ScotlandDay37: Changed Priorities

Isn’t that a great sign?

Imagine actually being told that your priorities will change in the immediacy of the time it takes you to travel 100 yards – the length of a football field (American football, that is)?

In light of such information, would you stop?  Take stock even if for a moment?  Turn around and head back the way you came?

Or would you just keep going, walking into your own life, your own future, into whatever changes were waiting to meet you?

Should life come with warning signs?

I kind of doubt it – after all, it often does, but they seem largely wasted on us, at least collectively.

So what did I do when faced with this portentous omen today?

I kept going forward, of course – smiling – but forward I went.

The sign was simply an advisory that we would soon come to a single-lane bridge in which the right-of-way was specified – in my favor, which left me wondering why it was that I would need to know about the priority change for the folks coming in the opposite direction.

Nevertheless, I appreciated the heads up.

A Sonnet – not Shakespearian – to

Flickr Commons

what?  Of what shall I write?  A sonnet - a song of praise - a paean to – a burst of joy about – exactly what?  Maybe babies – they’re cute, after all – or maybe to a butterfly – who doesn’t love butterflies?  Well, that suggests I go for the unlikely - a sonnet to the turkey buzzard?  Ben would approve, no doubt.  Maybe to politics and pundits.  Or bad daytime television - that’s it!  Bad daytime television - here goes . . .

1 There’s a place to which I aspire – if you will, a summit
2 the very peak of civilization – television in the daytime
3 I step into the land of the remote and my IQ begins to plummet
4 as I settle in to watch game shows, soaps, and all sorts of visual grime

5 restaurants at war and cooking gone bad
6 syndicated reruns I’d never waste a minute on after 8
7 houses oh, so so, desired, but not had
8 lovers, mothers and brothers spewing hate

9 whether Jennifer’s baby belongs to Brad or to Sam
10 whether this one or that knows where Canada is
11 whether it’s true love – or a scam
12 whether the bad-boy beau will break a chair or walk off stage in a tizz

13 Another day’s gone and I find I’m late
14 for my own life – off the couch with me – it’s a date!

________________
This bit of silliness is the result of my playing around with poetic forms.  The doggerel reflects time I’ve spent totally wasted – mindlessly – watching daytime television.

ScotlandDay35: Sticky Toffee Pudding

Continuing the theme of being separated by common language, the concept of a cake as a ‘pudding’ is simply confounding to me.  And so, of course, I went to the internets in search of an explanation: just what is a ‘pudding’ in the collective consciousness of the British (sorry Scottish friends, but I’m including you as British on this one).

It turns out that ‘pudding’ referred originally to the manner of preparation (which actually clears nothing up for me): a pudding was something containing flour that was stuffed into a casing like a sheep’s intestine and then steamed or boiled, removed from its casing, sliced and served.  Pudding

As ‘pudding’ evokes an image as much of texture as of taste in the US,  I’m still trying to make the connection: was pudding referring to a somewhat jiggly, not-quite-set texture?  I’m still not sure.

But another article, even more interestingly, makes a case for the use of language to describe a meal within the UK as a matter of class distinction; thus, ‘pudding’ is to be preferred over ‘dessert’ (used by the newly rich gauche set). Pudding

And then, I searched exactly what goes into a sticky toffee pudding, and stumbled onto Jamie Oliver’s site, where his recipe calls for a dollop of Ovaltine – that’s right: Ovaltine.  (Never a fan, should I venture to make my own sticky toffee creation some day, I think I’ll skip the Ovaltine, The Christmas Story movie favorite connection notwithstanding).  Jamie Oliver's Recipe

Dining the other evening with friend Liz and a group of her supervision ministry students, all of us save Liz (who went for the healthy fruit plate option) opted for the sticky toffee pudding dessert (is that a redundancy?  I still don’t know).

Regardless of class implications and historical confusions, it was lovely.  Beautiful presentation (and yes, we all ate even the spun sugar and iced kumquat garnishes), wonderfully moist cake (aka pudding), delicate sauce and simple vanilla ice cream accompaniment made it plate-licking good (there I go again revealing my betrayal of all the good breeding my mother so desperately tried to instill in me at an early age – sorry Mom!).

ScotlandDay34: Rediscovering Rainbows

I’ve rediscovered rainbows since returning to Scotland.

We have rainbows where I live, but nowhere else that I’ve ever been has there been such an abundance of color exploding from the dark clouds in the rain-swept sky.

I’m no meteorologist, but I’m guessing that the fast-moving weather patterns, brought about by so much wind, allows for the blessing of the many rainbows above Scotland.

My kids are big fans of the ocean and all not-so-secretly hoped I’d take a call in some place like Florida or South Carolina, preferably with a beach-front property they could come and visit regularly for their annual sun quotient.  But I am much more a mountain gal and opted for a different direction.

