Sunday, June 24, 2012

Listen To The Violet

CONTEST - Following the contest will be today's journal entry "Listen To The Violet"

Here's a contest for you. How hot is it? When I first ran this contest the winner was a school teacher who wrote: "It's so hot my hot flashes cool me off."

it's your turn. How hot is it?
It's so hot my toaster pops up before I push it down. (DB)
Its so hot we are using our dog's panting as an extra fan (SH)
it's so hot that sweat runs uphill. (BK)
It's so hot....the microwave popcorn packets are popping in the cupboard (LS)
It's so hot I saw two trees fighting over a dog. (Donna)
It's so hot here in Texas that people have been deliberately committing crimes so they can go to hell and cool off. (JV)
it's so hot here I tried to order another vodka on the rocks but my breath caught fire.
It's so hot....
Good luck, prizes will be awarded, the decision of the certifiably mad judge is final.
DB
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Language is the house of being.

Martin Heidegger
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Hello Lily
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We would know a lot more about nature and the world we live if we could understand all, or even some, of the languages around us. People try to, and think they do, understand the singing of some of the birds. Others study the dolphins' talk and still others are listening to the whales.

But the fact is that everything that exists has a language, and what a story some of them could tell. Take, for example, the humble violet. If we could read it's biography it would tell us of an almost microscopic story of struggle and travail to become what it is: tiny, tender fingers grasping a bit of earth, growing unseen underground, bravely pushing against enormous weight to slip out into the sunlight and breath the air to open up to be what it is, a beautiful little flower.

The small rock lying in the meadow could tell us how it was once part of a mighty boulder, baked and changed by the intense heat of volcanic action. thrust to the surface by mountainous underground movements, picked up by an advancing glacier, scraped against other rocks which left scars on it's surface finally, as the glacier receded, to be left at rest in the meadow.

Take the meadow itself. Walk through it, see it and listen to the endless chatter of tales being told, stories traded, information shared.

That old house down the street has histories of love, pain, romance, lives thrown away and lives revived. It won't all be in the town records, but the house knows.

There is language everywhere, in the Earth, in the Solar System, the Galaxy and on. And we are only just beginning to translate. We need dictionaries to give us the terms for the inaudible, invisible universe around us.

That's why there are poets.
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Dana Bate - Vagabond Journeys
Never Give Up
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2 comments:

Ken Riches said...

I have always believed in stopping to smell the roses...

Geo. said...

I've long believed nature is the language of an intelligent universe and you have bolstered that opinion. By the way, it's so hot here I tried to order another vodka on the rocks but my breath caught fire.