Sue Vincent's Daily Echo

Dear Don: Riddles and Runes

Posted on September 12, 2020 by Sue Vincent

Dear Don,

Yes, We had been wandering the moors… when have we ever been at Ilkley without me chomping at the bit to get up there? And I think we’d just come in from a wander in the moonlight too… though we would have stuck to the edges, unlike the first time I went back there after years of absence and was called up there in the dark…

The knots with which Loki is tied struck me… my first thought was the Knot of Isis, though that can have nothing to do with the image apart from its symbolic nature.

The ill-defined features on most of these early depictions make me wonder if they are only there to define the function of the senses, rather than to give an indication of personality, which is a human trait rather than a godly one, after all. We tell the tales of the gods, their stories couched in human form to aid our understanding, after all, not because we believe the Powers That Be really do behave like lecherous old men or spoiled brats.

And look how much grief has been caused by planting the seeds of misunderstanding by portraying divinities ‘out of character’. The image of the fair-skinned, long-haired, blue-eyed Jesus, wearing flowing robes contradicts the archaeological evidence for a man of his era and origins, for example. And how many times have we seen representations of Him as a mediaeval noble?

Continue reading at France & Vincent

Posted in albion, Books, Don and Wen | Tagged Aspatria, carved crosses, Gosforth, Loki, Odin | Leave a comment

Secret #midnighthaiku

Posted on September 12, 2020 by Sue Vincent

Posted in Photography, Poetry | Tagged dog, haiku, hide and seek, hope | 13 Comments

Going West: Back in Time

Posted on September 11, 2020 by Sue Vincent

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“This is for kids.” I detected a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Granted, the site has been made into an educational experience, but the fact remains that Castell Henllys is a real archaeological site and quite unique, for while it was being dug, it was also being reconstructed.

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“And?” Children we are, there are some things you are never too old for, regardless of years. It is a place where the imagination can step outside of time and range back over two thousand years and beyond to a moment when legends were born.

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The hillfort, once home to members of the Demetae tribe, sits high on a rocky outcrop, a little way inland from the coast and would have been a superb lookout point as well as making the site easily defensible. I had been there once before and there was just something about the place that had stayed in memory. If I wanted to be thought any weirder than usual, I’d say it felt a bit like coming home. It was familiar in a way that is difficult to explain… an instance of genetic or far memory, perhaps.

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The hillfort is hidden in the trees. Wild herbs, watercress and wild garlic still grow here, giving a clue to what those who called it home, some two thousand years ago, might have been able to find in the wooded slopes.

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A wicker fish trap lies beside the stream, birds and herbs are plentiful and supplemented by a tended herb garden… and anyway, there was a robin. We always get a robin when we are in the right place. And it had a totem pole…

Welcome to Castell Henllys, Pembrokeshire

Image © Derek Voller CCL

It also had pigs, the old fashioned kind that would have been familiar to our ancestors. Two of them, rooting around in the earth, tilling it with their noses, oblivious to the watchers and the robin, which seemed to be following us.

Continue reading at France & Vincent

Posted in Ancient sites, Birds, History, Photography, Stuart France and Sue Vincent, travel, Wales | Tagged archaeology, Castell Henllys, hilfort, Iron Age, pembrokeshire, round house, Wales | Leave a comment

Dear Wen: Riddles and Runes…

Posted on September 11, 2020 by Sue Vincent

Dear Wen,

Physical/Planetary is a rather startling juxtaposition as my old ‘letter-man’ might have put it.

The Cow and Calf incident may have to go down as one of the first recognisable instances of something or someone ‘pulling the plug’.

Am I correct in thinking that we had been wandering the moor earlier that evening?…

Yes, that rendition of the Loki Stone is much clearer. It shows his wrists and ankles bound. Or his elbows and knees. The former would, perhaps, make more sense. Bound together… Hmmm. It is a pity the top of the stone is missing. I would be severely tempted to expect a jester’s cap on his head, otherwise we are talking ‘horns’ which seems odd, to say the least.

I particularly like the way in this art the facial features are so blandly defined. This will no doubt be put down to a lack of ability, but one has to wonder…

‘I didn’t see his face. He was just ordinary. He might have been anybody.’

