost on the Deep Springs campus, affectionately named ‘DS1’, sometime this fall. Late this summer, the first female student(s) ever, after 94 years of educating only young men, may enroll here..

This exclusive and highly rated two-year college, remotely located in the rugged high desert of eastern California between Lone Pine, California, and Dyer, Nevada (its mailing address), may be the most isolated educational institution in the United States.

Deep Springs accepts only a maximum of 15 new students each year out of nearly 200 applications. The institution and its campus is a working cattle ranch, and the students all work on the ranch in lieu of paying tuition or any other college expenses, which is one of the allures of the school.

Stay tuned to see who the first  female student will become  a working cowgirl at the most  unique higher educational program in America. ~llaw (July 7,2018)

Continue reading “Hello World!: Deep Springs College to Enroll First Female Student”