A note from Bright Crow: This continues the revision of a serialized adventure Walhydra first published on The Crone Thread in 1996. The story is posted on Walhydra's Back Porch, in order to protect innocent eyes from the "naughty bits."
Part 2: Matchmaking
Blessèd Be...with giggles.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Yule blood
First sliver of New Wolf Moon, after Winter Solstice
Walhydra realizes that "blood" is not a word folks usually associate with Yule. We usually think of lights and worship and music and family...and scurry and worry and spending too much and eating too much....
Even so, on Yuletide morning, Walhydra marked her black front door with a splash of blood-red ribbon.
It was as if she were making certain that the angel of midwinter darkness would pass over their home and allow the first born light of the New Year to shine upon them.
Not that Walhydra is troubled by darkness this year, as she was so profoundly last year.
Unlike then, Senior Witch now lives just fifteen minutes away, in a comfortable, competently staffed assisted living facility. Walhydra and Hubby Jim see her now as often as they did when the three of them still lived in South Carolina.
And Walhydra has been able to resume adult conversations with the brilliant woman who still peeks out with determination through the increasing childlikeness of Alzheimer's.
This winter's darkness has been filled with cozy slumber and cuddling with Hubby Jim, rather than with the neurochemistry-driven despair and panic of a year ago.
At first, back between Samhain and Thanksgiving, Walhydra was scolding herself for neglecting completely the dawn ritual which kept her marginally sane last winter: the floor exercises and tai chi, the zazen, the devotional reading and prayer.
As the days grew shorter—"As I had to start going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark!" Walhydra points out—it became increasingly tempting to just stay in bed, snuggling with JimJim until the last possible moment.
It was quite a challenge to her "dark Lutheran" sense of duty. "I ought to be disciplining myself to get up on time," she would say, using Senior Witch's favorite Lutheran preacher's kid term of self-abuse.
Eventually, though, Walhydra was rescued by a long-time online friend Igraine, who assured her that playing spoons was a perfectly marvelous way to get through the winter months.
In any event, why is Walhydra speaking about blood in relation to Yule?
Isn't the season of Chris-Hanuk-Kwanzaa (as Jim calls it) about good cheer and overly sweet desserts and candles and garishly colored, blinking lights on houses and yards....
"...and little girls dancing to that cutesy, overwrought Russian ballet," Walhydra adds, never having understood the obligatory annual repetition of this confection, which didn't appeal to her little boy self.
For years, Walhydra has felt that the whole winter solstice business is exploited and trivialized by modern American culture. Part of what a friend of hers calls the "santa-claus-ization" of sacred days and heroes.
Before the West invented the so-called infrastructure, with its piped-in water and gas and its wired-in electricity—and especially before cities allowed surplus people to huddle together for warmth and shared agricultural stores—Yule was not necessarily a friendly, cozy season.
It still isn't for the impoverished majority of the world.
At midwinter, the hope of the clan was that the hunters would drag back enough bloody meat from the forest to replace the dwindling grains and fruits and nuts of the harvest.
That was the red on the cloak of Father Yule. The blood.
Yule was for Herne, protector of all animal life, yet also lord of the wild hunt. Lord of "mortality, the body, sex, sweat, and being," as Walhydra's friend Cat once described him.
The other blood of the season is woman's blood. No babe is born without blood and the danger of death.
Yet the Christ Child, the Son of the New Year, is always presented to us in sanitized swaddling clothes—as if born from stirrups and epidural anesthesia in a modern hospital, swabbed antiseptically and laid clean on the new mother's breast.
This year, though, with Christmas coming in the midst of a global economic crash, it's the first time in decades that Walhydra has sensed a collective awareness of the finiteness of life. Of the importance of nurturing and conserving what we already have, rather than recklessly consuming the future.
We may be starting to remember that the ancient Yule was about survival.
Maybe our family—at least the hardiest of us—will survive until spring.
Maybe if we hunker down, lay on some fat and sleep a lot, relying on our brutal men to plod home with meat and our ragged women to live through childbirth...maybe enough of us will survive to go on.
Prosperous Westerners who pay attention to the Bible tend to gloss over the bits about blood.
The steps of the altar in the Temple were gushing with it.
The whole Middle World, Semite and Aryan alike—Philistine, Jew, Greek and Roman—relied on blood sacrifice to convince themselves that their gods would remember them in the worst of times.
In a similar way, those of us brought up in or under the sway of the Church are taught to make a big deal about Christ's blood as sacrifice to a god who demands such.
And yet....
Walhydra doesn't believe that the blood at Yule is about sacrifice, at least not about sacrifice as payment for sin.
It is about birth and food.
Yes, it is about death. About Herne's sacrifice of some of his children to feed others of his children. But not death demanded by a god.
Walhydra, convinced heretic that she is, takes Yeshua, the Christ Child, at his word when he quotes (Matt. 9:13b) Hosea quoting (Hos. 6:6) YHWH:
For example, she realizes that there is a third kind of blood at Yule, the blood which flows through us from generation to generation.
Lately, Senior Witch has been telling...and retelling...stories about her own parents. Walhydra has learned more about the character of her maternal grandparents in the past few months than she had during the past five decades.
In part this is Senior Witch's rehearsal for her own death, a process of letting go of the present and moving back into childhood.
Yet Senior Witch has a fiercely penetrating Sagittarian's perspective on her own life and the lives of her parents, husbands and children. She has always sought to string the bow of the past with animal intention and to aim it toward the future with spiritual wisdom.
Despite mixing up names and dates and sequences of events, Senior Witch can tell the hearts of her parents with a sharp yet compassionate precision. Walhydra realizes that she can do the same with her children.
It's daunting yet inspiring.
Also daunting is the word from Walhydra's father, the Lutheran preacher, at the dark of the moon. He called yesterday to say that his last sister had died. He alone survives his parents and five siblings.
Walhydra felt odd, longing to give reassurance to this man who has almost never dared ask for it, who has always done his sideways Cancerian scuttle to protect himself from self-disclosure.
Listening to her Dad's Parkinsonian mutter, Walhydra strains to sense what he is telling her, what he feels, what he longs for.
She gives him the most affirming um-hum's and uh-huh's she can...without knowing the content of most of this once eloquent preacher's sentences. She just wants him to know how much she loves him.
As best she can tell, that message gets through—and is returned in kind.
Wolf Moon.
Sliver of New Moon.
First week after Solstice.
It goes on. It goes on.
Thank the Divine One for the blood and the sun.
Blessèd Be.
Walhydra realizes that "blood" is not a word folks usually associate with Yule. We usually think of lights and worship and music and family...and scurry and worry and spending too much and eating too much....
Even so, on Yuletide morning, Walhydra marked her black front door with a splash of blood-red ribbon.It was as if she were making certain that the angel of midwinter darkness would pass over their home and allow the first born light of the New Year to shine upon them.
