Thursday 31 December 2009

New Blue Wishes for You

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Today is not only the last day of the year, it's also the last full moon of the year AND... it's also a blue moon (a second full moon in the month).



A 13th moon, on the 31st, seems a good time to make a few Full Moon Blue Moon wishes. ;-) So here are my wishes for all my friends and loved ones:

Happiness, Health, Peace, Prosperity, Hope, Joy, Home,
Security, Safety, Inspiration, Love, Romance, Laughter,
Music, Merriment, Movement, Luck, Surprises, Magic,
Compassion, Passion, Friendship, Companionship, Pets,
Success, Accomplishment, Completion, Closure, Career,
Satisfaction, Pleasure, Delight, Acceptance, Amusement,
Freedom, Fulfillment, Nature, Wonder, Smiles, Miracles...


Abundance



HAPPY NEW YEAR!
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Wednesday 30 December 2009

Poets

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A friend sent me a poem in an email yesterday. It had no name on it, which always bugs me, since I've been a victim of word theft and author ignorance myself often enough. So... I went looking for the author and found a very interesting woman who gave us a quote that is pretty famous...

"Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
"Weep, and you weep alone."

Recognise that? I bet you do, but do you know who wrote it? I certainly didn't.

The author of that quote, and my email poem, is Ella Wheeler Wilcox. She was born November 1850 in rural Wisconsin.

I found her poem rather remarkable for a woman born two centuries ago. Let's see what you think. :-)

The Law

The sun may be clouded, yet ever the sun
Will sweep on its course till the cycle is run.
And when into chaos the systems are hurled,
Again shall the Builder reshape a new world.

Your path may be clouded, uncertain your goal;
Move on, for the orbit is fixed for your soul.
And though it may lead into darkness of night,
The torch of the Builder shall give it new light.

You were, and you will be: know this while you are.
Your spirit has travelled both long and afar.
It came from the Source, to the Source it returns;
The spark that was lighted, eternally burns.

It slept in the jewel, it leaped in the wave,
It roamed in the forest, it rose in the grave,
It took on strange garbs for long aeons of years,
And now in the soul of yourself it appears.

From body to body your spirit speeds on;
It seeks a new form when the old one is gone;
And the form that it finds is the fabric you wrought
On the loom of the mind, with the fibre of thought.

As dew is drawn upward, in rain to descend,
Your thoughts drift away and in destiny blend.
You cannot escape them; or petty, or great,
Or evil, or noble, they fashion your fate.

Somewhere on some planet, sometime and somehow,
Your life will reflect all the thoughts of your now.
The law is unerring; no blood can atone;
The structure you rear you must live in alone.

From cycle to cycle, through time and through space,
Your lives with your longings will ever keep pace.
And all that you ask for, and all you desire,
Must come at your bidding, as flames out of fire.

Once list to that voice and all tumult is done,
Your life is the life of the Infinite One;
In the hurrying race you are conscious of pause,
With love for the purpose and love for the cause.

You are your own devil, you are your own God,
You fashioned the paths that your footsteps have trod;
And no one can save you from error or sin,
Until you shall hark to the Spirit within.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Copyright 1911

Tuesday 29 December 2009

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I am thrilled to recieve an award from my dear friend and fellow blogger, Cliff of WIXY'S Gone Bananas.
"Next is the "Bananas are good for your health" Top Banana. This goes to Michelle of Crow's Feet fame. Michelle has had some health issues this past year and I hope that this might make her smile, which would help her feel better. Michelle is one who does what she can to make me feel better as we are good friends off the blog and on Facebook, as well as exchanging emails. Michelle lives in Scotland. She moved there from South Africa. She is also a published author."
THANK YOU, Cliff!



This award really is the cherry on the cake in a very fruitful year of blogging. :-)

Now for my award speech...

