You’re still free, boy. Suck it up. Post. – Amorella.
Lunch at LongHorn, alas Jennifer has the day off, but the food was excellent. You had steak and Carol had chicken – you split a tossed salad with honey mustard dressing. No dessert. Carol is at Kroger’s on Tylersville picking up last minute items for the trip. Mary Lou is arriving this evening. Earlier it took a while to discover how to find these resort cabins because the address was not on Tom-Tom. You did find a church address (which you plugged into the GPS) on the first road off the main street through Pigeon Forge. The second road you should run into and the third road you’ll have to keep a lookout for.
It took some time. First, I went to MapQuest but that was not much help. Second, Google Earth worked best though that took some time. Fun research though. Plus, I could see the Christmas Store we all are supposed to meet at in Pigeon Forge. I think it is the biggest store in the whole town, it looks that way on Google Earth in any case. – It is hot again today I did find a little shade for the front car window though, shade helps.
It doesn’t help the Dead.
How is that anyway? People like to say “it is hotter than hell” or “it is colder than hell”. What is the (meta)physics in the books. I get the idea you mentioned earlier, that heartsanminds can be imprisoned in the soul for their own good (although I thought the soul is smaller than the heartanmind. Maybe it is just my own that is that way as the soul is a one-room school house (poetic imagery) and the heart a cathedral in imagery. I assume Dante is responsible for the “colder than hell” as Satan is frozen waist deep in the pit of the Ninth Circle. But what about hot? Is that a kind of volcanic image – lava and fire coming from Earth’s center, from under the ground, hell?
In here, the heart and mind are ‘conditionals’ not nouns. As Milton says “You can make a Heaven of Hell or a Hell of Heaven” We are fiction here, boy so we might as well make the best of it. - Amorella.
So, what you think is where you are?
Now, that is a statement with humor and wit too. – Amorella.
I don’t see the humor or the wit, It is a straight forward statement.
Think about it and you’ll see why the soul of the Dead may enrapture the heartanmind. It’s for the best, my boy. Rules is rules. The Piper both gives and takes away. No exceptions.
I did not realize this about the Piper. How does he effect/affect the Rebellion?
SheanHe may provide the circumstance. You have a good example of this in one of Grandma’s Stories. Pop it in here and that will do for today, maybe tomorrow too, depending on how busy the family is. Give you something to think about as I already used this several times actually, but one is quite easy to see. The “zero” story.
This “Grandma’s Story” is from Chapter Nine of book one, Braided Dreams. It was fun to write because the world would have been different if she and others (at the time and circumstance) had taken the time to understand it’s meaning.
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Grandma’s Story – Nine [Braided Dreams]
I listen in to everything people are thinking. I got me a story that will fit this situation just fine. People discover mysteries in the world, and think some of them are supernatural. Just like the pea-sized ghost a few stories back. It is a natural thing to be interested in the ocean when you are born, raised, and die on an island to begin with. The ocean becomes second nature, so to speak, and second nature is what this story targets.
First nature is what you see in this story. Second nature is what you don’t see. People think of one’s second nature as habit, but it is more of a habitat instead. The habitat is in the mind of a human being. In this case, it is an aboriginal walking alone along the ocean. Her name was Abbatoot. Three thousand years ago she was walking that beach the same time King Simon was being drawn to death for revenge.
Now, you would think there would not be a connection, but nature is not as it seems, just as people aren’t as they seem either. Grandma Earth has a few tricks up her sleeve, you see, she always holds a few extra aces if she needs them. Some people silently think they can deal straight on with me even though they say out loud, “You won’t catch me messing with Mother Nature.” Grandma knows the inside truth.
“You won’t catch me messing with Mother Nature,” is what young Abbatoot muttered because a great storm just passed through. She felt lucky to just have lived through it. An old soothsayer had told the tribe the storm was coming because he felt it in his elbows and knees and when he felt it in four joints at the same time he had come to understand it would be one hell of a storm, and that is he told them. About half the tribe stayed. The other half walked to higher ground where they felt more protected.
Those who stayed knew better but there is a courageous thrill in meeting Mother head on. People who are conditioned to weather large storms know what I’m talking about. It is very exciting in the moments of confrontation. Suddenly you feel you may not survive whatever it is Mother Nature is throwing your way. You begin to realize the weather is not about you. This is the point when the excitement disappears and people begin praying to the goddesses and gods of their choice to let them survive, even if they survive whimpering.
Abbatoot was whimpering and humbly thankful she survived. She believed the moon goddess had saved her because when she awoke the skies were clear and the half moon sat in the western sky opposite the morning sun . She had heard a story as a child that moon’s brother, the sun, followed her across the sky because even though he was brighter than she was, she was a shape changer and he wasn’t. Shape changers are not fully trustworthy because you don’t really know who they are. Just because the moon goddess appeared only half full rather than full didn’t mean the goddess wasn’t completely full all the time.
While walking along the beach she came to think that the truth in the world was like that too, that half a truth was sometimes more honest than the full truth appeared. Half a truth leaves room for imagination and wonder, the full truth is a full fact of nature though some of the full fact remains hidden. Brother sun and sister moon still follow one another across the sky east to west. Even the star lights follow this direction.
