Beautiful Scenery
November 29, 2007
This is another writing gem, from Jeff Doak, Application Developer for Sprint Nextel. He currently resides in Rome, NY, and has interests in music, nature, lifetime learning, programming. Lives with wife, three kids, cat, hermit crab, and fish. Check his “neglected” website.
Beautiful Scenery
Fall – my favorite time of year. Here in the Northeast U.S. it is a beautiful time of year. The snow is falling today, but not sticking. The wind has a chill to it, but not harsh. It is a great time for daydreaming and self reflection.
I find myself drifting in time to the days of my youth, even then this was my favorite time of year. I was in Germany then, but the climate was much like it is here. The scenery is excellent. I recall my walks and jogs through the woods there and the brief conversations with the locals. The man I never saw before who gave me a walking stick he had meticulously and painstakingly carved himself. The woman who remarked how beautiful the scenery was at the beginning of one of my strolls. The girl who had a crush on me, but I was to young and shy to notice. The magnificence of Neu Schwannstein castle.
I also am swept to the more solemn times. The visit to Dacau where I was overwhelmed by the smell of death in the air brought out by the rain. The memories of the Berlin wall before it later was brought down. The Russian solders at the train station that stood a pace apart the entire length of the stopped train. The visit to the large hill outside of Stuttgart that had been erected from the rubble of the post-war crushed city. And of course the cross at the top, large enough to see from a mile away that stated something to the affect of “Never again”.
Much has changed. I have a family and between them and my job I find little time for reflection, but it sure is nice when I can. Please take the time yourself to reflect on life, current and past, because reflection is one of the true rewards for being human.
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Reflections on some well loved Poets Ziggy Olivier wrote this article. He met Dylan Thomas and spent some of his youth drinking whisky with him. He said me: "Everything you may have read about him was true." Reflections on some well loved Poets Approaching my own demise, I was delighted this Christmas to receive from...... -
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Life Journey
November 29, 2007
Rob Mitchell is a singer/songwriter from Nashville, TN. He has played songs around Nashville and appeared at the Bluebird Cafe. Musical influences are James Taylor, Jim Croce, Jimmy Buffett and John Denver. Rob is not a writer but what he wrote for us is a real writing gem:
Life Journey
Today the weather in Nashville is brisk. I woke to a chilly wind from the North whisking it’s way accross the dairy farm behind my home. Our dog is still curled deep in the cedar chips inside of her dog house as I fill her bowl with water. She stirs and looks at me with a bareful look. I think she wanted to sleep late too!
I notice my steps are short and stiff. The ache is evident in my thighs. Last night was the second of my new nightly routine of running. One mans quest to regain lost youth and health. As I walk back inside I make a mental note to learn to welcome the pain as that is my benchmark of progress. I’ll now cook breakfast for the kids and let my wife sleep late. She deserves the break.
After dropping the kids off at school I begin my 50 mile drive into work. I turn off the radio so I can reaquaint myself with my inner voice. That is the voice of my youth. I try to hear him encouraging me as he did in the old days. The clutter of my daily worries has driven him back into dark places as of late. When he went back there to the fringe of my forgotten subconscious is was when melancholy wandered in. I listen for him and his words of encouragement and hope as the asphalt ribbon runs beneath the car. He speaks softly at first. Unsure and not having the confidence that comes with youth. However the more I listen to him his voice becomes more assured.
I am still the person I was at 20, 25 and 30! So what if the road was more rugged than it appeared on the map. But isn’t every journey an adventure? Don’t all of us end up in detours sometimes or make a wrong turn or two on the road of life? We don’t stop the trip because we get lost. We look at the map again or we ask directions. What if where we finally end up isn’t where we thought we wanted to go? If we choose to linger here a while it can only mean that this isn’t such a bad place to be afterall. Hopefully we can learn from the experiences in our journey and if nothing else come of it; we can look back and say it was one heck of a road trip we took!