Not that Walhydra is troubled by darkness this year, as she was so profoundly last year.
Unlike then, Senior Witch now lives just fifteen minutes away, in a comfortable, competently staffed assisted living facility. Walhydra and Hubby Jim see her now as often as they did when the three of them still lived in South Carolina.
And Walhydra has been able to resume adult conversations with the brilliant woman who still peeks out with determination through the increasing childlikeness of Alzheimer's.
This winter's darkness has been filled with cozy slumber and cuddling with Hubby Jim, rather than with the neurochemistry-driven despair and panic of a year ago.
At first, back between Samhain and Thanksgiving, Walhydra was scolding herself for neglecting completely the dawn ritual which kept her marginally sane last winter: the floor exercises and tai chi, the zazen, the devotional reading and prayer.
As the days grew shorter—"As I had to start going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark!" Walhydra points out—it became increasingly tempting to just stay in bed, snuggling with JimJim until the last possible moment.
It was quite a challenge to her "dark Lutheran" sense of duty. "I ought to be disciplining myself to get up on time," she would say, using Senior Witch's favorite Lutheran preacher's kid term of self-abuse.
Eventually, though, Walhydra was rescued by a long-time online friend Igraine, who assured her that playing spoons was a perfectly marvelous way to get through the winter months.
In any event, why is Walhydra speaking about blood in relation to Yule?
Isn't the season of Chris-Hanuk-Kwanzaa (as Jim calls it) about good cheer and overly sweet desserts and candles and garishly colored, blinking lights on houses and yards....
"...and little girls dancing to that cutesy, overwrought Russian ballet," Walhydra adds, never having understood the obligatory annual repetition of this confection, which didn't appeal to her little boy self.
For years, Walhydra has felt that the whole winter solstice business is exploited and trivialized by modern American culture. Part of what a friend of hers calls the "santa-claus-ization" of sacred days and heroes.
Before the West invented the so-called infrastructure, with its piped-in water and gas and its wired-in electricity—and especially before cities allowed surplus people to huddle together for warmth and shared agricultural stores—Yule was not necessarily a friendly, cozy season.
It still isn't for the impoverished majority of the world.
At midwinter, the hope of the clan was that the hunters would drag back enough bloody meat from the forest to replace the dwindling grains and fruits and nuts of the harvest.
That was the red on the cloak of Father Yule. The blood.
Yule was for Herne, protector of all animal life, yet also lord of the wild hunt. Lord of "mortality, the body, sex, sweat, and being," as Walhydra's friend Cat once described him.
The other blood of the season is woman's blood. No babe is born without blood and the danger of death.
Yet the Christ Child, the Son of the New Year, is always presented to us in sanitized swaddling clothes—as if born from stirrups and epidural anesthesia in a modern hospital, swabbed antiseptically and laid clean on the new mother's breast.
This year, though, with Christmas coming in the midst of a global economic crash, it's the first time in decades that Walhydra has sensed a collective awareness of the finiteness of life. Of the importance of nurturing and conserving what we already have, rather than recklessly consuming the future.
We may be starting to remember that the ancient Yule was about survival.
Maybe our family—at least the hardiest of us—will survive until spring.
Maybe if we hunker down, lay on some fat and sleep a lot, relying on our brutal men to plod home with meat and our ragged women to live through childbirth...maybe enough of us will survive to go on.
Prosperous Westerners who pay attention to the Bible tend to gloss over the bits about blood.
The steps of the altar in the Temple were gushing with it.
The whole Middle World, Semite and Aryan alike—Philistine, Jew, Greek and Roman—relied on blood sacrifice to convince themselves that their gods would remember them in the worst of times.
In a similar way, those of us brought up in or under the sway of the Church are taught to make a big deal about Christ's blood as sacrifice to a god who demands such.
And yet....
Walhydra doesn't believe that the blood at Yule is about sacrifice, at least not about sacrifice as payment for sin.
It is about birth and food.
Yes, it is about death. About Herne's sacrifice of some of his children to feed others of his children. But not death demanded by a god.
Walhydra, convinced heretic that she is, takes Yeshua, the Christ Child, at his word when he quotes (Matt. 9:13b) Hosea quoting (Hos. 6:6) YHWH:
"I desire mercy, not sacrifice."So where is Walhydra going with this sideways rant about the season? She isn't really sure. Putting that blood-red ribbon on her door got her to thinking, and that thinking is labyrinthine.
For example, she realizes that there is a third kind of blood at Yule, the blood which flows through us from generation to generation.
Lately, Senior Witch has been telling...and retelling...stories about her own parents. Walhydra has learned more about the character of her maternal grandparents in the past few months than she had during the past five decades.
In part this is Senior Witch's rehearsal for her own death, a process of letting go of the present and moving back into childhood.
Yet Senior Witch has a fiercely penetrating Sagittarian's perspective on her own life and the lives of her parents, husbands and children. She has always sought to string the bow of the past with animal intention and to aim it toward the future with spiritual wisdom.
Despite mixing up names and dates and sequences of events, Senior Witch can tell the hearts of her parents with a sharp yet compassionate precision. Walhydra realizes that she can do the same with her children.
It's daunting yet inspiring.
Also daunting is the word from Walhydra's father, the Lutheran preacher, at the dark of the moon. He called yesterday to say that his last sister had died. He alone survives his parents and five siblings.
Walhydra felt odd, longing to give reassurance to this man who has almost never dared ask for it, who has always done his sideways Cancerian scuttle to protect himself from self-disclosure.
Listening to her Dad's Parkinsonian mutter, Walhydra strains to sense what he is telling her, what he feels, what he longs for.
She gives him the most affirming um-hum's and uh-huh's she can...without knowing the content of most of this once eloquent preacher's sentences. She just wants him to know how much she loves him.
As best she can tell, that message gets through—and is returned in kind.
Wolf Moon.
Sliver of New Moon.
First week after Solstice.
It goes on. It goes on.
Thank the Divine One for the blood and the sun.
Blessèd Be.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Fearing joy
Saturday night, Walhydra and Hubby Jim joined about a dozen colleagues and assorted spice for a reference department holiday party, at the home of one of the other senior librarians.
As the night progressed, Hubby Jim and the other spice got to see what no one else in the public sees: library types letting their buns down...so to speak.
There was good potluck food from several cultures, and, in the second half of the evening, a silly game of White Elephant Gifting (which Jim recognized as a variation on the mathom exchange of hobbits.)
The idea was that each family would bring a gift they had previously received (or bought) and...ahem...wanted to get rid of.
Each family drew a lottery number, and, beginning with #1, took turns picking anonymously wrapped gifts. To make the game more silly, anyone who had not yet picked, or anyone whose gift had been "stolen," could "steal" a gift from someone else.
