Not all hermits live in isolation. For many, it is a mental attitude, not a physical location.

Many people come to this blog because of two posts on choosing to live as a hermit.  It was not my intention when I started mentalimaging to focus on this topic.  And, I never imagined that this topic would generate more hits than anything else.  Most of the comments on the hermit posts are from people who want to move from wherever they are to some remote area and “live off the land” in one way or another.

For me, choosing to live as a hermit is not about getting away from other people or living in isolation in a remote area.  It is about choosing a reflective, contemplative life that is lived mostly alone.  This does not require a specific physical location but rather, a mental location, a mental attitude of choosing to cultivate wisdom and self-acceptance over popularity, entertainment and conflict.

Chile’s Michelle Bachelet – Public Approval Rating 70+

Read the full story in the NYTimes

In 2006, Michelle Bachelet captured the world’s attention, becoming the first woman to be elected president of Chile, a deeply conservative country. And she had done it alone, without the famous husbands that had propelled other female presidents in Latin America.

Analysts and pollsters attribute her stunning popularity to her handling of the economy during the global financial crisis and to her decision to save billions of dollars in revenues from copper sales during the last commodity boom. That aggressive saving gave the country money to spend on pension reform and Ms. Bachelet’s ambitious program of social protections for women and children, despite the financial crisis.

Ms. Bachelet is among a handful of Latin American leaders, including President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, whose handling of the crisis has strengthened their popularity. Both Brazil and Chile are now emerging from recession, with Chile’s government saying the economy will grow by 5 percent next year.

Ms. Bachelet, a professed agnostic and single mother of three in a country that legalized divorce only five years ago, shattered the mold of traditional Chilean politicians in this Roman Catholic stronghold. At the start, she said, the political establishment tried to portray her as weak and disrespectful of the office of the president.

“It was an important challenge in the first few years,” Ms. Bachelet, 58, said in a recent interview, noting the way other powerful women had urged her to toughen up and “scream and insult” to be respected. “I took a gamble,” she added, “to exercise leadership without losing my feminine nature.”  As she took power, Ms. Bachelet introduced a cabinet of 20 ministers: 10 men and 10 women, a gender parity no previous Chilean president had tried.

With billions of dollars saved, Ms. Bachelet’s government legalized alimony payments to divorced women and tripled the number of free early child care centers for low-income families. It added a minimum pension guarantee for the very poor and for low-income homemakers. The government is on pace to complete its goal of creating 3,500 child care centers, said María Estela Ortiz, executive vice president of Chile’s National Board of Day Care Centers.

The Real Norma Rae

I never knew who the real Norma Rae was (1980 movie with Sally Field).  What a courageous woman!

Crystal Lee Sutton, the union organizer whose real-life stand on her worktable at a textile factory in North Carolina in 1973 was the inspiration for the Academy Award-winning movie “Norma Rae,” died Friday in Burlington, N.C. She was 68.  Ms. Sutton (then Crystal Lee Jordan) was a 33-year-old mother of three earning $2.65 an hour folding towels at the J. P. Stevens plant in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., when she took her stand. Low pay and poor working conditions had impelled her to take a leading role in efforts to unionize the plant. She was met with threats, she said.

After months trying to organize co-workers, Ms. Sutton was fired. When the police, summoned by the management, came to take her away, she made one last act of defiance.

“I took a piece of cardboard and wrote the word ‘union’ on it in big letters, got up on my worktable, and slowly turned it around,” she said in the interview. “The workers started cutting their machines off and giving me the victory sign. All of a sudden the plant was very quiet.”

Within a year, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union had won the right to represent 3,000 employees at seven plants in Roanoke Rapids, including J. P. Stevens, which was then the second-largest textile manufacturer in the country.

Read full obit in the New York Times

Office of Global Women’s Issues

I just realized today, from reading an article in the Christian Science Monitor, that there is an Office of Global Women’s Issues in the State Department — and that Melanne Verveer is the Ambassador at Large of this office.  She was appointed on June 12, 2009.

Here is the link: http://www.state.gov/s/gwi/ to their website.

