Mid-morning on a sunny Spring day. You’ve
had breakfast, cereal with peanut butter on a banana, taking on a normal
Carol-like breakfast, and you’ve read the Sunday paper that was more worth
reading than usual. As you looked over the ‘best book’ sellers in the USA
division of the paper you showed a slight depression because your sort of books
do not have a chance of mainstream. – Amorella
0922 hours. I don’t know that it was a slight depression. Mostly it is recognition that I am not a writer who wants or needs a large audience. I was quite uncomfortable when the blog started to get higher notice because of a couple of photos depicting the heart, soul and mind. The photos are metaphors in mind. If anything, the ‘depression’ is caused by the idea that the ebooks would sell in greater numbers. That’s more like it. If I sold more than a hundred books, I would be in a deep dread. Selling five to six books a year is more my speed of continued comfort.
Post. - Amorella
You
are home but are heading out again shortly. Carol is putting her new plants in
place. Post. - Amorella
Shortly
after noon local time. You are at Pine Hill Lakes Park and Carol is walking.
You did forty minutes of exercises and twenty yesterday. The doctor okayed what
you have been doing but you were concerned for the recent ‘tennis elbow’
symptoms. He dismissed those but did say your palms could be off and on sore
for the next year and a half because it takes a long time for nerves to heal.
You were pleasantly surprised to hear that the numbness in three of your right
fingers and thumb will eventually get better. You thought to yourself that you
could be dead by that time but politely chose not to counter him with it. When
you told Carol she laughed and laughed because you don’t always have a social
filter on (as your friend Alta says). – Amorella
1245 hours. It is a brisk Spring day and feels like we are up in east
Cleveland with the lake affected winds. I
miss that part of town. We have some errands this afternoon and lunch
eventually. I am going to vote for Cracker Barrel because it is Sunday fried
chicken day. It is a great treat once in a while. I might as well work on
cleaning Brothers 12.
Part
of the rewrite was jarring to you because of the added piece at the conclusion.
Even final drafts are open to some changes for the better, boy. I’ll let you
know when it is good to go as it is. No attempts at prideful nitpicking. It
takes arrogance to let things go too. Keep that in mind. – Amorella
1253 hours. I never thought of arrogance used to stop a piece of writing
before. That’s interesting. People
can get caught up in all kinds of tangles and not know why; strange that I
think of Paradise Lost. Milton hit on those circular arguments and
rationalizations Satan uses. I most always think of arrogance as negative.
** **
arrogant -
adjective
having
or revealing an exaggerated sense of one's own importance or abilities: he's
arrogant and opinionated | a typically arrogant assumption.
DERIVATIVES
arrogantly
adverb
ORIGIN
late Middle English: via Old French from Latin
arrogant- ‘claiming for oneself,’ from the verb arrogare
From
the Oxford-American software
** **
Claiming for yourself that it is time to
stop and send in ‘as is’ for publication. You’re the editor and legal author. -
Amorella
Mid-afternoon. You are now at Natorp’s
Outlet Nursery and Carol is looking for plants/flowers for the front yard. You
had Sunday dinner at Cracker Barrel and it was delicious for you both – Carol
had the trout and sweet potato. The rolls were like a dessert, so right out of
the oven fluffy and tasty. – Amorella
1434 hours. I didn’t think of dinners as soul satisfying.
Boy for someone who likes to eat you can be
too casual about food. Some of the most satisfying moments in life are good
food accompanied by a close friend or friends. – Amorella
1437 hours. Boy, did that hit some memories. I wish I could consciously
remember more of those times. Oh my. The food/drink is most always less
important than the company of a close friend or two.
Where does the ‘sharing moment’ stop? –
Amorella
1442 hours. I don’t know.
You share a pizza at the Varsity Club at
Ohio State and you end up marrying the woman. You shared friendly lunches at
school with an endearing colleague in the English department and she becomes
the muse for these six Merlyn books. These are the first two examples that roll
up from your ‘Spiritual Center’ as you remember Joseph Campbell called it. -
Amorella
1454 hours. I am out of words Amorella. It is like some things are meant
to be and go on forever.