The north and south sky points hit her questioning mind that morning on her walk. What comes up on the north and goes down in the south? She had no idea. Whatever it was, it wasn’t visible, it was like half the moon. Visible or not, she began to wonder if two objects also moved across the father sky from the north to the south or even from the south to the north. She had no idea. The four points suddenly came together. I am four points plus one. Then she observed her right hand closely. I have five points at the end of each of the four points. She made and gave a separate sound for each of the twenty points and one more for the top point. Twenty-one sounds for twenty-one points.
A vision flashed. What would I be without any points at all? She imagined a body without the limb extensions. What would be the point of no limbs and a head? All thought and no action. What could you do but dream your life away? Thought dreams. You can see thoughts while awake, but you cannot see dreams unless you are asleep.
The sun and moon move from east to west, so what moves from north to south? Thoughts move from the north and dreams move from the south. Who chases whom across the sky of the mind? Thoughts come in like waves. Dreams are solid, like the land. The thoughts are as water and nourish the dreams. The beach, which stretches east to west following the sun and moon is real, but dreams are a different real. A thought or the dream, which is first? Thoughts are cold as the moon is cold, the sun is hot as is the sex organ to the south of the head.
Cold moon thoughts and hot sexed sun dreaming. What a mix. She glanced over her naked body. I have twenty digits plus two arms and two legs equals twenty-four digits, plus a head and you have twenty-five digits. Plus, I have a nose and two ears and thus I have twenty-eight extensions, men have twenty-nine. A moon from quarter to half to quarter to full is four in twenty-eight to twenty-nine days. Thus, the moon and human extensions have a commonality. Plus, people have natural rhythm. ‘Whenever the sun and moon do meet, thoughts and dreams center at the feet. Toe touching is where we beings most often touch our Mother.’
I keep an eye on incidentals and fish along beach’s way and think of Mother and how she would walk through the Dead. As I walk nervous and faster, I find my thumbs touching the inner part of my middle fingers which bend slightly as my forefingers extend slightly. Abbatoot observed a large tower cloud separate at its head out over the ocean and another to the west. Two wispy clouds, spread like long thin wings with a 5 or S shape in the middle. Abbatoot stopped and with a shell made a replica in the sand of the S sign of the cloud. She concluded the cloud sign means something.
Abbatoot glances back up as the sign drifted. The cloud head drifted west. Suddenly and without provocation, she turned around and headed back to her tribe. It is right not to go on, thought Abbatoot. It is better not to kill the shaman who ordered us to leave our place. He had a right to order us. Likewise, we who decided to stay and weather the storm had the right not to go. We each decide our own way.
Following the beach back to her people Abbatoot thought about how grateful she was to still have her limbs attached to her body. She did not know if the tower cloud felt any pain when his head was severed by the west winds meeting the east winds but she hoped it was quick and painless. The 5 or S sign with wings she never deciphered, but she was sure the moon had something to do with it. She got back to her tribe and said, “I know something I did not know. The moon makes white cloud signs in the sky.”
Later, even the shaman was amazed that she had discovered this about the moon, and he spend days making the S mark she had copied from the wispy cloud wings in the sky. Even more astounding was the fact that she mentioned a human body without limbs. In those days, only the shamans knew that the eternal ancestors, the Ungambikula, rose up in Dreamtime, before humans were completely created. They found the humans doubled over in clumps of shapeless sacks near the water holes and with stone knives the Ungambikula carved limbs and faces and hands and feet and finished the humans. After this was completed the Ungambikula went back into the earth, into the eternal great sleep, but the shamans knew this. Only the shamans knew another great secret: the ancient Dreamtime still exists between the beat of each person’s heart.
How did Abbatoot know the fact that humans at one time had no limbs? How did she make up the sounds for the counting of numbers? No one knew. The old shaman was past the age of worrying and trying to comprehend such things. If she knew something he did not know, he would take the time to learn it.
Thus Abbatoot helped him memorize the separate sounds she gave to the numbers of digits human beings had, right up through twenty-nine. What he liked best though was her description of dreams. Dreams are solid, she told him. Dreamland is invisible on the outside but it is a reality nevertheless. The shaman pointed to the north and secretly told another shaman, “We know Dreamtime, now we two know the Ungambikula’s sleeping place, it is presently under the lands in the north.”
Grandma laughed, “Those two shamans kept at it until the end of their days, Neither could understand how Abbatoot, who did not get along with most everybody, could have learned a secret about Dreamtime and also gather something from the moon goddess that they did not already know. Beside that, she named things that didn’t exist, the numbers from one up through twenty-nine. Some tried to imagine one more extension on the human body, but they could not come up with a place or a name and neither could Abbatoot. One day Abbatoot came running to the shaman and said, “I thought of one more! The belly button!”
The shaman laughed and said, “Don’t tell anyone.” He did not know what else to say, but he continued, “The belly button is not an extension at all, Abbatoot, it is something less than one.”
Grandma bent over and slapped her thighs then as she stood she readjusted her large bosoms unconsciously, she broke into more laughter. “I guess you had to be there to get the joke,” she said, “I gave that shaman and Abbatoot an immediate slap of a sudden hot breath of north wind out of nowhere, but neither of them thought on the connection.” Grandma gleefully chanted,
The button is rounder than a digit of one,
And sits in the belly as a visual lesson.
What once was for feeding and appearing quite square
Is left as nothing but a fleshy dip in the air.
Today Abbatoot would be quite a hero
For discovering, then inventing, the wonderful zero
Alas, it was not to be in those times,
But, for a windy Grandma it makes a fair rhyme --
And, shortly from my old and earthy gums,
Merlyn’s mind of a future this Moon-way comes.
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