Book Luvin' on a Weekend Morning!

Tired trying couple ov' weeks gone past with everything churning in a melange of never ending "to do". Life itself was a fairytale gone twisted with the ends of my mind mostly curled in dumb disapproval. I resembled somewhat the fox or - the wolf ( big and bad) - who huffed and puffed and blew the hut ( or house, or cottage) away. Only, dear me, I didn't manage to blow anything away - except rivulets of my patience and cubes of my mushed sanity. 

Meeeeh!!

So enter my staycation relax solutions!

Bright spot of those days were stolen moments immersed in two glorious books; one gifted, the other a precious endearing BookSale ( that means thrift!)  find  I love, love, love it when my eyes and hands trip on a keeper of a book tucked away above, underneath or in between piles of pre-loved literary goodies!

My Secret Keeper book ( by Kate Morton) is that sort ov' find! Fabulous  portrait cover! And after  inspecting every corner, and after scanning what it was all about, I knew for sure I had a winner of a read in my hands -  a premium deluxe possession, a sparkling jade of a second hand book. Seriously, this must cost ten times more in our pricey bookshops.

Agatha Christie - Inspector Poirot  mysteries are a fancy to me  so you can just imagine how my eyes bulged rounded when I got to the part where a young lady witnessed an act of  the sublime -- tragic of tragics! Yaiks, I think that  spurt reads bad, haha!

No,  I'm not a sucker for tragedy, nor do I live wit a hidden fetish for misfortune, but when dire circumstances of a plot are weaved in passionate telling, my interest is delightedly piqued.

This is what it's all about straight from the pretty flap:

During a summer party at the family farm in the English countryside, sixteen year old Lauren Nicholson has escaped to her childhood tree house and is happily dreaming of the future. She spies a stranger coming up the long road to the farm and watches as her mother speaks to him. before the afternoon is over, Laurel will witness a shocking crime. A crime that challenges everything she knows about her family and especially her mother, Dorothy. Her vivacious, loving, nearly perfect mother. 

And if sixteen year old Laurel has her tree house,  I, on the other hand have my hideaway for quiet reading moments, undisturbed and basked in solitude, just the way I like it!

Tdaaa'...lady prism moments... :D

Catching Light Chasing Shadows ( Lux Lucis Vita )

1-28 2014 Maybe this resonates with you. Maybe it doesn't. A moment when slices of decorous days turn sour and your light within extinguishes itself without apology.

Suddenly, your inner colorful morphs into a mottled palette overnight, a drab washed out lizard salmon of a life. That tempest within, she wakes, cocking what a diminutive dun you are.

Facing shadows - a melancholy one must battle.The past days have been so for me. What was there to do but embrace it. My adoring gratitude goes to the one who is patient and who believes and makes me laugh, until once again I am suffused with the sensation of bright - a conduit to the honest happiness around me. Tis' over. Now, I claim my emergence.

"One need not be a chamber to be haunted...

one need not be a house.

The brain has corridors

surpassing material space."

- Emily Dickinson

Something is happening to me. For weeks on end I am swept over by a sour suffocating smog of the soul. As if my spirit, once blithe and carefree, all of a sudden felt faint weary, begging for rest - that long deep dreamless rest of the ones who sleep. Scares me. 

I am not unfamiliar with my shadow. We are....acquainted.
Once a year I am besieged with an un - s.u.n.c.t.i.m.o.nious vacuum that knifes through my being. A veritable selfishness, sloth and venom of days wherein I pace my dysmorphic earth with hollowness. As if nothing exists and matters. Ghostly. A self satisfied canting of there is no mend. 

End.

I speak to it - at it - my barren shadow. 

Not with fights. Not with accusations. Not with soothing words nor with acceptance. 

Letting it be, I walk it through capturing beams and prisms as light amiably slants through branches, leaves and twigs, settling in streets, lawns and bends. Lucent.

I catch the light 

and I catch it 

and catch it 

and catch it. 

Until captured, the light becomes me,
and becomes me,
and becomes me,
and finally,

becomes me,
chasing my shadow -
away. 

Lux Lucis Vita

CATCHING LIGHT CHASING SHADOWS
( a photo journal - click on the link to view all pictures.)

Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ♥¸¸. ,•ღ. of gardens i remember•ღ. ℒℴνℯ♥¸.•*”Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ♥

Hear this....

"In My Neighborhood" 

~ Photo By: Roselle Quin

"Many of us have made our world so familiar that we do not see it anymore. An interesting question to ask yourself at night is, What did I really see today?" 