Walhydra knew that she and Jim had accumulated a number of "oh, um, thank you" gifts in the various storage spaces of their home, so she hunted until she found one, still in it's box, under that stairs to the second floor duplex apartment.
It was a set of three apple-pie-scented candles in graduated sizes, housed in "cute" red crockery. (That word "scented" seems much too mild.) Someone had given this set to Senior Witch the previous Christmas, and, after the guests were gone, she had turned to Walhydra and said, "Here, do you want these?"
*ahem*
So, Walhydra dragged the mathom out from hiding. When she opened to box, the cats fled the smell in alarm.
"Oh, yes," said JimJim. "That will do nicely."
[Segue to the White Elephant Gifting]
Lottery ticket #5 had picked Walhydra's candle set and loved it.
Walhydra, with #6, picked what looked like a very safe, thin package in discreet silver wrap.
Ah, a "quotable 2009 calendar."
Now, Walhydra must explain. In her own misanthropic way, Walhydra is actually very much an optimist. Despite all her grouching, she genuinely believes that all things will work out for the best—at least from the point of view of the Divinely Real.
(Granted, her strange, ex-pyschologist step-mother calls this trait of Walhydra's "magical thinking." But then, Walhydra's step-mother believes there is scientific proof of life-after-death, handwriting analysis...and possibly aliens...not to mention "vast leftwing conspiracies" on the part of Hillary and Obama.)
In any case, despite Walhydra's witchy faith, she has no patience for the unending flood of New Agey "self-help" literature—strong emphasis on self—which fills the bookstores and *grrr* the shelves of her library. So, what a delight to get a calendar which has for each month a saying like:
But silliness was the point of this game, and Walhydra gave a genuine laugh.
Later, chatting with one of her best buddy fellow librarians, Walhydra said, "Seems everyone actually got appropriate gifts. I got a tacky 'power of positive thinking' calendar."
"Yes," said her friend. "That was from me. I thought it was a stitch."
Oops.
"I like it," Walhydra muttered quickly. "It's so unlike me."
They laughed.
By now, the gentle reader is probably wondering what any of this has to do with the title of this piece: "Fearing Joy."
Well, this exchange with her friend has gotten Walhydra to wondering just why she doesn't like such perky, enthusiastic quotations.
"About time you wondered about that!" Goddess blurts out.
"Oh...," Walhydra begins.
"...it's you," she and Goddess finish in unison.
Goddess gives her a sour look. "As I was saying, it's about time you looked at that fear of yours."
"Fear?"
"Yes. You have an almost insurmountable fear of untrammeled joy...and I'm really getting tired of it!"
Walhydra frowns, puzzled.
"Oh, stop! I'll give you two hints: tomato juice and giants."
"Huh? Oh...."
The first hint by now should ring a bell with the long-suffering yet still gentle reader, who has surely become tired of the amanuensis constantly linking back to the "Teacher's Pet" piece.
The other hint requires a bit of a back story. It's a story Walhydra was originally going to tell shortly after it took place, except that she was already well into chronic depression.
In July of 2007, four months after Senior Witch had to leave her home and just before Walhydra put it on the market, Walhydra and Hubby Jim took a week plus vacation to the Shawangunk Ridge, east of the Hudson River. For most of that time, they stayed at Mohonk Mountain House.
There's much Walhydra would like to share about this wonderful vacation, a gift from dear Hubby Jim. But the crucial story for now has to do with the nightly entertainment, specifically, the first Monday night they stayed at the resort.
That night's event was Masked Theater with Michael Cooper.
Michael Cooper is an astoundingly talented puppeteer and storyteller. He uses a variety of puppet masks and costumes to act out his whimsical stories and songs. Quite a delight!
However, on that Monday, Walydra resisted this man's art all through the evening, not liking what she experienced as his aggressive demand that she enter into his magic. Into his androgynous physicality. His child-focused humor and song.
That is, until he got to the last story of the evening, the story of "The Clumsy Giant."
Then he wrapped pants legs around the stilts and drew around himself a cloak which reached halfway to the floor, fastening it at his throat. He slung on a shoulder bag and reached behind himself for something else which he did not yet reveal.
At this point, Cooper pulled a giant's mask over his head and stood up on the stilts.
And Walhydra felt her chest heave to life. She gasped for breath and wanted to cry.
It was so painfully startling and wonderful to see this giant actually come to life.
"Well?" Goddess asks after a few moments, as she watches Walhydra reliving the night. "And...?"
"And...I remember going back to our room later," Walhydra whispers. "I sat on our balcony and wondered why I had wanted to cry.
"Then I knew. I wanted to cry for lost childhood. Childhood I don't want to re-enter, resist re-entering...because I'm afraid of the pain of losing it again.
"Childhood which would remind me of the mother I'm losing to Alzheimer's. The father I'm losing to Parkinson's. Childhood I am losing to my own aging."
Goddess sits beside Walhydra and touches her hand lightly. "And...?"
"I was shut down. No sex. No body. No joy...except the dry joy of 'spiritual materialism.' I feared how much I believed it would hurt to open up again."
The hand brushes hers again. "And...?"
"I'm still afraid of that."
Walhydra remains silent for a long time.
Then Goddess stands up slowly and turns to face her student.
"Yes. We all fear that. All of us. But how silly not to enjoy something for fear of losing it. Especially when we can re-enter it whenever the music starts again.
"Dance, darling, dance."
And so it is.
Blessèd Be.
Note from Bright Crow: There is another approach to this issue on The Empty Path in "Melancholia & Thisness."
As the night progressed, Hubby Jim and the other spice got to see what no one else in the public sees: library types letting their buns down...so to speak.
There was good potluck food from several cultures, and, in the second half of the evening, a silly game of White Elephant Gifting (which Jim recognized as a variation on the mathom exchange of hobbits.)
The idea was that each family would bring a gift they had previously received (or bought) and...ahem...wanted to get rid of.
Each family drew a lottery number, and, beginning with #1, took turns picking anonymously wrapped gifts. To make the game more silly, anyone who had not yet picked, or anyone whose gift had been "stolen," could "steal" a gift from someone else.
Walhydra knew that she and Jim had accumulated a number of "oh, um, thank you" gifts in the various storage spaces of their home, so she hunted until she found one, still in it's box, under that stairs to the second floor duplex apartment.It was a set of three apple-pie-scented candles in graduated sizes, housed in "cute" red crockery. (That word "scented" seems much too mild.) Someone had given this set to Senior Witch the previous Christmas, and, after the guests were gone, she had turned to Walhydra and said, "Here, do you want these?"
*ahem*
So, Walhydra dragged the mathom out from hiding. When she opened to box, the cats fled the smell in alarm.