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Travel Writer
November 21, 2007
This is the beginning of the latest writing by Peter George Mackie. Please contact him if you want to know more about his works. The first chapter of his piece of travel writing “Flowers of Zagreb” can also be downloaded at www.authorsonline.co.uk.
Travel Writer
Dave was pondering over a map of the former Yugoslavia when he landed on Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, which he had visited in the summer of 1977 at the age of 20 and had made friends with so many 17-year-olds who were still listening to ’60s music.
Most of them had travelled to the West at some point and were very interested in what he had to say about places he had been to, such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen.
Having known people who had been to this country before, he was only mildly surprised to learn that the locals were able to travel in and out of and all around Yugoslavia at will and felt it to be a country which seemed to be moving forward and whose young inhabitants exhibited what he perceived as a unique friendliness and a liveliness which was quite unlike anything he had ever known before.
He also found that many of them were interested in literature and the arts and it was there that he met his first real love, Elidija, a music student, who was one year younger than himself. Although it was only a one-night stand, that evening when they had made love in her friend’s flat in one of the back streets of Zagreb would always stand out throughout his life as one of his most treasured memories – and he was also very glad that he had been able to satisfy her as she was a virgin at the time.
Dave then found himself transported to the summer of 1986 when he had visited Belgrade for the first time and had met a young art student somewhere in town. They had taken a look in the window of an art workshop where some local artists or students had seemingly hurriedly put an exhibition together and they both agreed that none of the exhibits were very good.
It was a roasting hot day and, when the young student reached the flat where he lived with his parents and sister, after a long walk in the scorching heat, he removed his shirt and shoes.
It was at this point that he introduced Dave to his sister, a good-looking young girl with long black hair, who knelt down in front of him, also in bare feet, and exclaimed, “Serbian girls are the best!!”
The young art student, whose name Dave had probably never learned, then explained that the room in which they were sitting was his and his sister’s bedroom.
It did not seem to Dave all that surprising that, in a poor area of a country like Yugoslavia, a teenage brother and sister would be sharing the same room, which must have also been the case in other countries, probably including Britain, in the past.
At that time, people were keen to emphasise that they were one country and, when Dave visited Sarajevo that same summer, he thought that it was the most beautiful and unusual city he had ever seen – and the last thing that would have occurred to him was that there would be a war there six years later. He was also disappointed that the spool for his camera had run out by this time so that he was unable to take any photographs.
His spirit at this point moved back to the map again where someone or something was trying to tell him that, in the future, the young people in Zagreb and Belgrade would be reconciled again but did not explain how this would be done… but it was found necessary to heal the town of Split, where the Dioclitain palace was falling down……
Dave was presently transported to the back garden in Scotland where he had played as a child in the 1960s.
In later life, he would realise how lucky he was to have heard all the music at that time, when it had first come out, as he considered that something special had happened then, which could only have occurred once in the whole of human history.
His mind moved on to when he was 12 years old, when he had had some very vivid and profound spiritual experiences which people around him at that time had confused with mental illness.
His father had had him incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, where he was to spend two and a half years, and Dave would never to be able to forgive him for having destroyed him spiritually as well as having taken away two and a half years of his youth, which he would never get back, and, due to which, he would never be able to form steady relationships, his courtship with a young girl having been put a stop to by the hospital authorities.
Dave’s mother, on the other hand, was convinced that Dave, who was always the first in the class at Maths at school, was going to be a genius, but his education was neglected in the hospital and he would never be able to make much of his life…..
In fact, throughout his whole life, Dave’s father had never been able to accept the fact that he had ever grown up and would continue to play psychological games with him. For instance, only a few years before, when Dave was in his forties, his father, having lured him back to his house to see whether or not a certain magazine had arrived for him in the post, threatened to call the police because Dave had accidentally dropped a cup and saucer into the sink. This, in turn, brought back all the old traumas of what his father had done to him when he was younger, the memories of which he had been desparately trying to shake off…
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