For being out of words you hit on something
important; it is as if to say one can sometimes ‘understand’ what types of
memories she or he takes with him after physical death. – Amorella
1458 hours. If indeed one moves on matters of the heart surely move on
also. Matters of the heart are one of the greatest qualities of life in my
opinion.
Relax, enjoy the sunny weather in the shade
of the car, boy. Later. – Amorella
You both had a light supper and watched programs
from earlier. You have been finishing up Chapter Twelve and are ready to add
it. Drop it in and post. – Amorella
2320 hours. I am not positive it is ready.
You can check it out in the morning. At
least it will be safe online. – Amorella
***
Richard mutters, ”I just wondered where you were, that’s all.”
Chapter 12
Consorting
The Supervisor has a little saying:
Ring-a-ring o'rosies
A pocket full of posies
"A-tishoo! A-tishoo!"
We all fall down!
We rise from clay
On Judgment Day
Be we dead or still alive.
I, Merlyn, have this little ditty above memorized to the point it sets stemmed in letters out of which each four-leafed chapter dreams grow to clover size. I knead the dreams into a word stream of music for the heart and soul and mind with hope that when read, these stories cast a light into those living with an imagination that casts no shadow.
The Dead 12
It is only a moment ago, thinks Merlyn, I began soaring eagle-like within these nebulae surroundings, mountainous gas bubbles, places undeterminable in or out of time and space. Behind me, my early refuge, Avalon, appears large cumulus in form. The pleasing reddish hues of such a cloud reminds me of the Malus domestica, the pleasant apple-like pigment for which our Celtic Realm of the Dead, Avalon, is named. As I further distance, my Celtic heaven appears a well-weathering giant Cumulonimbus, ever so majestically shaped as a broad-winged eagle in angular flight. Even in death it might as well be imagination.
Merlyn looses his heartanmind’s eye forward instead to the classic heartanmind’s Elysium. He more closely observes the prodigious distance to his target, a small cloud hanging like a prolonged thin fissure of sanguine mist engulfing a diamond-like flash of well-centered sparkle from a sun-yellow unknown. This picture-centered-on-his-soul rests above a large moon-white light at the far end of the dark cavern of non-dead spirits in a gravitational hold. This is the edge of Elysium, reckons Merlyn, and I am as Hercules on his travel to the Garden of Hesperides, I fly to stand in Classical Greek immortality. I rise up to glide in on the golden speck, the other apple in my ghostly eye.
Closer to his goal Merlyn wanders into a nebulous cloud of his own mythical spirit. Merlyn wonders, what does it mean to hold the weight of the world on one's shoulders like Hercules when I weigh nothing? This vast Place of a multitude of universes Dead weigh nothing. We are all here, innumerable consciousness in less than a breath of earth’s air. What then is the weight of the Earth and Sun and innumerable other Stars and their surrounding worldly planes within universe beyond vast universe? From Here to There is but a grammarless thought. Time exists in conscious reasoning, in this spiritual flight from one cultural’s Dead to another’s between and throughout unimaginable space within which the Tree of Universes roots to the Before the first universe’s creation. We are little spirits, sprite and faery-like, defusing or condensing as a gas might and unknowing what we can do about it.
What good will our primal Mother’s blessing is in this newfound enterprise? I feel no burden, even though elected to tell the tale. Living or Dead, ears have to hear; eyes have to read; the mind has to reason. Holding one's heartansoulanmind with bone and muscle is one thing, without such biophysics it is quite another. Living or Dead one is free to remember. I hold on flying without the slightest of burdens. I am but one, Merlyn, and what I encompass is my own definition of who I am and by such excluding who I am not. G—-D is Beyond What Is as well as beyond the Before.
This flight shows me there is seemingly no end to the Dead and no stopping to the Living. Growing into spiritual maturity is what being humane is Thus is Merlyn’s thinking upon as his spirit condenses into the Shroud of Elysium.
Consciousness re-fixes on the common ghost ways of others. I stare, determines Merlyn, at the natural common consciousness of two cart-wide stone roadway. I know this; it leads to Mother's House.