*cough*

2009 had its fair share of lemons and I know I'd have had a much harder time (even gone bananas) if it wasn't for my berry good blogger friends... like you, Cliff. :-) You're a peach for picking me. This award is a grape honour, certainly nothing to trifle with. I'm jelly proud to add it to my side bar. If I feel melon-cholly next year... I'll go look at it and smile. So... I hope you read between the limes here and understand how truly apple I am to know you and count you as a friend.



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Sunday 27 December 2009

Twelve Days of Christ-mass

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The traditions of Christmas have always fascinated me. It's amazing how often we know very little about them. Like the fact so many Nativity plays have everyone arriving together to worship the newborn baby in the manger. The shepherds, were told by angels, did arrive in time to find the baby in the manger...



...but the Magi (who were following the star) arrived later... after Mary and Joseph had left the Inn and were staying elsewhere.



Traditionally the day the Magi found baby Jesus is celebrated on the Feast of Epiphany - the 6th of January. It's not a well known holy day in Africa and I only knew it because we knew a South American family in the 1980s. In their culture it's these three Wise Men who leave gifts for children, just as they once left their gifts of Gold, Myrrh and Frankincense for a very important child.

It took me a while to realise that the 12th day of Christmas is Epiphany, the day we've always traditionally taken down our Christmas decorations. This year I was listening to the song, "The Twelve Days of Christmas", and realised I still don't know much about the days that lie between Christmas and Epiphany.

I went to do some snooping and discovered that the Twelve Days of Christmas are traditionally called Christmastide. They run from St Stephen's day, the 26th of December, till the Feast of the Epiphany on the 6th of January. In older times all twelve days were a holiday of food, fun and music. We seem to have lost out in our modern times!

So what about that famous song? Where does it come from?



Well, it's probably from France originally, but it has been sung in England for a very long time. There are mentions of it being sung in the 16th century.

The fourth day's gift is often sung as four calling birds but originally was four colly birds - blackbirds. Funny enough I learnt the words from a book of nursery rhymes I had as a child and in that they were called colly birds.

Another misinterpretation are the five gold rings. Apparently they meant ring-necked birds such as the ring-necked pheasant.

The first seven gifts were all birds: partridge, doves, hens, colly (black) birds, pheasants, geese, swans. Perhaps the birds all related to food that would be served during the 12 days of feasting? Swans were eaten in the past and "four and twenty blackbirds" were baked in the king's pie in another old song. Putting live songbirds into pies, so that they'd fly out when the pies were opened, was as much a "special effect" at parties as doves being set free at weddings is nowadays.

In some French versions of the song almost all the gifts are food. Wikipedia has the sequence as:
"... a good stuffing without bones, two breasts of veal, three joints of beef, four pigs' trotters, five legs of mutton, six partridges with cabbage, seven spitted rabbits, eight plates of salad, nine dishes for a chapter of canons, ten full casks, eleven beautiful maidens, and twelve musketeers with swords."

Sounds like a really good party!


Scotland has its own 19th century version too. It starts:
"The king sent his lady on the first Yule day a popingo-aye [parrot]; Wha learns my carol and carries it away?"

In this one the gifts are:
"..three partridges, three plovers, a goose that was grey, three starlings, three goldspinks, a bull that was brown, three ducks a-merry laying, three swans a-merry swimming, an Arabian baboon, three hinds a-merry hunting, three maids a-merry dancing, three stalks o' merry corn."

I notice the gifts don't grow in number, they stay either one or three items. Trust the Scots to be sensible! What I can't figure out is the gift of a baboon for Christmas...

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Sunday 20 December 2009

Away with the Fairies...

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I've been talking garble lately. I'm not sure if it's tiredness or my brain finally reached its "Sell by" date. I'm saying words backwards, saying the wrong word, or forgetting words completely!

Last week it struck again. I was munching dried apricots. I love dried apricots. :-) So... I'm chewing away when hubby walks in. He's hoping it might be time for lunch and he sees me chewing.

Hopefully he asks, "What are you eating?"

and I reply.... "Leprechauns."

LEPRECHAUNS???


I can only think my brain picked up that both words have a similar sound in the middle...

