Part Two of The Unseen Sea: adrift in the enneagram

LUCA didn’t know it back then, but her birth as the all-mother of organic life on Earth was witnessed by the entire solar system. The ‘positive’ energy behind life, a higher variant of light as we know it and relayed by the Sun, began its spiral into the Earth, in an arc that took in the seven planets that were visible to the ‘ancients’. There were no ancients as we now think of them, of course, four billion years ago, but later, much later, they would come to be aware of a remarkable signature in the night sky.

The day sky was dominated by the life-affirming Sun, later identified as the centre of the harmonic system that contained the Earth as only one of its children.

In the warm womb of the deep ocean trench, Luca’s struggle for sustainable life…

Image: Steve Tanham for his #NoirWednesday

She was young, beautiful and the sun rose in her eyes. A stranger child… found by the wayside and raised by the elders. The village lads vied for her favour. Their mothers nodded doting heads and grandfathers remembered their  vigour when the sun struck her midnight tresses, painting them blue.

Superstition is insidious.

The small creatures of wood and field came to her hand and flowers bloomed brighter where she passed. She healed the wild things with her herblore and the dogs were silent as she passed.

Jealousy is a black art.

She danced for joy beneath the full moon, crowned with oak leaves and they who watched saw a shower of stars fall to earth.

They gave her a house, a tiny house, built just for her upon the bridge that spanned the stream, surrounded by stone and far from the green places…

Picture by: Stephen Tanham

It was a house like any other house. A little house over a bridge, doing what little houses over bridges did. Only it wasn’t.

This house long thought to be a small house in which shelter could be sought when crossing the bridge held a dark and sinister secret.

So dark and sinister that it curled the hair of straight haired people and straighten the hair of the curly headed.

People avoided it if they could, which made it hard if you wanted to cross the river in the most direct way.

The house was one in which murder was a preferred event. Once the location for birthday and anniversary celebrations it also had a dark and dangerous past. Every birthday, every celebration was marked with death. Be it poisoned cake, exploding candles or spiked drinks there wasn’t a single event anyone could remember where death…

A new challenge from Steve over at Sun in Gemini for Wednesdays, so I thought I’d give it a go.

#NoirWednesday: the small house

https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/25507207/posts/1122975263

The Two kept themselves to themselves, never mixing with any of the locals to pass the time of day or even a simple nod of acknowledgement if someone said hello.
Rumours were rife in such a small community, speculation ranging from them being fugitives, criminals, abuse victims and even members of a witness protection programme.
Trying to draw them into friendly conversation resulted in mumbled mutterings as they scurried away to the safety of their tiny house on the bridge.

There is only one Life.

But there are a dazzling myriad ways in which it finds expression. Life is very simple to define at this symbolic level: it is the animation of matter, such that it exhibits awareness.

The scale of that awareness varies from the most primitive forms of single-celled response to environment all the way up to the conception of the ‘self’ – literally, that there is an “I” which is separate to the place in which it finds ‘itself’.

So-called ‘manifestation’ is simply an entry of the vivifying principle into the world of separateness; and so called ‘enlightenment’ is a (usually) step by step return to the revelation that nothing is actually separated at all…

Everything is in those three paragraphs–the whole mystery. But to see what lies beneath the words we have to go on a journey. We have to set sail on a voyage that…

I had shepherds’ pie for my breakfast…

It isn’t as bad as it seems…

After nearly a week of not eating a thing

A good meal was the stuff of my dreams.

*

A mouthful of toast had been madness…

A yoghurt as good as it got…

After turning my stomach with every delight

I would rather go hungry than not.

*

It is not like I didn’t give it my best shot

I had cooked and attempted to chew it,

And although I could probably lose the odd pound*

This was not the best way I could do it.

*

I’d stocked up the fridge, there was good stuff to eat

But here all I was doing was picking…

The fish ate their way through the nice crispy veg

While the dog ate her way through the chicken.

*

I had just about given up trying to eat,

And…

(With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan)

I am the very model of an amateur grammarian
I have a little knowledge and I am authoritarian
But I make no apology for being doctrinarian
We must not plummet to the verbal depths of the barbarian

I’d sooner break my heart in two than sunder an infinitive
And I’d disown my closest family within a minute if
They dared to place a preposition at a sentence terminus
Or sully the Queen’s English with neologisms verminous

I know that ‘soon’ and not ‘right now’ is the true sense of ‘presently’
I’m happy to correct you and I do it oh so pleasantly
I’m not a grammar Nazi; I’m just a linguistic Aryan
I am the very model of an amateur grammarian

I’m sure people appreciate my pointing out their grammar gaffes
And sorting out their sentences and crossing out their paragraphs
When you…