Here is not a place I’d describe as the ‘beach’, which conjures for me the idea of warm sun and sand and crowds of people basking in the warmth and frolicking in the water.  Here, the water is almost always much too cold to spend much time in it.  Here, the rains are far too often to allow for sand wallowing.  Here, sandy shores are more for walking than sprawling upon.

Here, it is the sea that greets you.  Here, the winds force your body into a horizontal posture as you navigate the sand.  Here, the shoreline is more like the rough coast of the northern states of the US than the more gentle sands of the southern coastline.  Here, most days you can watch the storms far out to sea and wonder whether they’ll make it in to the shore or not.

Here, a rainbow is a respite, not a sign, a fleeting blessing, as fleeting as the sun.

Scotland - Day 33: Otter Crossings

The otter crossing signs here, like the one on A-77 on the way to Girvan, crack me up.  I have yet to see any otters slithering – shimmying – lurching – scooting – crawling – whatever it is that they do on dry land – across the road.  The image the road-crossing reference begs for is a good joke, as in Why did the otter cross the road?  To – . . . well, you fill in the blank.

But as with similar deer-crossing signs back home, I am always left with the question, How do they know?  How do ‘they’ (whoever ‘they’ are) know that this is where the otters will cross?  How do ‘they’ know that a one- or two-time event is actually a trend, a habit, a pattern?

If it’s so common that it needs a warning sign, why have I not seen any otters?!?

Of course, I really don’t want to see any otters while barreling down a country road at 55 mph or better.  But a hint, a peek, of an otter rearend as it's already made its way across would be nice – just some evidence that otters really do cross the road and that they cross it here would be nice.

As with so many things in life, I am left wondering without evidence from my own experience; and yet, when I see the sign, I do slow down, just in case.

The tension I run into (and maybe I’m not alone) is this: how do I know when I should take the signs posted along the road of life at face value and when I should take them with a grain of salt and when I shouldn’t take them at all?

Jesus chastized some questioners once about their inability to read the signs of the times.

But with all due respect to my Lord and Savior, it really isn’t always so easy.  Faith or no faith, blind-following vision or none at all, it isn’t always that easy to know when an otter crossing is really an otter crossing or when someone’s merely having me on.

The Flirting Tree

Like a girl

showing off

her newly 

painted fingers

See my nails?

Aren’t they pretty?

the tree

stands proudly

in the well-tended

woods and flirts

with passers-by

Things Are Not Always as They Seem

Yesterday’s visit to Culzean Castle was a feast for the senses.  It was a beautiful west-of-Scotland spring day: sun shining, wind blowing, clouds quickly scattered.  And the grounds of Culzean Castle are lovely.  The well-tended gardens, the swan pond, the nicely-kept walks through the woods all reveal treasures.  The smell of wild garlic wafted on the air; flowers in bloom, known and unknown, were a feast for the eyes.  Birdsong filled the air.  You could walk and walk in the darkness of the woods and forget that you were right on the sea, only to come across another opening and have it there before you.

At one point, we came onto some grounds well into our walkabout that opened to the sea and as we approached, I noticed a series of regular humps of ground, like the scalloped edges of an Irish-lace tablecloth.  Eagerly I walked forward to see what they could possibly be, only to discover a small canon set in each of the scallops.  I literally cried aloud in dismay and disappointment.

But what did I expect?  The main function of a castle from any age, after all, is that of the fortress.  It is truly terrible how often and how well the form and function of violence meld into an aesthetic of beauty.

Some of the early Reformers so eschewed beauty because of this very concern – that beauty can be such a seductress, tempting the beholder to believe that the beautiful is, by its very nature, the good – so often not the case.

Perhaps we are the problem, in that we ascribe to beauty both more and less than it actually has to offer.  A beautiful landscape is a beautiful landscape – or is it?  Knowing its history, its context, can change our very perception of its beauty (or lack thereof).

In Baghdad, there is an almost beatific sculpture of a woman pouring from a large pitcher into the urns surrounding her at her feet.  Such a serene, pastoral vision – until you know that she is Ali Baba’s handmaiden and that what she is doing is pouring boiling oil into the jars, which contain hidden men who planned to attack from their hiding places in the night.

I never know quite what to do with all of this.  My ancestors in the faith seem too extreme to me, repudiating, as some did, all forms of physical beauty; beauty seems as much a divine gift to me as is the air we breathe and the food we eat.  It nourishes us somehow.

But mistaking beauty for moral good won’t do either; there’s simply too much evidence to the contrary.

Living in the tension – that, I suspect, is the premier challenge of being human: accepting that very few, if any, of the things of this world are absolutely good or absolutely evil; taking it all in with provisional judgment – judgment willing to be changed with new or different information; seeing the beautiful in the ugly and the ugly in the beautiful – now that’s the job of a lifetime!