"valour
This post was triggered by a friend, who wrote saying she'd have to cut her email short because her husband had just brought her lunch. And in that moment a whole realisation flashed into my head about the untold stories of the courage of men.
- the qualities of a hero or heroine;
- exceptional or heroic courage when facing danger;
- a quality of spirit that enables you to face danger or pain without showing fear."
What I'm more interested in doing today is adding more awareness about the courage of those who keep on keeping on for months, years and lifetimes. For the fathers, husbands, brothers and sons who, in times of sickness and hardship, act as the anchors and the safety nets. They cook meals and clean houses, they sit beside beds, take care of children, act as a taxi service, wait in waiting rooms, wash the weak and hold the dying.
"Book Week Scotland will be a national week-long celebration of reading, delivered on behalf of Creative Scotland by Scottish Book Trust, the leading agency for the promotion of literature, reading and writing in Scotland. Scottish Book Trust will work with authors, workplaces, libraries and schools across the nation to deliver a packed programme of free projects and events, bringing Scots of all ages and from all walks of life together to celebrate books and reading.
Running in support of the first ever Book Week Scotland – which runs from 26th November to 2nd December 2012 – the Scottish Book Trust are forming a band of special book lovers who will be at hand to recommend and advise (via email and Twitter) those who seek ‘superhuman’ literary guidance.
The League of Extraordinary Booklovers is a group of people from all walks of life who love books and reading, who are volunteering to share their passion and expert knowledge with readers across the nation during the first Book Week Scotland (26 November – 2 December 2012)."
Liebster is a German word which means sweetest, kindest, nicest, dearest, beloved, lovely, kind, pleasant, valued, cute, endearing and welcome.
A. Each person must post 11 facts about themselves.
B. Answer 11 questions the tagger has given you.
C. give 11 questions for the people you’ve tagged.
D. Choose 11 people and link them in your post and tell them you’ve tagged them.
Remember, no tag backs.
Yes, this is insane, but it's lots of fun and way easier than trying to remember the lyrics. Try it... I dare you! ;-)
Tripbase Awards 2011
I am pleased to inform you that your site has been chosen to receive a Tripbase 2011 Blog Award.
This year our panel of judges reviewed hundreds of sites from across the Internet before hand-selecting the best ten for each travel category. Your site is among these elite ranks, and can be seen here:
http://www.tripbase.com/d/awards/2011/categories/winners/scotland.htm
I would like to congratulate you on your continued hard work and achievement in winning a Tripbase Award - this year, the awards have been featured in CNBC, CBS and AOL News. We have created small and large badges for you to show off your achievement to your readers, so please feel free to grab the code and upload it onto your site.
Well done once again, and keep up the great work.
"We have created a range of the top Scotland websites that we think are fantastic resources for those who hope to make the most of their trip to the Scottish Regions, and offer their help to fantastic courses. As an interesting and useful site, we have commended your website to our visitors and you can see your website listed at the following link:
http://www.tripbase.com/c/scotland/
Millions of visitors a year use Tripbase for travel tips and inspirational vacation ideas. Tripbase eliminates the time-consuming and frustrating online search process by providing travelers with personalized travel recommendations for those who may be looking to truly have a fantastic trip while helping many amazing courses."
The rules for this award are:
1. Copy the award to your blog with the name/link of who gave you the award.2. List 10 things that make you happy and then pass the award on to others.
10 Things that make me happy...
Then it was all back in the car and onwards towards Ben Nevis. We stopped here on the road side to photograph the mountains...
There were loads of stunning views all along the way, but nowhere to stop the car to take photos. :-( Is the dept of roads deliberately spiteful to photographers or are they merely unmoved by beautiful, scenery? It gets so frustrating when you have to zoom by waterfalls and other wonderful sights with nowhere to stop.
Here's a close-up of the memorial from the front.
We got to Fort William far too early and decided to do a bit of sight-seeing. This is the view of Loch Shiel where Bonny Prince Charlie rowed to shore in 1745. The memorial statue is to the left of my photo. The view was far prettier, to be honest.
We stopped at the very pretty Catholic church of St Mary and St Finnan. You can just see Mary in her little grotto to the right of the church. (between the red bushes)
The view of Loch Shiel in front of the church was so lovely I've used it as my new blog banner.
St Michael stands guard... my favourite archangel.
Then it was back To Fort William for the prize giving.
