Faith is not certainty so…

Quote

Faith is not certainty so much as it is acting-as-if in great hope.

From a friend.  Thanks Grandmere Mimi!

The Poet

Aside

The poet is a writer who can be honest about life, loves, and nasty people and be praised for their creativity.

A Picture – Is It Really Worth a Thousand Words?

If you blog as I do, you put words to a page almost daily in the hopes of bringing it to fruition on a blog. But more often than not my thoughts for any given blog has been inspired by the pictures I take.

I’m really not that good a photographer, but there is something about an image in a given picture that sets my mind to thinking in phrases, or words pictures. Though words can seldom recreate the exact beauty or feeling that has captured my heart and mind I love to attempt the feat but seldom do it justice.

This is one of those pictures that is one of those impossibly beautiful photos that when I take it in I find myself touching an achingly sad feeling that immediately takes to the spot if I close my eyes.  Here I see St. Kevin’s Church.  Here also I see the graveyard of many who lived, and died and are buried in the hallowed ground.  But what grabs me and holds me by the throat is the green that envelopes the whole scene.  Like Ireland, this scene holds faith, life, and death but mostly the irrepressible spirit of a people who lived, fought, and died for the land.  Here they created a music that began to share personal stories about the pain and separation of families as well as of the loves and joys in the smallest things of life.  They sang, and sing, a song for Ireland.  The music of the Celtic soul of this land is often what makes life bearable and worth living.  It is not always beautiful, nor is it always easy to hear.  But like many a song it is a way to deal with those experiences and then continue on in living.  From the joyful songs to their most painful ballads and laments the Irish have allowed for a letting go in song and the music.  The pain is never really gone with the singing of the words it is only given and shared freely, and through that act permitted to be given away.  A load shared, is a load lightened for many.

The Heat…

The heat of summer has kept me jailed in a house of cool breezes staring out windows and hoping for cooler days.  So many people love this kind of heat, and I don’t blame them.  I am just jealous of them  because of my asthma and a nasty case of the sweats each time I simply step out to take the dogs for their daily walks around the yard in this high humidity weather.  Today, I went out and moved the sprinkler to water the small gardens and pots around our yard and got the mail – period.  Came in severely dripping from the top down after only 15 minutes in our Michigan sauna.

As I check the weather online I am wondering if it will change anytime soon.  It’s awful to run from one air conditioned spot to another for the whole summer.   My real fear in this type of hot weather is that we will have a power outage! The heat has even affected my gardens.  Many of the plants looks wilty or the leaves are beginning to curl, no matter the amounts of water they receive.

But some of my more tropical plants are doing above and beyond this summer.  One such wonder is my croscosmia.  The spiky wonder with scarlet flowers has been blooming and blooming most of our early summer.  It has also spread like crazy from the seeds that dropped last fall and is looking a bit like a jungle in one little corner of the garden these days.  (Below are two shots  of my most prolific flower this summer, the crocosmia scarlet.)

Crocosmia

The flower has many little trumpet flowers that usually take about a week to all open.  Then of course there are the petunias which I was surprised at this summer.  They have all been blooming like never before and look lovely in pots around my yard.