Musiolarise

           During one of my recent walks I took the photo above.  The green hill is a  dike along the Ohio River; the trail is on the river side. I thought about the church as a symbol of God and  how it takes effort to connect to Him, as represented by climbing to the top of the dike.  To meet God we need to climb higher -- stretch our spirits toward Him.        In thinking  of the dike I'm reminded of the old animated movie The Secret of NIMH  and the owl's counsel to Mrs. Brisby-a mouse-who was asking him for a way to save her family from the spring plow. The old owl told her to move her family to the lee of the stone.  The lee of the stone was the backside of a nearby rock in the field she lived in; the spring plowing was about to begin and the stone would protect her home from being destroyed by it.  Dikes protect us from floods, but only on the far side.  Climb to the safe side...

      This morning I saw a hummingbird for the first time in my backyard of almost 3 years.  She was checking out my orange marigold plant, the only living thing in our two elevated garden beds. This spring I tried growing marigolds to fill one of the beds but the seedlings didn't make it.  However, I noticed that one I had not sprouted had  grown in the planter they were in last year. This volunteer is now about 4 times bigger than any that I grew then!   This is where I saw the hummingbird feeding.  Sometimes gardens give us pleasant surprises!

      Earlier this week, feeling very sore, tired and grumpy, I decided to rest and escape with an episode of a Chinese drama I'm watching, The Longest Promise.   I'm a fan of xianxia, a genre of Chinese fantasy dramas set in ancient China, one of the reasons being that  I sometimes find  moral messages in them.  The stories are kind of like extended fables or fairy tales.        An episode I recently watched took place in the Abyss of Resentment.  This place was a lower world, part of what one might think of as hell.  It was dark and barren, with foreboding cliffs, dangerous narrow paths and an extremely deep abyss, the bottom of which was obscured by fog or smoke.  The escape route crossed a hanging bridge made of  long, large twisted tree branches all of which were  barren.  The  path had many gaps of varying sizes between the twists and uneven bumps.      A man and youn...