Ian's poem was my favourite entry. It isn't up on the JMT website yet. I hope they sort that out soon as it really is worth reading... AND looking at. ;-) How often do you find a poem that looks good as well as reads good?
I'm so glad we went. It was a wonderful day. :-)Leap of Fate by Michelle Frost
Love stories usually end with a marriage proposal, but this story started with one...
I was born in Africa and had lived all my life in Africa. I’d have probably died there too, if it wasn’t for a Highlander I’d met on the internet having other ideas. In 2002 he turned my life around with once sentence on a chat room window.
“Will you marry me?” He asked…
…and I said, “Yes.”I can’t explain why I was so certain. I’m not the kind for leaps of faith or impulse - I can take thirty minutes to decide between tea and coffee! All I knew was that I had no doubt I loved this man I’d never met and never seen. We did realize that arranging a meeting between a man in the North of Scotland and a woman in the South of Africa was going to take some serious effort. Since he had recently started a new job it made more sense for me to travel to Scotland than him to Africa. So, two months after I first said that fateful “Yes”, I was on a plane and on my way to spend a month in the far North. Little did I know that I’d be falling in love all over again… not once, but twice before my travels were over.
I fell in love with the idea of a man on a computer screen, but I had to travel to the far side of the world to find the real man behind the words. Since he had no chance to take leave from his new job we did the next best thing… I went along with him to work during the week. You can forget your guided tours and bus trips; I can tell you the best way to see Scotland is in a builder’s Transit van. Thanks to a building contract that was mostly rural I got to see more of the countryside in my month’s holiday than any package holiday provides. Admittedly I did have to shovel one ton of sand and scrape thousand year old carpet tiles off a farm floor, but in between was pure magic. What more romantic gift could a man offer than to share the country he loves with the woman of his dreams?
And that was exactly what he did. During workdays he’d take the more scenic routes and he’d stop for lunch in the places he loved the most. There is nothing more romantic than sharing a pork pie in the middle of absolute nowhere with your true love. We shared ours on the way up to Thurso on a spring morning when the air was so sharp and clear it was like breathing diamonds. Every weekend he’d be up at dawn planning where to take me and what to show me. We’d spend the whole weekend driving and walking. I wore the soles off two pairs of African shoes climbing Scottish hillsides.
I think I realized I’d fallen in love with my Highlander the second time when I didn’t kill him for taking me through a bog, a stream, a field and over two gates and a barbed wire fence. How can you not love a man who makes you ruin your last pair of packed shoes, and freezes your thin African skin to the bone marrow, to show you a woodland bursting with bluebells? And how do you describe seeing a bluebell for the very first time - the amazing colour of them and how they smell? Just one would have been incredible and here he had laid out, beneath my muddy feet, an entire woodland of misted blue magic.
How do you explain the wonder of all that mud-making water to African eyes? Rivers, burns, lochs… so much water and all so beautiful, but especially the waterfalls. Rushing down hills and mountains and even tiny ones along the road sides … they’re everywhere! It was all so alien from my childhood of dry riverbeds and violent rain storms, this Northern world of soft seeping waters. I will always remember my first rain, fine as mist on my skin when we walked around Loch Ness and the surprise of richly golden peat tinted water frothing up like creamy ale over rocks and river beds.
I think, if I had to use any word to describe Scottish countryside it would be “rich”. Rich with water and trees and wildlife; rich in history and beauty. We’d drive all weekend and my eyes would be glutted on so much richness... forests of trees I had no names for and wildflowers I’d only ever seen as names in children’s books. I never knew buttercups were so small… or chestnut trees so big! And gorse! Why doesn’t anyone write about gorse? Never mind hosts of daffodils – why hasn’t anyone written odes to the fire of golden gorse flowers blazing on dark hills?
I remember so many richly treasured moments during that holiday. One perfect Sunday afternoon we drove to the valley of the eagles and came across a whole herd of red deer standing in the sun-sparkling Findhorn River. The day our van was stalked by a magnificent male grouse, with outraged scarlet eyebrows, who seemed to think the rough sound of an old Transit van engine was the battle cry of some invisible rival. Even more magical was the night we drove to Skye to catch the morning ferry to the islands. That night we saw a fox cub dancing after moths by starlight, his baby fur as woolly as a lamb’s. Later, on the ferry, we watched puffins that flew past like frantic flapping feathered bullets. Twilight was an adventure in itself; the sun does not linger in African skies. The glow of Scottish gloaming over wild empty places has got to be one of the most enchanted things anyone could ever experience.
