while you were sleeping,
it slithered through your grass.
now it lives, with more slithering things
in your yard, in your house, in your garage
while it feeds on fear and tyranny,
the original sin clothed in governing.
but you have not been crafted for peasantry
nor woven in the depths with hostile hands.
She hides in plain sight,
her brown blending
with earth...suddenly not so horizontal.
it is only because I stop to attend to my own nature,
that she appears at all…
which begs the question…
what else did I miss on my journey?
it is a question few ask until that rugged edge of time-
passing into an unplanned quadrant-
suddenly without a spouse, without a plan, without a head of hair.
somewhere between someone’s somewhere, and someone's nowhere.
on a road regularly driven in the center, to avoid wandering off
to fall precipitously hundreds of feet below
an unexplainable statistic
for this unfortunate soul, nature was kind to her
to cover her with creeping vines, soft leaves, and soft moss
where one can genuflect the vacancy marked by a cross.
For thou art more neath round yonder sun
Thou art more than dust and roses
Thou are the reflection of a Creator
Though thy bones rot beneath the sod.
If you woke up this morning, God gave you another day on Earth to do the right thing. You are not promised tomorrow. Today is the day of salvation.
If you are awake now, ready to go to bed, to sleep, remember, you have been given another night. If He wakes you tomorrow morning, will you give Him thanks for every person you meet? Will you share His love with those people you meet?
We were made to love as the creator loves- selflessly. While the enemy of our souls seeks to sow fear and hatred, reject the way of the worldly, and be the person God desires you to be. Love as Christ loves.
As a child, I would sit on the carpeted floor at the county library reading through juvenile books while my father would wander "the stacks," a cramped area where adults had to search through smaller books in a labyrinth of rows. It amazed me that I could, if given the opportunity, read through two or three books, then find others to take home, all while my father found himself lost in the stacks.
So many years later, I still remember the titles or faces of some of those books, with occasional flashes of memory, or a strange name appearing in my mind at the most unusual of times.
If I did not read all the books of Eilis Dillon, it wasn't because I did not want to. If I did not read every Madeline book, it wasn't because I tired of the little French watercolor, it was because someone had checked out the book I wanted.
I have fond memories of that library and the beige carpet. It was in that space that I found so many stories that probably helped contribute to my own storytelling skills at such a young age.
But it was not always that way. I remember the first readers in school. I remember some phonics, some mixture of sight recognition, but no one method of acquiring reading skills.
This was before I found solace on the beige carpet. I'd sit in the circle as we read aloud. "See Flip run. See Jane run. See Flip and Jane run." It was dull. It was stupid. And I was bored out of my mind. I could not understand why we only read three or four pages at a session.
Finally, one day, I took my book home with me. That day I read the rest of the entire reader. I went back to school the next day and wondered aloud why we weren't moving on to other books.
I went through On Cherry Street so fast the teacher was embarrassed. I went to the school library. While there were books in that library, there were few interesting ones, and certainly none with the kind of story that would enthrall a child who had passed all the reading levels "allowed" in his grade.
The education system there was so poor that many of us lost interest in the texts used.
But in the county library, I was free to roam like a buffalo on the plains. I had a home to roam while my father...or mother...was preoccupied looking for that one book. Meanwhile, I was accumulating enough books to need a bag to carry them all home.
If the books in that library helped give me a desire to be a reader, imagine what you can do by taking your child to the library. Let your child search through the level-appropriate books. Encourage them to take several books for the week.
Your son or daughter may not become an author, but they will gain an appreciation for reading, and thereby, an appreciation for learning. And reading is just the beginning of that journey.
The works presented on this site are mine, created by me without any touch of artificial intelligence. All individual works, in the form of posts, are copyrighted by International Copyright Law and are the property of Daithi Fleming. No portion may be used as part of a whole of original creation of another, in any disseminated form, but each passage must adhere to standard copyright laws, citing ownership of the passage quoted, and adhering to international law.
My profile narrative contains one line meant to remind readers of that protection. I am disseminating this information in this form because there are many throughout the world unaware of these international creative protections under the law.
There was a time, in a corner of a shingle of Christendom, when more than your fair share of men were "pregnant" with opportunit...