*
Unrealized by Merlyn, Mother awaits his arrival as all mothers since knowingly wait for their own children, every last ethereal child once born in Space-and-Time to be home and reunited with the spiritual root of all the mothers in all the universes hanging like single lights on the Tree rooted to a twin named Singularity. This is a sense of the one myth that unites all such once embedded humane spirits a myth Mother begins to chant the most ancient of ancient stories, first created by a humane spirit in the first of many following universes, “Thunder”.
“Long, long ago only two Qualities exist, Before and Space/Time. Both are cloaked in a Silence that would stir the Dead. Time does not move but Space does. This wears warmth where Before and Space/Time are close to one another. Warmth creates a catalyst for Growth in the Silence that would stir the Dead back to life. The warmth, the friction, causes a Lightning unheard. Before and Space/Time are both equally struck and an original welt appears in Before at the same time an equally original welt appears in Space/Time. The welts mold into separate and equal twin Spirits. The Spirit dancing in Before is Singularity and the Spirit growing in Space/Time is One. From One growth begins while dancing to Singularity’s tune . . . .”
The Brothers 12
Richard sits in the winter blue wingback living room chair, looking on the west wall at a thin black-framed historic portrait of the Stoner Inn on South State. I continually forget, he considers, how much this small village was a part of the Underground Railway. In the 1850’s, George Stoner used to smuggle slaves in the back of his stagecoach to the Inn where they stayed in the basement until they could move north to Canada. Bishop William Hanby was a conductor on the old Underground. Here I sit in comfort a few blocks away from that doing next to nothing beyond the habits of a comfortable retirement. We are slaves of a different sort today. No more Ohio River to cross, no more underground railway north. Where can we go to be free other than in our heads? Grandma used to say that we kids should study hard and learn what is important in the world because no one can ever take your education away from you. Grandma was born not more than ten miles north of here in Delaware County in 1888, the year of the Great Blizzard.
Richard retreated into the family genealogy — we Greystone's and the Bleacher sisters — both sides of our grandparents, were born and raised in Delaware County. Riverton used to end at the Franklin County Line, now the city stretches up several miles, almost to Freeman Road in Genoa Township in Delaware County. He glances at his watch and asks, "When is Robert getting home?" No response. I thought the girls were in the kitchen. They are always in the kitchen. He got up from the semi-comfortable wingback chair. His tone more unchecked, he shouted, "Cyndi! Connie! Where are you?"
"What do you mean, where are you two? We are not your children to boss around, buddy boy," snapped Cyndi as she opened the basement door.
"Why didn't you answer?"
"We were in the basement,” replies Connie following Cyndi from the stairs.
"What were you two doing down there?"
“What do you think, Richard," rebuts Connie.
"I thought you were both in the kitchen."
"Why, because we're women?" quips Cyndi.
“You guys are always in the kitchen. I’m in the kitchen too. What’s the problem?”
“When we are in the kitchen we are working not sitting on our duffs playing chess or writing," replies Connie.
"Or playing with our computer toys.” adds Cyndi. "You'd think you and your brother would do more around the house. We give you lists and you never do them. You said you were going to clean up the basement but we ended up doing it.”
"Rarely, you rarely do chores, Richie and neither does Robert,” says Connie.
"Rob isn't here to defend himself," comments Richard.
"Robbie's at that medical conference," pipes Connie.
“Why? He didn’t tell me he was going to a conference.”
Cyndi responds more kindly, "He's still interested in surgery, Richie."
Her tone stands sulkingly defiant so Richard follows, "You're saying I'm not interested in anything?"
"You like your history,” responds Connie. “You have always liked history and genealogy.“
"You don't need to side with the old goat," smirks Cyndi.
"I'm not, but he does like history and both boys like writing poetry." Her eyes thread a protective look into her sister.
Cyndi declares, "We are not always in the kitchen, Richard. We work hard to keep order in our homes."
Connie smiles, "And we do try to provide happiness."
A consolatory tone rises, "You just didn't answer. I didn't know where you were."
"Why didn't you just get up and come looking?" asks Connie constructively as she heads to the living room with the others following.
` "Did you think we were upstairs ironing clothes?" comments Cyndi.