"Oh, yes," said JimJim. "That will do nicely."
[Segue to the White Elephant Gifting]
Lottery ticket #5 had picked Walhydra's candle set and loved it.
Walhydra, with #6, picked what looked like a very safe, thin package in discreet silver wrap.
Ah, a "quotable 2009 calendar."
Now, Walhydra must explain. In her own misanthropic way, Walhydra is actually very much an optimist. Despite all her grouching, she genuinely believes that all things will work out for the best—at least from the point of view of the Divinely Real.
(Granted, her strange, ex-pyschologist step-mother calls this trait of Walhydra's "magical thinking." But then, Walhydra's step-mother believes there is scientific proof of life-after-death, handwriting analysis...and possibly aliens...not to mention "vast leftwing conspiracies" on the part of Hillary and Obama.)
In any case, despite Walhydra's witchy faith, she has no patience for the unending flood of New Agey "self-help" literature—strong emphasis on self—which fills the bookstores and *grrr* the shelves of her library. So, what a delight to get a calendar which has for each month a saying like:
"Believe in yourself and all that you are. Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle." —Christian D. Larson"Of course," Walhydra thinks. "Reflux."
But silliness was the point of this game, and Walhydra gave a genuine laugh.
Later, chatting with one of her best buddy fellow librarians, Walhydra said, "Seems everyone actually got appropriate gifts. I got a tacky 'power of positive thinking' calendar."
"Yes," said her friend. "That was from me. I thought it was a stitch."
Oops.
"I like it," Walhydra muttered quickly. "It's so unlike me."
They laughed.
By now, the gentle reader is probably wondering what any of this has to do with the title of this piece: "Fearing Joy."
Well, this exchange with her friend has gotten Walhydra to wondering just why she doesn't like such perky, enthusiastic quotations.
"About time you wondered about that!" Goddess blurts out.
"Oh...," Walhydra begins.
"...it's you," she and Goddess finish in unison.
Goddess gives her a sour look. "As I was saying, it's about time you looked at that fear of yours."
"Fear?"
"Yes. You have an almost insurmountable fear of untrammeled joy...and I'm really getting tired of it!"
Walhydra frowns, puzzled.
"Oh, stop! I'll give you two hints: tomato juice and giants."
"Huh? Oh...."
The first hint by now should ring a bell with the long-suffering yet still gentle reader, who has surely become tired of the amanuensis constantly linking back to the "Teacher's Pet" piece.
The other hint requires a bit of a back story. It's a story Walhydra was originally going to tell shortly after it took place, except that she was already well into chronic depression.
In July of 2007, four months after Senior Witch had to leave her home and just before Walhydra put it on the market, Walhydra and Hubby Jim took a week plus vacation to the Shawangunk Ridge, east of the Hudson River. For most of that time, they stayed at Mohonk Mountain House.
There's much Walhydra would like to share about this wonderful vacation, a gift from dear Hubby Jim. But the crucial story for now has to do with the nightly entertainment, specifically, the first Monday night they stayed at the resort.
That night's event was Masked Theater with Michael Cooper.Michael Cooper is an astoundingly talented puppeteer and storyteller. He uses a variety of puppet masks and costumes to act out his whimsical stories and songs. Quite a delight!
However, on that Monday, Walydra resisted this man's art all through the evening, not liking what she experienced as his aggressive demand that she enter into his magic. Into his androgynous physicality. His child-focused humor and song.
That is, until he got to the last story of the evening, the story of "The Clumsy Giant."
Apparently, long ago, giants were actually graceful creatures who loved to dance. Then some enemy overthrew their castle and their kingdom and exiled them to a valley where there was no music. They became forlorn and clumsy and could find nothing to love.Cooper had been miming much of this story as he narrated it, clowning as he had done throughout the show. Walhydra continued to feel annoyed and resistant to his humor.
Generations passed. The giants survived in an increasingly clumsy and brutal way, losing all connection with their former lightness and artistry.
Until, one day, the son of the giant king decided to explore beyond the walls of the valley, something that had been forbidden by law since the exile began.
Through great struggles, he climbed over the mountain range which entrapped the giants. He wrestled his way through forests and swamps, till at last he came up to the walls of his great-great-great-etc-grandfather's castle....
Now the king's son heard a very strange noise. It struck some note of recognition in his blood, even though he had never heard it before in his life. It was music....By this time Cooper had climbed upon a stool to the side of the stage, a stool at least six feet tall. He began to strap long stilts to his legs, telling the story as he worked, while a lively jig began to play in the background.
Then he wrapped pants legs around the stilts and drew around himself a cloak which reached halfway to the floor, fastening it at his throat. He slung on a shoulder bag and reached behind himself for something else which he did not yet reveal.
The strange noise, the music, stirred the young giant's bones. He began to feel the rhythm within him. He began to want to do something which his blood seemed to know how to do, even though he wasn't sure what it was.
Soon enough, though, the music took over....
At this point, Cooper pulled a giant's mask over his head and stood up on the stilts.The giant took one step, and another, and then suddenly sprang into a wild and graceful dance.Cooper strode forward on the stilts, pirouetting and high-kicking and leaping to the jig. He danced all the way around the theater, while the audience cheered and clapped.
And Walhydra felt her chest heave to life. She gasped for breath and wanted to cry.
It was so painfully startling and wonderful to see this giant actually come to life.
"Well?" Goddess asks after a few moments, as she watches Walhydra reliving the night. "And...?"
"And...I remember going back to our room later," Walhydra whispers. "I sat on our balcony and wondered why I had wanted to cry.
"Then I knew. I wanted to cry for lost childhood. Childhood I don't want to re-enter, resist re-entering...because I'm afraid of the pain of losing it again.
"Childhood which would remind me of the mother I'm losing to Alzheimer's. The father I'm losing to Parkinson's. Childhood I am losing to my own aging."
Goddess sits beside Walhydra and touches her hand lightly. "And...?"
"I was shut down. No sex. No body. No joy...except the dry joy of 'spiritual materialism.' I feared how much I believed it would hurt to open up again."
The hand brushes hers again. "And...?"
"I'm still afraid of that."
Walhydra remains silent for a long time.
Then Goddess stands up slowly and turns to face her student.
"Yes. We all fear that. All of us. But how silly not to enjoy something for fear of losing it. Especially when we can re-enter it whenever the music starts again.
"Dance, darling, dance."And so it is.
Blessèd Be.
Note from Bright Crow: There is another approach to this issue on The Empty Path in "Melancholia & Thisness."
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Kuwaiti Wild Cat
This is sooo cool!Thanks to 3quarksdaily, Walhydra has stumbled onto this gorgeous photo from the 2009 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest.
Here's the description from the Traveler site:
Merit Award: Majed Sultan Ali, Kuwait City, KuwaitThe photos are all excellent.Such a beautiful world!