From the swearing in ceremony, Hilary Clinton:

“Melanne is most famous for the unwavering passion she brings to her causes. And for the last 15 years, that cause has been women and girls; their rights, their opportunities, their central important to the future of our world’s progress and prosperity.   The absolute commitment she has always shown to giving voice to the voiceless, and making sure that the stories of everyday heroes and heroines would be known to a broader audience. She helped to launch the Vital Voices Democracy Initiative more than a decade ago, and she nurtured it and helped it to grow into what it is today. In the past eight years, she turned a government program into a global NGO, and the results of that work are ones that I encounter everywhere I travel on behalf of the United States. And she particularly helped to lead our commitment to end the intolerable scourge, the global crime of human trafficking.”

Vital Voices Global Partnership

The 34th Toronto International Film Festival opened on Thursday with the women in charge.

Read full article in the New York Times

While still struggling to find their place in the movie industry at large — the number of directors at American studios remains well over 90 percent male — female filmmakers have managed to occupy some of this 10-day festival’s most valuable slots: those showcase screenings and press conferences in the first couple of days, when everyone is still paying attention.

Thursday’s most raucous event was almost certain to be the 11:59 p.m. red-carpet debut of 20th Century Fox’s “Jennifer’s Body,” directed by Karyn Kusama (“Girlfight”) from a script by Ms. Cody (“Juno”), in which Megan Fox plays a high school sex bomb who, quite literally, turns into a man-eater.

According to Natalie Johnson, a spokeswoman for Fox, tickets to the midnight show at the landmark Ryerson Theater, which seats more than 1,200, were gone within two hours of going on sale last week. (“Hell is a teenage girl,” runs a theme-setting line from the film.)

“Jennifer’s Body,” which opens in commercial theaters next Friday, got its first festival screening at noon on Thursday. Several hundred press and film industry types, normally a jaded bunch, were lined up for a look at the Kusama-Cody-Fox combination’s take on female vengeance.

Anyone who is looking can read the signs, including those ubiquitous photographs of Ms. Cody flashing her bicep tattoo of a bikini-clad beauty: Women have staked a claim on the season.

The Beaches of Agnes – a film that gives you the desire to grow old

Read full story in the NYTimes

Agnès Varda, the only female filmmaker associated with the Nouvelle Vague at its high-water mark and now, at 81, an artist of undiminished vigor, curiosity and intelligence. That is certainly how she appears in “The Beaches of Agnès,” her latest film, which opens in New York on Wednesday, after winning a César (the French equivalent of an Oscar) for best documentary feature in February. Conceived as Ms. Varda’s 80th birthday approached, “Beaches” is a cinematic memoir in two senses: an autobiography rendered in carefully chosen, meaning-rich images and the account of a life lived in, through and for cinema.

There is an elegiac undercurrent to the film — visits to familiar places that have changed over the years, recollections of the dead — but it is not so much concerned with taking stock or summing up as it is with the restless exploration of memory. “I wanted to be like a bird,” Ms. Varda said in an interview one wintry morning in Manhattan a few months ago. “I wanted to be free in my memory, to go from one part to another and see what I would find.” An inveterate collector of odd images and curious ideas — her 2003 documentary, “The Gleaners and I,” is a personal and philosophical inquiry into the practice of gathering what has been discarded or passed over — Ms. Varda composed “Beaches” as a sort of living, moving collage.

How to live as a hermit.

Read full story in the Guardian by Rachel Denton

I moved here in January 2002 and started my life as a hermit, naming my house after St Cuthbert, the patron saint of hermitage. On a typical day, I pray between 6am and 8am. After breakfast, I work on my calligraphy business, perhaps on card designs or wedding invitations, until midday. I eat, nap and read until two, then work in the house or garden until five. Over supper, I listen to the radio for an hour, followed by more prayer. In the evenings I may sit and watch the fire, sew and wander around the garden.

I try to live a simple life. I grow my own fruit and vegetables and, on an income of around £8,000, I have to be careful what I spend. I don’t have a television and I allow myself only an hour of radio each day.

