Month: October 2022
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The spider’s tale
Spiders are perhaps most often associated with perseverance; the story of Robert the Bruce’s eventual victory over the English king at Bannockburn is probably apocryphal, but salutary all the same. If the Scottish laird was indeed holed up in a cave on the Isle of Arran, watching a spider trying, over and over again, to…
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Thinking: ?Cognitive reflex?
I’ve been thinking this morning about the way a cognitive stimulus travels, the journey it provokes. We’re sending off a little package to our grandson today, a print-out of my historical fiction short story and an accompanying letter. Maybe he’d like to do some illustrations for the piece? The stimulus way back over a month…
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Joy is hard to find in autumnal despair . . .
I’ve been feeling a bit like our bedraggled trees, the hornbeam that’s losing all its yellow leaves now, and the red stemmed dogwood in a similar situation as the stiff wind does its leaf-taking. News comes in from a lovely blog I’ve begun to follow, Your World in Your Hands, of another blogger whose homily…
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Sharing a shortlist is fun . . .
Although my effort did not reach the vaunted heights of an actual cash prize (£50 for each of the chosen top four!), it was a delight this morning to see my little poem shortlisted among the top twenty submissions for this month’s Visual Verse challenge. As I mentioned in a previous joyful entry, I had…
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The joy of research
I’ve been embarked on a short story in historical fiction mode that’s taken me back to Viking times. Every Canadian knows, or should know, about the early voyages of Leif the Lucky and Eric the Red, as they explored the coast of the new country they called Vinland. An excavation at l’Anse aux Meadows, on…
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Marshland colour
For a Canadian expatriate, the more brilliant the red leaf is, the more homesickness intrudes. But yesterday afternoon you didn’t have to be a reminiscing Canadian to experience the delight of the blackberry leaves turning crimson, branch by branch. I remember when the new Canadian flag was first mooted. Schoolchildren were urged to create their…
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Indolence, indulgence and/or perseverance
Sometimes Kali cat is happy to rest on our laps, of an evening, when she’s fully fed and replete, warm and cosy with the fire blazing, and we’re quiet ourselves. She still hunts for small creatures, and gobbles them whole, all except the guts. But mostly she perseveres with her importunings: feed me; feed me…
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Joy of an autumn walk
As we ambled along homewards through the lush vegetation, my beloved exclaimed, ‘Oh I do love these woods!’ I felt so guilty that for so many long years we’ve been stuck high on the remote and moor-ish fellside where a deciduous woodland walk has not been feasible unless you get in the car and drive…
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World Mental Health Day
When I set up this little blog, I thought I had two purposes in mind: to develop a large readership by concentrating on a few salient contexts; to consciously think joyful thoughts, rather than sinking into an endless morass of self-recrimination. The daily readers who have drifted in to these entries are so much appreciated…
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Whew! Bakery oven alight again . . .
Today we’re baking a bigger batch of bread than the usual weekly effort. I say ‘we’ but really my job is only to take care of the fire and then do the washing-up of the bowls. So when the fire has really taken hold of the hardwood logs (not nearly as fast as dry softwood…
Roads to Joy 