How do you describe falling in love? Does it lie in an unexpected touch or the moment your eyes meet? Is it an instant knowing or a slowly growing realisation? For me it was all of those things. Near the end of my holiday we were returning from a job on the West Coast. It was early evening twilight when we came around a corner… and there in the road was a red deer stag. He leapt up the bank beside the road and then paused, looking back over his shoulder as we passed. Like a scene in a dream I watched him as he watched me. He was so close… so still and so beautiful. There was an instant of knowing that my heart was as trapped in this beautiful wildness as my eyes were caught in his calm curious gaze. It was a slowly growing realisation that I had fallen in love a third time… with this lovely, cold strange world of water and stone, sharp light and deep shadows.
And I would never be the same again.
~The End~
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1. Thank the person who nominated you for this award
Thank you Ritva. :-)
I hope everyone goes to look at your blog, because it's beautiful and you write such thoughtful interesting posts.
2. Copy the logo and place it on your blog
1.I can hear bats, "silent" dog whistles and other high pitch noises
2. I do chakra readings in my spare time
3. I love cheese - Brie, cheddar, emmental, cream, gouda, gruyere... you get the idea!
4. I can read backward upsidedown writing. Comes from doing art classes on setting things for printing.
5. I find dimples very attractive (yes, hubby has a dimple in his cheek. :-D )
6. My imaginary friend as a child was a flying horse, like Pegasus, and a blue dragon named Thursday.
7. I am trying to write book two - sequel to First Light
5. Nominate 7 Kreativ Bloggers
"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! 
There once was a king who offered a prize to the artist who could paint the best picture of peace.
Many artists tried. The king looked at all the pictures. But there were only two he really liked, and he had to choose between them. One picture was of a calm lake. The lake was a perfect mirror for peaceful towering mountains all around it. Overhead was a blue sky with soft clouds. All who saw this picture thought that it was a perfect picture of peace.
The other picture had mountains, too. But these were rugged and bare. Above was an angry sky, from which rain fell and in which lightning played. Down the side of the mountain tumbled a foaming waterfall. This did not look peaceful at all. But when the king looked closely, he saw beside the waterfall a small tree growing in a crack in the rock. In the tree a mother bird had built her nest. There, in the midst of the rush of angry water, sat the mother bird on her nest – in perfect peace.
The king chose the second picture.
“Because,” explained the king, “peace does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. Peace means to be in the midst of all those things and still be calm in your heart. That is the real meaning of peace.”
~Author Unknown
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The International Reach Out Award is for these special people who have all, in their own unique way, done exactly that – they’ve built bridges:
It is to acknowledge the depth and breadth of the warm open-heartedness from bloggers all over the world who reach out and touch their readers with their words.
“It has been my experience that whenever one human being reaches out to another in compassion, a bridge is built. A bridge which leads out of despair, into the light of hope and the possibility that tomorrow will hold a few less tears than yesterday”
Dr. Maithri Goonetilleke - the Good Shepherd Hospital and Baylor Clinic in Swaziland.
Noblesse Oblige Award The recipient of this award is recognized for the following:
- The Blogger manifests exemplary attitude, respecting the nuances that pervade amongst different cultures and beliefs.
- Their Blog contents inspire; strives to encourage, and offers solutions.
- There is a clear purpose at the Blog; one that fosters a better understanding on Social, Political, Economic, the Arts, Cultures, Sciences and Beliefs.
- The Blog is refreshing and creative.
- The Blogger promotes friendship and positive thinking.
The Blogger who receives this award will need to perform the following:
That list of criteria is impressive and rather intimidating. I have always strived to be 2, 4 and 5 and if I pull off those three I am happy enough. Bogey's blog, View from the Fairway, definitely ticks the boxes listed for this award and I'm not at all surprised to see his name on the award list ahead of my own.
It's an honour to share this one with you, Bogey. Thank you for passing it on to me. :-)
"for enabling communication and learning" though their blogs.
I'm awarding to Guyana Gyal and Emma
I'm awarding to: Amias and Mimi, for her Blogblast for Peace.
"for volume, quality, and quantity of excellent, thought-provoking content."
for dark humour or the ability to weather life's woes with a wry smile. 
"for reaching beyond the obvious, putting a new twist on ancient materials."
"for imaginative, creative content linked to photography." 
"for penetrating insight, occasional dips into darkness, a tinge of the mystical."
Tripbase Awards Badge">