Nikon Coolpix Digital Camera and a Bogen National Geographic Prize Package
Majed Sultan Ali, a computer engineer, photographed a wild cat in Kuwait's Subah reserve. Noticing flying ants in the area, he waited for one to enter the frame before shooting. (Nikon D300 camera, Nikkor 200-400 mm Vr lens at 400 mm, exposure at 1/640 second, f/5.6, ISO 320)
Again this year, Traveler partnered with Photo District News on the ultimate travel-photo contest. More than 4,000 amateur shutterbugs entered 14,647 images in our World in Focus competition.
And so it is.
Blessèd Be.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Oh. Um...yeah....
Goddess has been tapping Walhydra on the shoulder for several months now, saying *ahem, ahem* in her sweetest pretend-polite little voice.
Finally she has conked Walhydra on the head—in the friendliest way possible, of course.
"Um, Dear. You need to read this blog post."
The post to which Goddess refers is "The Dark," by Cat Chapin-Bishop, on the the blog she shares with her husband Peter Bishop, Quaker Pagan Reflections.
Cat writes:
She realizes how much Cat's words speak to her condition.
"Yeah," Goddess murmurs, a little snidely. "I figured you'd notice that. You've not been paying much attention to body and spirit for a long time now."
"I haven't?"
"Um. You've stopped daily tai chi practice. You've stopped sitting meditation. You've stopped your morning prayers and devotional reading. You've stopped riding your bike...."
"Oh."
"You know, Dearest, that I'm all in favor of modern meds, within reason, but I'm beginning to wondering whether your SSRI experiment last November has gradually dulled your natural awareness?"
"Oh."
Now that she considers it, Walhydra realizes that she has gradually fallen out of the habit of all those deep self-care practices she was doing at the height of her grief-induced despair and anxiety last winter.
She didn't quit them as soon as she started to feel real again in February, when the meds had finally gotten her brain back to a healthy level of serotonin.
And it's not that she's stopped believing in the Divinely Real upon which those practices kept her focused.
But she sees in retrospect how, gradually, beneath conscious awareness, she has increasingly cut corners on herself..."because I'm too busy...because I've got to get to work...because I'm too tired...," etc., etc., etc.
On the other hand, since Fall Equinox, Walhydra has noticed Hubby Jim getting more and more cuddly at night and in the morning—and chosen to stay with him, rather than get up "on time."
It's so sweet, so full of good vibes, to stay huddled together under the covers. Playing spoons. Feeling the weight of the two cats, Sonic and Shadow, as they cuddle up...or bounce around wanting breakfast.
This exchange of cozy snoozefulness has increased as the days have gotten shorter. On non-work mornings, Walhydra lies in bed with JimJim for hours. Waking, deciding not to do tai chi, fading into sleep, waking....
About a decade ago, Walhydra realized that she no longer delights in fall and winter the way she used to. It took a few rounds of so-called "seasonal affective disorder" before she recognized that the shortening days definitely get her down.
At this time of year when everybody is "supposed to" be getting excited about the holidays, getting busier at work and at home, planning for family and parties and gifts and cards and....
Oy, veh!
At this time of year, Walhydra feels less than ever like being sociable and pretending to be nice to people (not a good thing for a public librarian). What she wants to do is hide out, eat, read and go to bed early.
A few years back she finally came up with a slogan for this, based on the same sort of anthropological and evolutionary biological studies Cat refers to:
"Between Samhain and Imbolc, our mammalian brainstems are trying to tell us to put on a layer of fat and hybernate until spring."
*sigh*
Goddess nods her head. "You see? I told you. Even though you know all this stuff, you haven't been paying attention to it. Again."
"Grrr...."
"Oh, don't grrr at me. You know I'm not into guilt-tripping. Just a friendly conk on the head."
Walhydra smiles reluctantly.
"Now, be a good girl and say 'Thank you' to Cat."
Thank you, Dearest Cat. Thank you for speaking in this great, unending, Meeting for Worship in cyberspace.
Love to you.
And to all the gentle readers.
And so it is.
Blessèd Be.
Finally she has conked Walhydra on the head—in the friendliest way possible, of course.
"Um, Dear. You need to read this blog post."
The post to which Goddess refers is "The Dark," by Cat Chapin-Bishop, on the the blog she shares with her husband Peter Bishop, Quaker Pagan Reflections.
Cat writes:
It's dark, my friends. Yule is almost here, and the wheel is still turning....Cat then describes the experiment she and Peter did some years ago:
Without the moon, the Dark is all there is.
Now, that's not a bad thing. Frightening to us sometimes, because we know Dark (we moderns) no better than we know Moon....
But, you know, you can walk a trail in the woods in the dark—in the full dark, the real dark, the dark without the moon—if your feet are wise, and if you know your way.
And you can deal with the dark, the growing dark, the Midwinter Dark, as our ancestors did, once upon a time.
How did our ancestors live, back in the days before electricity banished the darkness?...
Peter had read somewhere...a study of some group of humans...who lived communally, in a world without artificial light beyond firelight and the moon. And those who studied them noted how they dealt with the dark time of the year.
They slept. A lot.
Moderns are mainly sleep deprived. We nap, or sleep in for long hours when we vacation, but mainly, we do without. Unimaginable, then that entire groups of people would curl up and go to sleep when the sun's light fails. That, by five or six on a winter's night, whole families are at rest...and will stay so until six thirty or seven the next morning.
Except they don't. Sleep is different, it turns out, when it is not artificially staved off by lamplight, but allowed to run the full length of a winter's night. At times, it was more like a light doze, or a meditative wakefulness. And then, with little to divide it from waking, sleep would return again. People roamed in and out of dreams and waking several times each night. There was a different quality to it, not just a different quantity....
[To] the extent that we could, we decided to set aside the time between Yule and Imbolc--February 2nd--for the Dark. We would use no electric light, no computers, no television, no telephone except for emergencies, and no radio for that time. Oh, at work we would use such things, as we had need.... But to the extent we could, we did without them...."Oh. Um...yeah...." Walhydra mumbles.
Whether it was the dimmer lighting, the quiet of a life without email and television, or simply ceasing the struggle against the Dark, we found ourselves aware of our sleepiness. We might not have gone to bed at seven, but we often were asleep by eight or nine.
It was good. The nights were soft, and the Dark was gentle.
And when, by Imbolc, the days were lengthening and the nights were growing shorter once again, we felt the returning light, in a way that's simply untranslatable unless you have also lived a season with the Dark. Each tiny sign of the return of spring--not the opening of the buds, but the swelling of them; not the disappearance of the snow, but the thinning of it, and the way it reflected the fire of the sunset later every evening--became pronounced.
This is the power of the Dark.
She realizes how much Cat's words speak to her condition.
