Where Creativity Takes Wing
I listened to this song last night and it brought so much up inside me. It’s an incredible set of lyrics, the guitar work is amazing, and the sound impeccable. Everybody knows Don McLean for his song American Pie, but this is just as profound and carries an incredible message, for and about artists. So I wanted to share it with my readers here – that is, anyone who will listen.
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/panoply/
I love looking at geodes. The best ones have tiny crystals all through them. The concept of “the crystal cave” has been an endearing one to me throughout my life, and I love holding one in the palm of my hand. This little geode is not even two inches long.
Fire and flames have been rather central to my life.
When I was young, I kept warm at a stove just like this – it provided all heat and ability to 
cook. My parents scavenged for wood at local building sites and behind supermarkets, burning scrap lumber and cut up old pallet boards. I was used to fire, used to tending it. I was as used to this as most are used to flipping on a light switch. Later, when I owned my own home, 110 years old with faulty baseboards, I relearned how comforting flame is. I love campfires.
I also learned respect for fire as my house burned down when I was six – it was fall, promising a hard winter in northern Idaho, the stove pipe was too close to the cedar shake siding, and we lost everything.
Fire is warmth and destruction, energy of creation and consuming anger. As with all things, the internal flames of emotion are useful and warm when banked properly, the damper’s set just right, and you use good dry fuel.
Just like fire, the flames of emotion can be destructive or choke you out with smoke that makes it impossible to see when not tended properly, or allowed to get out of hand.
The mind, rational thought, is like that careful homeowner who sets the wood just right, keeps things managed, so you can warm your fingers and toes and boil a pot of tea. Then emotion becomes something to inform and inspire you, not something that clouds the truth of how the world really is, or makes you sensitive to every little slight so you spend your life being consumed by the fire of rage.
(Still an important topic, I’ve updated this post.)
Belief is mutually exclusive with Knowledge.
Belief is accepting something as true when you have no evidence.
Knowledge is accepting something as true when you do have evidence and a means to prove it.
Belief is emotion based and tends to resist evidence to the contrary.
Knowledge is thought based and tends to update as new evidence is found.
Belief is the basis of religion, Knowledge is the basis of science. To cross the two, as people do when they say “the science is settled” about something that clearly isn’t settled, is disaster and is not how science really works. For the record very little in science is ever “settled.” That’s the point of science. True scientists create a theory, test it, change their theory when the facts don’t support it, and try to repeat their results. False scientists create results to fit their theory, or alter them when they don’t come out “right.”
Here is a great quote regarding belief that truly made me think and I hope it does the same for you, dear Reader:
“Belief is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to preserve itself,and the way it preserves itself is to keep you from having any doubts,and the way it keeps you from doubting is to blind you to the way things really are.” – Philip Caputo
What is more, I have found that Belief and Knowledge are mutually exclusive. Having a desire to understand the world in all it’s awe inspiring beauty, I’ve made it a personal mission to eliminate belief. It’s a long process, and a little disturbing how many ways belief is inserted into society as well as my own upbringing, but it’s been worth it so far. Embracing a knowledge based mindset has given me a firmer grounding in my world, better understanding of how things work, and a deep, abiding joy in existence. Belief had left me with a shaky foundation and a great deal of uncertainty.
Faith and belief lead to uncertainty for me. Knowledge and understanding lead to trust.
A customer service training I went to once said “take all hope away from your customer.” The statement was meant to shock the student, then get them to think, because the follow up was “they shouldn’t have to hope you will do your job well, they should know you will.”
I’ve taken that to heart, and find it interesting food for thought.
I also wish to add a link to this visual article. I found it thought provoking, entertaining, and a little touching.
It can be pretty hard to convince my cat to eat.
She has this habit of liking a food, eating happily for a few days to a few weeks, then deciding she hates it.
Lately, this even happened with her favorite type of treats!
