Patricia Smith Melton is a peace activist, writer, photographer, and poet. She founded the international peace organization for women, Peace X Peace, and was the editor and photographer of the book Sixty Years, Sixty Voices: Israeli and Palestinian Women, which was gifted to every Ambassador to the UN and every U.S. Congressperson.

She has created numerous video shorts and was executive director-producer of the documentary Peace by Peace: Women on the Frontlines filmed in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Burundi, Argentina, and the US. The film debuted at the United Nations and aired on PBS.

She co-founded the Melton International Education Foundation, the first international social network.

For my text and images on this site, you may download and share them so long as you credit me, Patricia Smith Melton, and do not change them in any way, or use them commercially.

BLOG GUIDEBOOK

SLOUGHING TO ENLIGHTENMENT

At age 4, I put a paper and pencil next to my bed and challenged God to write His name. By age 5, I asked Him only to leave a mark. By age 6, I asked Him just to move the pencil.

Travel with me from adolescence where “being touched by God” turned out to be a case of hives to the religious commune where people swung from rafters, from the years of breakage to the Stunning Now and every day’s pull to the light.

WOMAN OF A CERTAIN AGE

We women “of a certain age” have our secrets and some I’m willing to share – those like bouquets of different flowers and scents that are heady and make you swoon, those like the small knife under your sheltering cape that can cut anyone if you choose but that you don’t choose because since you know you can you don’t have to, the ones that weave decades and lovers past and present, young and old.

ROAD SHOW

This year Paris, the Galapagos with the blue-footed boobies, and weeks in NYC with eccentric friends. From taste and smell to art and history that punctures through to the present, from glimpses of kisses or fights to conversations on the fly or into the center of it all. Maybe Palestine again. It is calling. Gaza?

PEACE INTERVIEWS

Twelve years after founding Peace X Peace, I live gratefully in a world of rising women, powerful women who are changing the world. Each month, I will interview one of them, starting with my friend Jean Shinoda Bolen, the Jungian analyst who first told us we were all goddesses, and gods. Be inspired, become informed, stay tuned!

PHOTOS

Images, vision, perceptions, insights. For a decade I was a professional photographer, the eye remains, and so does the impulse. All photos on this site, except where obviously not or credited otherwise, are by me – including the header of a sunset over New Jersey. Visit the gallery.

POEMS

Nothing to say except what the poems say.

Excepting interviews, all opinions expressed are mine alone with no relationship to the international women’s organization Peace X Peace that I founded.