Richard mutters, ”I just wondered where you were, that’s all.”
Within a moment or two Robert enters the side door, strolls into the kitchen greeted the three with, "Hello, everybody! I'm home. It was a great conference at Tower Hall. Very exciting new work on invasive aortic valve surgery. Only a three to four inch incision." Silence. Robert walks into the living room. Connie and Cyndi are sitting on the separate ends of the couch waiting for Richard to speak civilized.
Seeing the situation for what it is, Rob smiles with added delight, ”What's the argument, Richie, are the girls getting your goat?”
“We are too cooped up,” replies Richard with a forced smile.
Cyndi comments dryly, “You are not a prisoner here, Richard.”
“And neither are we,” adds Connie as she looks to Robert.
Grandma’s Story 12
Grandma sits comfortably, cross-legged on a sand dune and begins speaking as the large yellow sun rises to her back. This story takes place about twenty-six hundred years ago and this particular setting requires the ancient watery trade route between old Egypt and ancient Ireland. But first, the two young people involved are Princess Teah Tephi of Egypt and Prince Eireamhon of Ireland.
Eireamhon calls Teah his princess. Supposedly, Teah Tephi is really the daughter of the last king of Judah, Zedekiah. Zedekiah had allied himself with the Egyptian Pharaoh Apries. Many Hebrews went with King Zedekiah to Egypt but eventually the Hebrews were sent to exile in Babylonia as some have already read.
The story is that a Pharaoh Apries hid Zedekiah's daughter Teah Tephi, and she keeps a title of princess to the Pharaoh for her protection. Whether she was truly a daughter of Zedekiah, only her mother and this old Grandma knows.
When Teah left Egypt, she took locks of hair from her family to keep her company and a few small stones from her original home in Judah. Though Teah was told her father had been driven into exile, she came to believe her father had died in the desert or drowned. The stories always make Teah suspicious and doubtful, and this is one of the reasons she didn't mind leaving Egypt one for Ireland. She feels that as princess she can always return to Egypt if she so desires and that not even her husband Prince Eireamhon is going to stop her from doing so.
On the boat travels that follow the trade routes of those days, Teah smiles and says to her Prince Eireamhon, “I brought my Judah with me,” and she shows her husband three small rocks. Her eyes widened with enthusiasm, “I will keep these. These will bring us luck.”
The prince smiled rhetorically, secretly believing the Irish will think she is a fool for bringing these stones from her homeland, or worse, they will secretly treat the gift as an insult to our own Irish stones. He politely suggests, “Put them in a sheltered place so they will not be lost.”
Eireamhon wants me to hide them, realizes Teah. I can tell when he is lying. He is trying to show himself to be cleverer than me. He cannot make a fool of me. I will not allow it.
The two arrive at Tara in Ireland, not to far from present Dublin. Princess Teah is presented to the High King and she says, “I have a present for you from my own country of Judah. This small stone is from the stone pillow upon whose head, Jacob, our ancient patriarch, rested at Bethel. Jacob was the grandson of our first patriarch, Abraham. It was at Bethel while resting on this stone pillow Jacob had his visions of angels.”
The High King appears interested because Ireland too has its ancient and magical stones. He asks, “How big of a stone is this piece broken from?”
She stretches her arms to measure its size, about twenty-six inches. She moves her hands in to sixteen inches, and then raises her right hand above the other about eleven inches. Then she adds, “The stone weighs over three hundred pounds, and this is a small piece of it."
The king cautiously continues, “Does this stone have power?”
“Since Jacob dreamed of angels while sleeping on it,” replies Teah shrewedly, “it is surely possible an angel’s touch is still within the stone.” She pauses dramatically and adds, “No one knows for sure.”
The king responds, “Perhaps we should construct a replica of the stone pillow and strike the small stone to it so that the angel may move from the small piece to the larger one.”
“This is an excellent idea,” chimes the Princess.
When the replica of the reddish stone was carved to her specifications, Princess Teah is struck by the fact that this stone pillow is very much a copy of original she once saw in Judah and wonders if it is the original. She cannot tell the difference. In a great secret ceremony, the king strikes the larger stone with Teah's small stone chip. “As this was a pillow witnessed by Angels,” the king decrees, “it will rest under the high king’s throne for our protection and good fortune.”