A"prico"ts ----- Le"prico"rns

I keep having this vision of little green legs flailing madly as I chewed...
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Saturday 19 December 2009

Friday 11 December 2009

Wor(l)ds and Windmills

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This morning, browsing blogs led me on a journey that turned out to be a circle... or a spiral. I started off chasing windmills and became one instead.

It started when I read Ann's tribute to the tragic student massacre in Canada, 20 years ago. The Canadian Massacre story led me to finding a very interesting new blog - The League of Ordinary Gentlemen. That led me to popping into Facebook, to share the links with a friend of mine there who runs the Canadian White Poppy group. Searching through my groups reminded me of several I hadn't looked at in ages, including my own. That led me to some more browsing where I wandered off Stephen Fry's Facebook page onto his blog.

There I watched a video about twitter and the phenomenon of social media, found a forgotten favourite author (Oscar Wilde) and remembered something startling. I first made contact with my Spirit Guide while watching Stephen Fry on TV. I wonder what he'd make of the fact his TV show on searching for his ancestral roots was the catalyst that led me to discovering the elephant in my head was Jewish? My mind boggles!



From there I went on to wish three people Merry Christmas and dash of a belated Happy Birthday to Mimi, the Queen of Blog blast for Peace. That in turn reminded me of other birthdays I'd forgotten so... back to Facebook where I found another friend (Stephen) had left a petition waiting for me. I went to sign the petition ... what do I find at the end? One of those who is in support of it is... Stephen Fry. Weird Windmills!

...and none of it would have been possible without the Internet - this world of words.

Which was when something else struck me - isn't it interesting how the WORLD becomes a WORD once you remove the "L"? My browsing has been equally interconnected today. It's all spirals and synchronicities, connections and re-connections. I haven't a clue what it means, but it feels nice. :-)

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Simon's Cat 'Fly Guy'

I bought the book for my birthday. It's hysterical. I LOVE Simon's Cat. :-)

Saturday 5 December 2009

Ice Aged

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Last week I got into a discussion about how we label strong emotions hot or cold. A friend of mine said she tends to see hot emotions as good and cold ones as bad. When she's all "fired up" in anger she can tackle anything, but when she freezes her anger... not so good!

I pointed out that I'm the opposite when I'm angry. When I'm fiery, I burn bright, but it's messy and I can burn both myself and others in the process. I have no control.


Cold anger is when I'm able to get things done, to stay in control, but when fear freezes my heart... I'm paralysed and useless.

My friend came back later in the week with another email to say that she'd realised that she'd been mistaking frozen for glacial.

So, what's the difference? Well, for my friend the difference showed when the big chunk of frozen anger inside her grew so HUGE it became a glacier... and began to move.

Slow...
grinding ...deliberate
...and unstoppable.

I was still thinking about that last night when... what did they have on the news? Glaciers! They were showing the affect of global warming on glaciers. The scientist being interviewed said that having Glaciers melt too fast was devastating - because the frozen water was a controlled regulated water source.

Controlled. Regulated. Not a flood, not a drought... always just enough.
Freezing is a good and healthy thing. Nature does it because it serves a vital purpose.In many parts of the world there wouldn't be any water for Spring flowers without the melted waters of snow and ice...


It made me think... are emotions the same? Fear, hate, anger or grief... is an emotional glacier a way to control extreme emotions? As long as you do allow them to become a glacier and not an ice-bound freezer, of course!

If we follow the rules of Nature an emotion "glacier" could be a way to allow strong feelings to melt gently in a controlled manner. A way that allows them to seep away without doing damage.

Sometimes it feels like the world wants instant solutions and fast fixes. Has it made us too keen to do the same psychologically? When we turn a bright spotlight on problems are we shining a light or are we trying to melt thing too fast? Are we merely creating our own personal global warming?

Maybe being aged in ice, until it's time to gently and naturally thaw, isn't such a bad thing at all...


Tuesday 1 December 2009

First Snow

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It snowed last night. The grass was just frosty this morning, but the mountains around us are all white.

Winter is here!