"Yeah," Goddess murmurs, a little snidely. "I figured you'd notice that. You've not been paying much attention to body and spirit for a long time now."
"I haven't?"
"Um. You've stopped daily tai chi practice. You've stopped sitting meditation. You've stopped your morning prayers and devotional reading. You've stopped riding your bike...."
"Oh."
"You know, Dearest, that I'm all in favor of modern meds, within reason, but I'm beginning to wondering whether your SSRI experiment last November has gradually dulled your natural awareness?"
"Oh."
Now that she considers it, Walhydra realizes that she has gradually fallen out of the habit of all those deep self-care practices she was doing at the height of her grief-induced despair and anxiety last winter.
She didn't quit them as soon as she started to feel real again in February, when the meds had finally gotten her brain back to a healthy level of serotonin.
And it's not that she's stopped believing in the Divinely Real upon which those practices kept her focused.
But she sees in retrospect how, gradually, beneath conscious awareness, she has increasingly cut corners on herself..."because I'm too busy...because I've got to get to work...because I'm too tired...," etc., etc., etc.
On the other hand, since Fall Equinox, Walhydra has noticed Hubby Jim getting more and more cuddly at night and in the morning—and chosen to stay with him, rather than get up "on time."It's so sweet, so full of good vibes, to stay huddled together under the covers. Playing spoons. Feeling the weight of the two cats, Sonic and Shadow, as they cuddle up...or bounce around wanting breakfast.
This exchange of cozy snoozefulness has increased as the days have gotten shorter. On non-work mornings, Walhydra lies in bed with JimJim for hours. Waking, deciding not to do tai chi, fading into sleep, waking....
About a decade ago, Walhydra realized that she no longer delights in fall and winter the way she used to. It took a few rounds of so-called "seasonal affective disorder" before she recognized that the shortening days definitely get her down.
At this time of year when everybody is "supposed to" be getting excited about the holidays, getting busier at work and at home, planning for family and parties and gifts and cards and....
Oy, veh!
At this time of year, Walhydra feels less than ever like being sociable and pretending to be nice to people (not a good thing for a public librarian). What she wants to do is hide out, eat, read and go to bed early.
A few years back she finally came up with a slogan for this, based on the same sort of anthropological and evolutionary biological studies Cat refers to:
"Between Samhain and Imbolc, our mammalian brainstems are trying to tell us to put on a layer of fat and hybernate until spring."
*sigh*
Goddess nods her head. "You see? I told you. Even though you know all this stuff, you haven't been paying attention to it. Again."
"Grrr...."
"Oh, don't grrr at me. You know I'm not into guilt-tripping. Just a friendly conk on the head."
Walhydra smiles reluctantly.
"Now, be a good girl and say 'Thank you' to Cat."
Thank you, Dearest Cat. Thank you for speaking in this great, unending, Meeting for Worship in cyberspace.
Love to you.
And to all the gentle readers.
And so it is.
Blessèd Be.
Saturday, December 06, 2008
Walhydra's Hermes Altar...sort of....
Walhydra's buddy Grumpy Granny recently left a comment on the Back Porch about the image in the blog header:
Walhydra figures it might be fun to give her readers a bit of a tour. She feels rather silly about this, but then she knows she likes to show off. Why else publish a blog to begin with?
Now, Walhydra doesn't usually think of this as an altar. It's just the worktable that holds her PC, keyboard and monitor.
Even so, she's strewn it with precisely arranged geegaws, just as she does any surface she can get at.
When she lived with Nikki (Husband #3) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, they had this ongoing teasing match about surfaces: dressers, credenzas, coffee tables and so on.
To Nikki, surfaces are just something to put things on. To Walhydra, of course, surfaces are something to display things on.
Every item aligned with every other in a sort of arcane aesthetic geometry which Walhydra herself doesn't actually understand. She never sees or assigns any "meaning" to the arrangements. Nonetheless, she can just tell when they aren't right, when this book is just a smidge too many degrees rotated in relation to that knickknack...and so on.
Hey. Virgo. Whadaya expect?
Once, Nikki caught Walhydra moving a stone on their coffee table slightly to the left.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"I'm making it look more random," she said, grinning at her silly self as she did so.
From then on, whenever they had a spat, at some point one or the other of them would threaten: "I'm going to rearrange the stones on your dresser and break the spell!"
Of course, Hubby Jim (#4 and holding) has caught onto this trait of Walhydra's...and he doesn't hesitate to tease her about it. She, in turn, teases him about the eight-year-deep midden heaps of letters, bills, printouts, books, floppy disks, etc., all around his work area.
Anyway, back to the altar. This being a workspace for communication—Virgo communication, at that—it presumably ought to belong to Hermes/Mercury.
Walhydra relishes the hodgepodge realm of rulerships ascribed to this deity: messenger of the gods, patron of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of thieves and road travelers, of orators and wit, of literature and poets, of athletics, of weights and measures, of invention, of general commerce, and of the cunning of thieves and liars.
She takes an especially perverse satisfaction in the trickster aspects, which she associates with other favorite dieties and totems.
Crow, Ratatosk, Loki....
Um...Severus Snape....
She's much less satisfied with that business about Mercury Retrograde, though she sometimes manages to deal with it in her own grumpy, anti-social way.
In any event, looking at this image of her workspace, the gentle reader might notice that Walhydra is what a snide friend of hers once called a "crystal queen."
There was a time when Walhydra gave serious study to the alleged metaphysical powers of crystals. Now she tends to just have them about or carry them as the whim moves her.
With extremely few exceptions, she prefers uncut, unpolished crystals. Those prettified stones in the New Agey stores, the ones with all their facets polished smooth, give her the willies! They feel dead—or, much worse, alive but trapped in deaf, dumb and blind bodies!
"How would you like to have all your unique character, your wrinkles and warts and birthmarks, sanded off?" she asks. "It's criminal!"
But crystals aren't really the point. Arcane alignments aren't the point.
The point—all joking aside—is that Walhydra genuinely delights in being surrounded by beautiful, vibrant beings, and this is what she'd done with her Hermes Altar.
Above the desk on the west wall is what's left of a Vietnam 1972 red dragon poster (the borders were trimmed to remove spaghetti sauce splotches from when this used to hang over her stove).
The blotch in the lower left of the frame is a yellowed fourleaf clover, brought to her years ago by one of her counseling clients, when this dragon hung in her office in a medium/maximum security men's prison in South Carolina.
To the right on the north wall is a small Green Tara tanka.
Neither image does justice to the clarity, detail or power of the originals, yet the reader can at least get a sense of color.
Hubby Jim always teases Walhydra that her favorite color is bland. But that's just because, on a day-to-day basis, Walhydra wears "uniforms." Khaki and mildly colored business shirts to work; black on black, sometimes with an autumn-colored shirt, on her own time. It keeps things simple.