*
Stories create their own traditions, grins Grandma. The replica sitting under the High King of Ireland's throne eventually finds its way to the Scottish kings where it becomes known as the "Stone of Destiny". More time passes and in 1952 Queen Elizabeth II of England is crowned in a chair with that very stone underneath. Some stories are beyond belief. Only Grandma Earth knows the truth, and the truth lies inside each person’s own mystery. Don’t search too long and hard though —
People can spend their lives considering stories and things,
And thus so miss the sweet songs the little bird sings
Diplomatic Pouch 12
Pyl glances at Blake who appears dumbfounded; then to the plane which has no apparent damage. She thinks, no problems when the wheels left the road and we became airborne. Where is that road? It is only moments late or so it seems, and the road, the county airport, Lake Erie -- where are they? I have my husband, my brother, and my Daddy's plane. I should be thankful.
Sensing uncertainty Justin feels irrefutably alone with Pyl and Blake. I don't know where we are and until I do we cannot hope to escape. Surely we are being set up, duped like we are on a set made for a Mission Impossible. Pyl and Blake are my responsibility. We need to assess our situation. I have to come up with a plan. We have to . . ..
Friendly’s voice reassures, "Again, we welcome you onboard our vessel. Ship, that’s what we call our vessel, also welcomes you. We will show you where you are."
"Come this way," directs Yermey. "We can climb the flight of stairs to the main deck. Where we are is in the annex."
"What you may call a basement," comments Hartolite.
"Or a storage area," continues Friendly. “Yermey, one step at a time up the stairs for our guests please."
Blake carefully counts the stairs, there are twenty-two. The room appears large and hospital clean in perhaps a forty to fifty-foot square. He sees machinery set at an odd angle of about a thirty-degree tilt off center and beside it is a large box towering perhaps fifteen feet straight up. 'I cannot tell,' he wonders, 'how wide this room is. It almost appears to be an optical illusion.'
"Come ahead, this way," says Yermey. "Over to this area where we can observe better."
Blake follows mostly out of polite routine. A whiff of acidic scent reminds him of being in a factory that molded exothermic sleeve forms used in the construction of steel castings, but the floor we are walking on has blended grasses of two to three inches in length growing just as the Annex. However the grass feels shorter and soft, like I am walking on a golf green. Shortly, Pyl and Justin stand beside him as Friendly and Hartolite walk to their left and stand next to Yermey.
The six are elevator close looking into the room from a new angle. No one can see the door they entered from. They cannot see another entrance or exit. The walls and ceiling slowly illuminated to an eye comfort level where all could better view the whole room and what fills it.
Blake's eyes focus on the first thing he sees upon entering the control room -- the two-stacked black boxes in what he assumes is the northwest corner. The size and shape reminded him of two top and bottom washer dryer combinations with round see through side windows to the front of both. Each window is surrounded by a four inch or so aluminum colored band. The boxes are otherwise clean of buttons or dials. I estimate this machinery is six to seven feet high and three and a half feet in width and this room suddenly appears to be in southwest corner of the ship, but I don’t know how this is so.
His eyes move east along the north wall to a second set of aluminum colored metallic or plastic boxes set beside one another. On the horizontal rather than the vertical they appear the same size and clean only the windows, similar in size to the other square machinery with rounded corners windows.
On the northeast corner is a large blue metallic-like box the size of a large refrigerator only a couple feet taller. It has one large oval window with an aluminum-like band surrounding. The height of the oval is over seven feet and it drops to within two feet of the bottom of the box. The width of the oval band is within a couple of inches of the sides of the machine. I have no idea what this technology is. There are no tables or chairs or desks. I wonder what is on the other side of those windows. Blake's thoughts are interrupted.
Friendly's calmly says, "We are all here. Where would you like me to begin?"
Blake replies, "I see many box shaped machines throughout the room. Please start with the one in the northwest corner." He points, "The two odd-looking black stacked boxes, they each look like a washing machine stacked neatly on top of another. What is the technology? What do they do?”
***
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