Tag: Life

Share Your World 8-17-2020

Last week’s SYW started us off on a two-parter, with Share Your World meeting the world of Harry Potter. This week we have as usual Melanie’s muggle-themed queries alongside those of Roger, this time invoking The Chamber of Secrets.

Be sure to check out everyone’s answers and join in the fun!

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Harry Potter can speak to snakes. If you were able to have conversations with any one animal, what animal would you like to speak to? What would be the topic of your first conversation? 

Naturally, I’d like to be able to speak with our house pets: we’ve had dogs, cats, guinea pigs, fish, and a snapping turtle that we rescued from a flood as a baby and set back in the creek after wintering with us. When they’re injured or sick, it would have been nice to ask them where it hurt so the vet could treat them more efficiently.

More fancifully, my answer would be: BIRDS! They always seem to be chattering to one another in such a cheerful mien. I’d like to start off by asking them to let me hear all the songs they sing to God, from the very beginning. It could take a long time. But I expect I’ll have eternity. 🕊️

Continue reading “Share Your World 8-17-2020”

Share Your World 8-10-2020

Oh boy! That boy “Harry Potter” is making his entrance into Melanie’s Share Your World, via special edition: “Harry Potter” themed questions cooked up by Roger Shipp. Let’s go!

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Because of the state-wide quarantines many of the local SPCA’s are having an influx of animals. You have decided that you would love to have a new pet. Would you go the normal wizardry route and pick and owl, a cat, or a toad? Or would you become a more eccentric wizard (like Hagrid, the games keeper) and seek out a three-headed dog, a dragon, or a unicorn? Please explain your answer.

Dinosaur Teddy

The Dra-Gon: because deep inside this fearsome exterior is a heart of gold, waiting,

to unleash its awesome powers which are innumerable

and jostle one another for supremacy

until they are needed in the hour of greatest need

against that villainous monster, MALADORK, the unnameable but named all the same.

Neville Longbottom was gifted a Remembrall. This was a glass ball that would assist you in maintaining memories of things that you often forget. What would you want your Remembrall to help you remember?

I would want to remember everything good that I ever forgot.

Also, I would want to remember to feed Dra-Gon.

Continue reading “Share Your World 8-10-2020”

Share Your World 7-27-2020

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Here are this week’s questions on Melanie’s Share Your World.

Are you a clean or messy person? Both – it depends. Messy until the messiness gets in my way or clean until the cleanliness gets in my way. Generally speaking, rather clean.

If I asked you to describe yourself in five words – what would they be? A child of God —Simul justus et peccator (I’m counting all the Latin as one very pretentious word 🙂

Do you enjoy being out in nature? Walking in the woods or along a river path for me is like hearing the the slow movement of Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2.

Don’t freak out. You’ll recognize it as soon as you hear the first notes.

In the same way, being outdoors hiking or just sitting on a hillside shatters me with nostalgia and the longing of a traveller headed home.

What could you spend all day talking about? The grace of God .

Sláinte!🍻

Share Your World 7-20-2020

Sneaking my entry in under the wire for this week on Melanie’s Share Your World.

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Where Do You Not Mind Waiting?

Almost anywhere. As long as my patience isn’t tested beyond endurance.

But a doctor’s office is the worst. It’s not just the wait, it’s the anxiety. What, you wonder, has she discovered this time? Are my blood test results okay? Any more tests? Ultrasounds? Intracavernous, intramuscular, intrajunctual, intravenal-focal-macular-subjunctal eldritch crepuscular morbidities?

You get the picture.

What Is In Your Fridge Right Now?  (you’re not required to give a comprehensive list)

Food. Perishable items. Cryptic, I know.

If You Could Only Speak One Word Today, What Would It Be?

Why?

Would You Rather Be Trapped In An Elevator Full Of Men With BO Or Three Soaked Dogs?  (this is with the codicil that C-19 doesn’t exist)

I’d prefer the dogs, but I’d rather not be trapped anywhere, much less an elevator. Elevators give me the jitters. I keep imagining an earthquake the very moment the doors shut, and me — and the dogs, if you insist — stuck between a crack in the earth and poor cell reception.

An Attitude of Gratitude

Please feel free to share something good about last week.   This is NOT mandatory, it is just if you’d like to.