In any event, here's the sweet little character who keeps Walhydra company as she types. He sits to her left on a wooden stool. A little rag doll she found at the Christmas Made in the South trade show, the second year she and Jim were in Florida.
The little guy was made of found cloth fragments by an Appalachian craftswoman. Although he may look forlorn, he actually has a funny smile made with Xs of black thread.
Walhydra thinks of him as that happy inner child, pre-polio, who loved magical adventures and the the color yellow.
His neighbors are a pottery frog candleholder, a moss agate bowl, a jade bear totem and a tangerine quartz point.
Then there's a cluster of stuff on the left back corner of the worktable.
No, that's not one of the monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey, although the little mannikin in front of it might feel like he's surrounded by monoliths. It's just a speaker for the PC.
This little guy hasn't revealed a persona, as the rag doll has, but Walhydra found him at her favorite art supply store...so that says something. He raises his right hand over a big quartz crystal. To his right are both selenite and smokey quartz. That's an orange fire agate in front of the selenite.
The beautiful piece to his left is polished labradorite (one of those rare exceptions to Walhydra's taboo on polishing stones). Other odds and ends: a Tibetan quartz cluster (in the shadows), a tiny quartz wand, a coiled snake netsuke (polymer, not ivory), black tourmaline, a black tektite, a quartz ball and an apophyllite pyramid.
And, of course, the eyes of the Compassionate Buddha—in case Walhydra ever bothers to notice that she's being looked upon lovingly by the cosmos she grouches about so much.
Best for last....
Yes. That's Hubby Jim.
In the late 1980s, Walhydra took a darkroom course—remember way back in another century, when photographs were recorded on film and had to be developed?
She could never get JimJim to pose for her without his making a silly face, but he finally let her take this one while drinking cappucino in front of their favorite Columbia, SC, coffeehouse.
It's actually Walhydra's favorite picture of her Sweet Man, because it captures his Leonine Urban-ity (that's a private joke).
The little guy in the corner is JimJim in around 3rd grade. (The pink tint is not because he already knew he was gay then, but because the photo faded.)
The odds and ends: rough faceted rubies and garnets, witchy finger rings, and a long quartz crystal. (There's some purple flourite, amethyst and lepidolite off camera to the right.)
Oh, and, yes, she is left-handed. Of course!
So there you have it: way more than you ever wanted to know about Walhydra's obsessively organized work space.
And maybe a hint that, even though she's learned (through many painful mistakes) that it's best to laugh at herself in public, she also knows that any stone can vibrate with life.
And so it is.
Blessèd Be.
Walhydra figures it might be fun to give her readers a bit of a tour. She feels rather silly about this, but then she knows she likes to show off. Why else publish a blog to begin with?
Now, Walhydra doesn't usually think of this as an altar. It's just the worktable that holds her PC, keyboard and monitor.
Even so, she's strewn it with precisely arranged geegaws, just as she does any surface she can get at.
When she lived with Nikki (Husband #3) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, they had this ongoing teasing match about surfaces: dressers, credenzas, coffee tables and so on.
To Nikki, surfaces are just something to put things on. To Walhydra, of course, surfaces are something to display things on.
Every item aligned with every other in a sort of arcane aesthetic geometry which Walhydra herself doesn't actually understand. She never sees or assigns any "meaning" to the arrangements. Nonetheless, she can just tell when they aren't right, when this book is just a smidge too many degrees rotated in relation to that knickknack...and so on.
Hey. Virgo. Whadaya expect?
Once, Nikki caught Walhydra moving a stone on their coffee table slightly to the left.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"I'm making it look more random," she said, grinning at her silly self as she did so.
From then on, whenever they had a spat, at some point one or the other of them would threaten: "I'm going to rearrange the stones on your dresser and break the spell!"
Of course, Hubby Jim (#4 and holding) has caught onto this trait of Walhydra's...and he doesn't hesitate to tease her about it. She, in turn, teases him about the eight-year-deep midden heaps of letters, bills, printouts, books, floppy disks, etc., all around his work area.
Anyway, back to the altar. This being a workspace for communication—Virgo communication, at that—it presumably ought to belong to Hermes/Mercury.
Walhydra relishes the hodgepodge realm of rulerships ascribed to this deity: messenger of the gods, patron of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of thieves and road travelers, of orators and wit, of literature and poets, of athletics, of weights and measures, of invention, of general commerce, and of the cunning of thieves and liars.
She takes an especially perverse satisfaction in the trickster aspects, which she associates with other favorite dieties and totems.
Crow, Ratatosk, Loki....
Um...Severus Snape....
She's much less satisfied with that business about Mercury Retrograde, though she sometimes manages to deal with it in her own grumpy, anti-social way.
In any event, looking at this image of her workspace, the gentle reader might notice that Walhydra is what a snide friend of hers once called a "crystal queen."
There was a time when Walhydra gave serious study to the alleged metaphysical powers of crystals. Now she tends to just have them about or carry them as the whim moves her.
With extremely few exceptions, she prefers uncut, unpolished crystals. Those prettified stones in the New Agey stores, the ones with all their facets polished smooth, give her the willies! They feel dead—or, much worse, alive but trapped in deaf, dumb and blind bodies!
"How would you like to have all your unique character, your wrinkles and warts and birthmarks, sanded off?" she asks. "It's criminal!"
But crystals aren't really the point. Arcane alignments aren't the point.
The point—all joking aside—is that Walhydra genuinely delights in being surrounded by beautiful, vibrant beings, and this is what she'd done with her Hermes Altar.
Above the desk on the west wall is what's left of a Vietnam 1972 red dragon poster (the borders were trimmed to remove spaghetti sauce splotches from when this used to hang over her stove).The blotch in the lower left of the frame is a yellowed fourleaf clover, brought to her years ago by one of her counseling clients, when this dragon hung in her office in a medium/maximum security men's prison in South Carolina.
To the right on the north wall is a small Green Tara tanka.Neither image does justice to the clarity, detail or power of the originals, yet the reader can at least get a sense of color.
Hubby Jim always teases Walhydra that her favorite color is bland. But that's just because, on a day-to-day basis, Walhydra wears "uniforms." Khaki and mildly colored business shirts to work; black on black, sometimes with an autumn-colored shirt, on her own time. It keeps things simple.
In any event, here's the sweet little character who keeps Walhydra company as she types. He sits to her left on a wooden stool. A little rag doll she found at the Christmas Made in the South trade show, the second year she and Jim were in Florida.
The little guy was made of found cloth fragments by an Appalachian craftswoman. Although he may look forlorn, he actually has a funny smile made with Xs of black thread.Walhydra thinks of him as that happy inner child, pre-polio, who loved magical adventures and the the color yellow.