Mixing a little Meow Mix kibble with a bit of water seems to be the best thing that she’ll reliably eat but that she eventually get tired of that too.
Interspersing this with Sheba pate seems to have the best effect but not even that is a guarantee.
We’ve tried so many things! All kinds of Friskies, even the odd flavors like cod with cheese and bacon. Meat only foods. Grain free foods. Organic foods. Broths. Bisques. Purees. Bits. We’ve tried it in a blender because we know she has trouble with her teeth. We’ve tried it in single use cans so it’s not too cold to smell. We’ve tried withholding food for a short time to let her get hungry. Not for more than part of a day, of course – it’s bad for cats to fast.
In the final analysis – what do I catch her eating, with relish, almost every time?
A lettuce leaf.
Silly cat.
You cannot control the sky. I think that’s a truism – ask any pilot, mariner, or photographer. So taking a picture of the sky can be the very essence of chaos. Today’s photo challenge celebrates this.
Bridges have the capacity to delight and also terrify me.
On one hand, from a bridge you have an amazing view of whatever it crosses, and it’s a lot of fun to look down at water. On the other hand, a bridge also has the capacity to cross heart-stopping chasm, and that can be terrifying for someone like me who doesn’t like heights.
In the painting above, there’s a small bridge leading to a tiny island where the Torii stands. Since the Torii is the gateway between the normal world and the sacred, the bridge is the path to that possibility. Then, when you look out into the fog – who knows what odd things you might find out there?
If you’re a writer, bridges make great metaphors. They are also natural choke points so you can use them to force characters to have to meet something. They can bring up all kinds of feelings, especially if that bridge happens to be a high railroad trestle with all the world visible between your feet!
Speaking of bridges, portals and gateways, I just finished a short story of about 10,000 words called Gateway Drug. Check it out on my Books Page!
A perfectly ordinary housecat as she dreams of being a unicorn.
Slowly the ear begins to center itself on her head, ready to turn into a horn.
What next? I think she’s going to meditate on being a samurai.
Now she’s dreaming of being a writer – I think she’s going to write her adventures down!
Tucson trees are fascinating to me.
Some have spines and fruit. Even the mesquite have that.
This one has looks like it’s related to a bean plant.
We have pines here, too, that sometimes grow into improbable formations.
Or they grow into twin trunks, like this.
I love it when trees grow old – then they develop character.
It’s truly a feast for the eye when you look at the fine detail.
All this wealth – in one neighborhood!
via Discover Challenge: Animal
Some draw a clear demarcation between “animal” and “human.” Knowing that humans are in fact animals and there’s no getting around that, I usually draw my line between sapience and non sapience – the ability to think, and not.
Even that is a sliding scale. Emotion is experienced by most mammals and even some reptiles. I read an article that used sensitive microphones to listen to lab rats while they were being tickled, and it caught a laughing sound and reflex. Elephants communicate over long distance using subsonics. Female cougars sometimes bequeath areas of land to their female cubs when they get old enough to need a territory but can’t find their own. Tigers have been found to engage in long disstance communication. Certain prides of lions in Africa have learned to hunt cooperatively with the local tribesmen. I’ve known cats who are self aware. I’ve seen parrots who speak cognitively and some can even read and spell simple phrases. Chimps and gorillas can learn sign language. Dolphins and bonobo apes have sex for fun.
With all these things that are true and verifiable (the cat facts especially in a wonderful book called “The Tribe of Tiger,” by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, then is there even a dividing line? I think it’s all a sliding scale of different levels of ability. My cat, for instance, has an amazing social intelligence, and good hunting ability. She can understand language, she obeys customs taught to her by another cat that are different than feline norm, prefers Japanese to English, and tells me when to go to bed and when to get up each day. Yet, her planning ability still isn’t the best. She’s definitely intelligent, but in a different way than I am.
Sometimes the line of demarcation between human and animal, or sapient and non sapient, is merely how much we see and notice.
Mindflight 
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