I made an official commitment to be a hermit in November 2006, at a special mass. Before you can take your vows in the Catholic church, you have to put together a “rule of life” agreed by the bishop. My vows were poverty, chastity and obedience, which I have interpreted as simplicity, solitude and silence.

An Aries Woman

“Sixty-two years of age, and an impetuous romantic girl of seventeen cannot exceed me in ardent passionate feelings.”

Jane Digby has been called “one of the most remarkable women of the nineteenth century.” A celebrated beauty, she was married at seventeen to Lord Ellenborough (later Viceroy of India). He was twice her age and within a few years she left him for an Austrian prince resulting in one of England’s most scandalous divorces. When the Prince deserted her she became the mistress and confidante of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, marrying for convenience a German baron who worshiped her. Subsequently she fell in love with a young Greek count who fought her husband in a duel while eloping with her.

After discovering that her Greek husband was unfaithful, and heartbroken at the death of her six-year-old son, she became an inveterate traveller in the Orient. For a time she became the mistress of an Albanian general and was thrilled to share his rough outdoor life as queen of his brigand army, living in caves, riding fiery Arab horses and hunting game in the mountains for food; until she found that he too was unfaithful and left him on the spot.

Middle-aged but still stunningly beautiful, and vowing to renounce men, she headed for Syria where she met and married the love of her life, a Bedouin nobleman, Sheikh Medjuel el Mezrab who was twenty years her junior.

During the remainder of her life she adopted for six months of each year the exotic but uniquely harsh existence of a desert nomad living in the famous black goathair tents of Arabia; the remaining months she spent in the splendid palace she built for herself and Medjuel in Damascus. As wife to the Sheikh and mother to his tribe this passionate woman found not only genuine fulfillment but further adventures, all of which she committed each year to her diary.

Read her biography by Mary S Lovell.

Introvert’s Rights Movement – I like you, now please shut up.

Great Article by Johnathan Raush, “Caring for Your Introvert.”

Introverts may be common, but they are also among the most misunderstood and aggrieved groups in America, possibly the world.

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?

With their endless appetite for talk and attention, extroverts dominate social life, so they tend to set expectations. In our extrovertist society, being outgoing is considered normal and therefore desirable, a mark of happiness, confidence, leadership. Extroverts are seen as bighearted, vibrant, warm, empathic. “People person” is a compliment. Introverts are described with words like “guarded,” “loner,” “reserved,” “taciturn,” “self-contained,” “private”—narrow, ungenerous words, words that suggest emotional parsimony and smallness of personality. Female introverts, I suspect, must suffer especially. In certain circles, particularly in the Midwest, a man can still sometimes get away with being what they used to call a strong and silent type; introverted women, lacking that alternative, are even more likely than men to be perceived as timid, withdrawn, haughty.

New book about chasity, “Chastened: No More Sex in The City.”

Read full article in Guardian UK by Hephzibah Anderson

The physical withdrawal is acute at times, but it passes. Now I can see that sex was a distraction that allowed me to ignore pretty much everything else in my life that wasn’t quite what it should or could have been. I became fixated on relationships to the exclusion of friendships, family, any sense of where I was headed.

The question I heard least frequently was the only one I’d really been anticipating: why? Plenty of people, I came to realise, have thought about hopping off the sexual merry-go-round. Sex, and its pursuit, seems to have become such a blood sport, its rules so confusing and its standards so exacting, that it is hard not to wonder occasionally whether it’s worth it. At the same time, sexiness is so ubiquitous it has become a bit of a turn-off.

One of my motivations for embracing chastity was a sense that sex had grown impersonal. Sometimes my decision to have sex seemed to be based more on what was appropriate to the moment than on what was right for me. At a certain point in certain scenarios, a part of me abdicated and gave in to the inevitable. Tipsily noticing that it was after midnight and I was far from home, say, in a dwindling group that happened to include a man I’d found myself in bed with some time before. But whichever bit of me had abdicated, it was never my heart, and I secretly dreaded that I might finally learn to separate sex from emotion.