His neighbors are a pottery frog candleholder, a moss agate bowl, a jade bear totem and a tangerine quartz point.
Then there's a cluster of stuff on the left back corner of the worktable.
No, that's not one of the monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey, although the little mannikin in front of it might feel like he's surrounded by monoliths. It's just a speaker for the PC.
This little guy hasn't revealed a persona, as the rag doll has, but Walhydra found him at her favorite art supply store...so that says something. He raises his right hand over a big quartz crystal. To his right are both selenite and smokey quartz. That's an orange fire agate in front of the selenite.
The beautiful piece to his left is polished labradorite (one of those rare exceptions to Walhydra's taboo on polishing stones). Other odds and ends: a Tibetan quartz cluster (in the shadows), a tiny quartz wand, a coiled snake netsuke (polymer, not ivory), black tourmaline, a black tektite, a quartz ball and an apophyllite pyramid.
And, of course, the eyes of the Compassionate Buddha—in case Walhydra ever bothers to notice that she's being looked upon lovingly by the cosmos she grouches about so much.
Best for last....
Yes. That's Hubby Jim.In the late 1980s, Walhydra took a darkroom course—remember way back in another century, when photographs were recorded on film and had to be developed?
She could never get JimJim to pose for her without his making a silly face, but he finally let her take this one while drinking cappucino in front of their favorite Columbia, SC, coffeehouse.
It's actually Walhydra's favorite picture of her Sweet Man, because it captures his Leonine Urban-ity (that's a private joke).
The little guy in the corner is JimJim in around 3rd grade. (The pink tint is not because he already knew he was gay then, but because the photo faded.)
The odds and ends: rough faceted rubies and garnets, witchy finger rings, and a long quartz crystal. (There's some purple flourite, amethyst and lepidolite off camera to the right.)
Oh, and, yes, she is left-handed. Of course!
So there you have it: way more than you ever wanted to know about Walhydra's obsessively organized work space.
And maybe a hint that, even though she's learned (through many painful mistakes) that it's best to laugh at herself in public, she also knows that any stone can vibrate with life.
And so it is.
Blessèd Be.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
3quarksdaily
One of the more interesting blogs to which Wahydra subscribes through the Bloglines.com RSS newsreader is 3quarksdaily: An Eclectic Digest of Science, Art and Literature, whose primary editor is Abba Raza.
Raza and his colleagues provide what they call a "one-stop intellectual surfing experience." They do this by culling good stuff "on a daily basis, in the areas of science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else we deem inherently fascinating."
The 3quarksdaily posts are usually a few paragraphs and an image from a larger piece, to which the blog then links.
Lots of interesting, sometimes sacredly weird stuff!
Walhydra is touting the blog today because of two items:
Pareidolia Revisited
In "The Virgin of Hollywood, Florida," Walhydra spoke about the phenomenon of pareidolia—especially religious pareidolia—in which "a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) [is] perceived as significant" to the human observer.
Well, today's 3quarksdaily points us to an image posted by Dean Terry of Our Strange World:
Dean Terry writes:
"Acorn Watchers Wonder What Happened to Crop"
That first item was interesting, but the second is distressing and recalls Walhydra's 2007 post, "The Birds and the Bees."
Brigid Schulte of the Washington Post reports:
"But," Walhydra wonders, "what about the poor squirrels?!"
Maybe the soup kitchens will add squirrel feeders.
And so it is.
Blesséd Be.
Raza and his colleagues provide what they call a "one-stop intellectual surfing experience." They do this by culling good stuff "on a daily basis, in the areas of science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else we deem inherently fascinating."
The 3quarksdaily posts are usually a few paragraphs and an image from a larger piece, to which the blog then links.
Lots of interesting, sometimes sacredly weird stuff!
Walhydra is touting the blog today because of two items:
Pareidolia Revisited
In "The Virgin of Hollywood, Florida," Walhydra spoke about the phenomenon of pareidolia—especially religious pareidolia—in which "a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) [is] perceived as significant" to the human observer.
Well, today's 3quarksdaily points us to an image posted by Dean Terry of Our Strange World:
Dean Terry writes: At first this photo seems to be a couple with a large head floating between them. But look again - things aren’t always what they seem.Actually, to Walhydra it looks more like a side view of Rasputin, but you get the point...or you will eventually.
Most people who look at this old photograph will probably see a large bearded head between the two figures. It looks like an image of Jesus.
You’ll probably think it’s just a crude hoax from bygone days. But look again, carefully. This is not a hoax at all. What the photo actually shows is a child sitting on the man’s knee.
Block out the head’s “hair.” That’s just a collection of foliage in the background. The “eye” is the face the child, shadowed by a large white bonnet. The “nose” is the sleeve of the child’s shirt. And the “mustache” is the child’s arm, bent at the elbow.
Be patient. It may take you awhile to see this.
"Acorn Watchers Wonder What Happened to Crop"
That first item was interesting, but the second is distressing and recalls Walhydra's 2007 post, "The Birds and the Bees."
Brigid Schulte of the Washington Post reports:
The idea seemed too crazy to Rod Simmons, a measured, careful field botanist. Naturalists in Arlington County couldn't find any acorns. None. No hickory nuts, either. Then he went out to look for himself. He came up with nothing. Nothing crunched underfoot. Nothing hit him on the head.The article assures us that the oaks of Washington, DC, are not themselves in danger. Rain last spring washed much of the pollen away, rather than letting it fertilize oak blossoms...but the oaks can try again next spring.
Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins. Squirrels boldly scampering into the road. And a lot more calls about squirrel roadkill.
But Simmons really got spooked when he was teaching a class on identifying oak and hickory trees late last month. For 2 1/2 miles, Simmons and other naturalists hiked through Northern Virginia oak and hickory forests. They sifted through leaves on the ground, dug in the dirt and peered into the tree canopies. Nothing.
"But," Walhydra wonders, "what about the poor squirrels?!"
Maybe the soup kitchens will add squirrel feeders.
And so it is.
Blesséd Be.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Leftovers....
Walhydra and a long-distance colleague were teasing each other by email over the glories...and consequences...of Thanksgiving feasts.
At some point, Walhydra decided she should enter into the overdone realm of leftover jokes, but she wanted something different, something to illustrate the concept in a new way.
To her delight, she discovered first a website and then an image.
The site, unfortunately inactive since 2007, is The Single Chef.
The post is one called "Leftovers leftover."
And here is the image:
Typical....
At some point, Walhydra decided she should enter into the overdone realm of leftover jokes, but she wanted something different, something to illustrate the concept in a new way.
To her delight, she discovered first a website and then an image.
The site, unfortunately inactive since 2007, is The Single Chef.
The post is one called "Leftovers leftover."
And here is the image:
Typical....
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