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I’m grateful for fellow bloggers who share their good humor, their talents, their energies in making this world a place worth sharing, specifically this week, encouragement from fellow creative artists and writers. Sláinte!🍻

3LineTales — Seamus & the Sea

Here’s a little something for Sonya’s Three Line Tales!

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photo by Callum MacAulay

There were only three voices Seamus could hear now: his own, his fiddle’s and the sound of the sea as it washed over him, telling the secrets of the sky and the deep.

“I’m just a poor fiddle player,” Seamus would say to the tourists on the ship when they stayed to listen to his song unveiling secrets of their hearts.

Yet it was just one song, one tune, only one secret he knew: a hidden kingdom unknown to many who listened but could not hear.

Day 22 – Fave Fantasy Movie (just now)

In response to SandmanJazz’s 30 Day Film Challenge for Day 22, and interpreting fantasy to include sci-fi as well, today I’ve got to go with Red Planet (2000). It’s a science fiction thriller directed by Antony Hoffman, written by Chuck Pfarrer, and starring Val Kilmer & Carrie-Anne Moss, with Terence Stamp.

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Okay, maybe also Blade Runner (1982), another science fiction thriller but directed by Ridley Scott and based on a novel by Phillip K. Dick, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, starring Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer.

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It’s a tie then, because both are terribly entertaining and the plots keep your heart pumping, and the images and landscapes are mesmerizing, but by the time the credits are rolling, they’ve also got you thinking about the choices we make, the judgments we’re driven to, and the nature of life and what we make of it. As Bud Chantilas (played by Terence Stamp), an aging scientist and surgeon in Red Planet, asks one of the main characters, Robby Gallagher,

Chantilas: [Suppose] we just finished poisoning the earth and everyone was dead in a hundred years. Then what was the point of anything? Art, beauty-all gone-the Greeks, the Constitution, people dying for freedom, ideas. None of it meant anything? What about religion? Do we give up on God too?

Gallagher: You didn’t just give up being a scientist one day, did you?

Chantilas: I realized science couldn’t answer any of the really interesting questions. So, I turned to philosophy. I’ve been searching for God ever since. Who knows, I may pick up a rock and it’ll say underneath, “Made by God.” The universe is full of surprises.

And in Blade Runner, Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) reflects on the AI that he had been hired to hunt down and kill:

Deckard: [narrating] I don’t know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life – anybody’s life; my life. All he’d wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do was sit there and watch him die.

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Struggle’s End

The lamb has yet to lay down with the lion
There is no peace in any day and age
Look beyond your walls! Can you not see
Enemies at the gates, barbarians rising
To receive as their bounty your life,
Your fortune, your freedom denied?

So cries one, and still another rages,
Voices of confusion and calamity.
Where will you go, with whom will you struggle
To find the security you seek within your walls
Where disease and misfortune and betrayal
Lurk at corners beyond your control?

Life in all its disarray where even within your soul
The enemy lurks to cause you to despair when hope
Seems all but lost, meaning all but gone, love
All but illusion – Where then to find the truth
That sets free? Who the author and the champion?
Who the founder and the deliverer – but God?

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John 3:16-17
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
DailyPostPrompt: Struggle

Sea Castles

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He had waded out too far
The boy in the sea
Knee-deep he stood
As the tide withdrew
Drawing bridges round his toes
Dipped in seaweed

On a mermaid watch
Spying only undulating glass
Alluring sheets of metal grey,
Gathering towers, sparkling spires,
Sudden with a dragon’s curve

And he, turning away too late
To shore, felt the sand give way
Beneath shifting feet of clay,
Merman knee-deep no longer
Arms flailing, gasping watery riddles

Above the cresting wave
Choking fear and salt water
Blinded eyes seeing royal fury
Losing air, light, sky, dreams
In a torrent of sea

Till he grew legs again
Bones plucked from the foam
Tossed back onto the shore
Spluttering at the eddying pool
From which he rose

Like a bird flapping forgotten wings
Then dropping like a stone
On to his knees
Beside fallen sea castles.

dVerse Poets Pub: OLN #278 Rejoice!
Re-posted on JollyBeggar.com
Originally posted on PilgrimDreams.com