~ John O' Donahue, Anam Cara, A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Now and again when I walk the path leading out of our leafy lined subdivision, I am  inclined to stare at this house wishing it were mine. I could do so many things with a gate like that: maybe hang a gigantic flowery wreath, maybe paint it cream or white or a kind of patina green, maybe put in an ornate bronze knocker. It looks familiar actually, and it just occurred to me why.

Yes, I remember when as a child I would visit my "Papa Lolo's" house ( my late grandfather's elder brother) and the gate was a beautiful massive woodwork that looked very much like the photo I took.  Tucked beyond the imposing gate was a handsome garden home - in all manner and sense of the word garden! I'm not talking manicured lawns or dainty scented florals or delicate herbs. No. My grandfather's bother, just like him, was a truly ardent and very gifted gardener -- both possessed that perennial green thumb magic and could fashion what could pass for forests! Abundant fruit bearing majesty of trees, nothing less!

During visits, the gate would dramatically be opened and visitors were welcomed to a surprising oasis of a tropical forest garden with the house in all its red shingled bungalow Spanish splendor wrapped covetously around its wild green grounds. Mesmerizing! The lushness was opulent; the house itself so uniquely married to the luxuriant scene with its old fashioned red clay flooring, tall wooden walls, open wood beams and supported by a stone walled foundation resplendent in rustic romance. Everything was an enthralling splash of all possible hues of green, brown, rust, earth and nature --> complete with cats. A lot of cats!

It was an expansive home with no modern conventional door. Instead,  the house ushered you first into a porch, and then inside pine wax scented confines through a slate wooden sliding entrance that stayed open to the sight of Eden, more or less throughout the day. It was quite literally like living smack dab in the woods.  Very enchanting. The drone of a hum-drum world outside was drowned by chirps and rustles and cicadas. The ordinary road with its wonted living ceased to ostensibly exist, and one might in drinking in the impressive change of scenery, be taken to think of fairy elementals commonly (and quite seriously) regarded as a living part of nature in those days. 

And those days are gone. 

And it makes me wonder what became of the forest home of my grandfather's brother. All relatives have migrated to different parts of the cold western hemisphere and last I heard the house had been sold. Nobody lives in the old town anymore. Ah, but anyway, that picture above, it gives back precious memories of charming childhood days and transports me to an era when I could so casually wander and lose myself under the canopy of garden trees. Leaves quite a cheerful gentle feeling really.

And this is what I see...

Taking from what I just wrote, I know how my week will go by -- soothing, gentle, refined and angelically revealing.  I feel assured and guided, full and powerful. I have traveled a distance and arrived.  There will be matters to think of, but answers will manifest and peace will prevail. There will be plenty of sunshine to grow plants and dreams. And in the late late afternoons deliciousness will waft from my kitchen. And in the evenings there will be good food and stories and merriment around my table. And before late into the evening a spot of peace with me and my book. This is my garden of a life. This is my Lady Prism living. 

Raising My Vibration: Living My Light

 Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ""Trust my instinct. Shun the phony. Stay clear of pity parties. Respect my soul: Never allow myself to get sucked into someone's cycle of doom and drama - no matter  how sympathetic I may be. Never be lured to peek into someone's world of hate. Bad vibes rub in. Turn down the invite. Never compromise my peace of mind. LIVE MY LIGHT! Protect my truth: Never apologize for having high standards." 

October is deep. A pull. A push.
A swirl. A dragging. A lifting.
A questioning.
A finding.

All that and more, this capricious month of highs and lows present itself to be both hail and breeze, iron and cotton, daring me to stroll out and challenge the depths of my beliefs, the brawn of my convictions, the maxim of my person. Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ"

My steps come one after another in an unsure swag, sometimes a huff, always one foot poised on a bedrock of learning, while the other teeters and balances uncertain. But I'll get there. Oh; I'll get there. Haven't I questioned enough? And doesn't the cosmos  throw me answers, more often when I am caught unawares? Why, heavens, in the sunrise as I walked around the bend the zinnias cheered to me -

Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ "Look at us! Look at us! We are made up of layers, cells, constellations, sister! Haven't you heard we are? And then there is YOU, who are made of the same stuff too! 

Reverie!
How stunning when wild wild things call to me.
invisible to the eye, essential to the soul,
an aisle of talking petals - Now I understand, Exupery! 
In its time, He makes all things beautiful, in its time.

Thus speak I do, about this wisdom trail I tread,
alongside posies - that light my path. Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ"

The Lady Prism