Following a post from @Saima Ali who wrote about her mother, I found myself inspired to tell my mother\u2019s story and how it resounded in me until today, every day of my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maria Anna Weber was born in 1922, just old enough to live in WW2 from home and work as a teenager in the Edeka family\u2019s grocery. She also learned how to shoot off airplanes from the sky with a FLAK, weld and solder, work steel, drive trucks, and do many things that men were supposed to do. At the time, men were too busy conquering the world and dying in battlefields. She was part of a first generation of women who learned how to run the country without the men.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what do you think happened when the war was over? The surviving men came back and wanted their macho lives back! Do you see where the equation was wrong? Over the years, a whole generation of women discovered that men were dispensable, though nice to have if they behaved. This was the first generation of grass-root Feminists. In 1945, most of the countries finally granted the right to vote to women, that was not even 80 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1968, the Student Revolution was a direct result of that evolution, and it brought a lot of fundamental change in women\u2019s rights, and started to own their bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How did my mother live her convictions in her day-to-day life as a mother of three sons and a wife, totaling four guys home? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She tried many things to make an impact on society: various NGOs, and several political parties. She was a founding member of the Green Party in Germany, but she went from frustration to disillusionment about the narrowness and slowness and became angry about the men\u2019s world and the women who served it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finally, she retired from public life and bought a farm in the middle of nowhere, where I grew up. Not just a farm, obviously, she transitioned into organic farming, I believe one of the first in the whole area. This was the 70ies. My mum believed in autarky and grew and fabricated everything we needed. The only thing she still needed to buy was coffee that one did not grow in Bavaria. Everything else was home-grown and handmade, not just fruit, vegetables, milk, cheese, butter, meat, bread, beer, wine, perfectly illegal tobacco, and all sorts of herbs. Circular Economy we call it nowadays, nothing went to waste. We had solar panels on the roof 60 years ago and never bought anything outside, we had everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then she started to learn the harpsichord, and oil painting, wove her fabric, tailored our clothes, repaired our truck, and built a new stable for the sheep, I stop here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My dad helped her with everything, as did we children, we hated some of it, but she just never stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She had an opinion about everything, researched topics, and was very passionate about corruption, politics, bad decisions, the neglecting and destruction of the environment, social injustice. And the impotent power-obsessed old buggers who rule the world, that is what she called them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what did that do to me as a grown-up?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We are all more or less the product of several influences or parameters. We can always discuss how much our decisions and lives are pre-defined or how much free will we have. I like to call genetics, epigenetics, education, and social environment our \u2018Basic Package\u2019, which has been applied to us when we came into the world and grew up. Our options after deciding to take our lives into our hands still have the power to shape our lives completely, to my view. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is a benediction if we were lucky in our \u2018Basic Package\u2019 and inspirational role or value models were included, and you were encouraged and loved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My mother was certainly a benediction for me. She taught me the value of doing things, made me a craftsman, and gave me a sense of harmony and a goal to fight for. She gave me the confidence that everything can be learned or achieved if we put the hard work into it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Qaori Cooperative is her grandchild: the fruit of the respect for people’s work and products and their disconnect from the global economy based on speculation and shortsighted political decisions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thank you, Marianne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rosho<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yokohama 21\/12\/2023<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ode to an Extraordinary Ordinary Women Following a post from @Saima Ali who wrote about her mother, I found myself inspired to tell my mother\u2019s story and how it resounded in me until today, every day of my life. Maria Anna Weber was born in 1922, just old enough to live in WW2 from home […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4066,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,147],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-philosophy","category-qaori"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qaori.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qaori.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qaori.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qaori.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qaori.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qaori.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4062\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qaori.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qaori.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qaori.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qaori.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}