Continue reading at France & Vincent

Posted in albion, Books, Don and Wen | Tagged landscape, magic, mystery, Photography, psychology, story, writing | Leave a comment

Direction #midnighthaiku

Posted on September 11, 2020 by Sue Vincent

Posted in Photography, Poetry | Tagged choices, find the path, haiku | 3 Comments

On hold…

Posted on September 10, 2020 by Sue Vincent

The dog and I watched the dawn come up from the doorstep. We had seen the stars sparkle in the moonlight and watched the mistwraiths dance in the fields as the first pre-dawn light crept over the horizon. It was a lovely moment, but not one we had been expecting to share. We should both have been a long way from home.

I had just loaded the last of the bags into the car yesterday when the phone rang. The dog was ready to go and another five minutes would have seen us on our way north, all calls blocked until I stopped driving.

For the life of me, I couldn’t see why the surgery was calling. Maybe they were getting the flu jabs lined up early? I wasn’t worried. I’d only had the X-ray a couple of hours earlier and the results would take at least a week, so it didn’t even occur to me that the proverbial rug was about to be pulled from under my feet.

Except, the health system can move fast when it feels a need.

Within the next few minutes, it became apparent that, if I had any sense, I was going nowhere except back in the scanner. Could it not wait till I came back? No, it really could not, apparently. Not quite the holiday I had in mind… and that upset me more than anything else. I really need a break and I hate letting people down. And I don’t much fancy spending my birthday as the jam in the middle of the CT doughnut.

For the rest, it was more of a relief than anything. There actually is a reason for the pain and fatigue that has been bugging me all year. It is not just a stressed body and mind… or an ageing carer seeking attention, as one never-to-be-forgiven doctor suggested. The dark mass in my lung is real. We just need to find out now what it is. So, with a five minute margin, the journey north was cancelled.

There is a cruel irony to that, when we were, once again, planning on meeting Mary Smith at Cairn Holy. And let us not forget the darker irony of Covid, which has made seeing a doctor at all both difficult and guilt-ridden. I wonder just how many, like me, have felt it unfair to ‘bother’ the doctor about ‘minor’ health problems until they got out of hand? As this has been going on for so long already, I also wonder if waiting till after the Scotland trip would really have made a great deal of difference…

Be that as it may, we did not go, the confused dog may not forgive me… and Scotland will still be beautiful whether we are there to see it or not.

Posted in Photography | Tagged covid, Dogs, health, Scotland, travel | 61 Comments

Going West: First Flight

Posted on September 10, 2020 by Sue Vincent

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We had watched the swallows in the hotel car-park, marvelling at their mastery of the air and swift, graceful flight and delighting in the first, tentative flutters as the baby swallows left the nest for the first time. We have had some beautiful encounters with swallows, but this was special. You could feel the excitement as the babies tumbled gracelessly from their perch, expecting to emulate their parents and finding they had no idea what to do with their wings. They came to land in the most inappropriate places and I had been down and ushered one of the stranded babies out of the path of the cars.

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One crash-landed on the little balcony outside the window and we watched, with some concern, its refusal to move at all. Still, it was a rare and beautiful thing to watch through a crack in the curtains as the parent birds flew in, hovering and flapping their wings, encouraging and demonstrating to the tiny creature just what it needed to do.

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Night drew in and the baby was still there, away from its nest in the chill rain. I fretted, knowing that the parent birds were still caring for their chick, so there was nothing I could do but let Nature handle it. She has more experience than I where baby swallows are concerned. Even so, sleep was a long time coming.

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Next morning, the first thing I did was peep through the curtains. It hadn’t moved. But it was no longer alone… one of its nest-mates had joined it and the pair of them huddled close in the pale light. Checking, every few minutes, I saw the parent bird return and try again to get them to flap their wings. Still nothing from the chicks, though now they were both perched on the edge of the balcony.

Continue reading at France & Vincent

Posted in baby birds, Birds, Photography, Stuart France and Sue Vincent, travel, Wales, wildlife | Tagged daring to be yourself, embracing being, fear | Leave a comment

The Entered Dragon (6) : figures in the mist ~ Steve Tanham

Posted on September 10, 2020 by Sue Vincent

Continued from Part Five

Centre stage, the King smiles at us. His gaze is strong but gentle. As our eyes touch his, we feel the sense of purpose he holds. Courage and force reflect in the subtle colours that draw us into his very being. We feel renewed by this contact, shown that the burden of what we must face in the day-world is only a necessary stage in our lives; that the sense of inner royalty he represents will carry us far beyond its confines – if only we will hold those eyes…

The scene pans backwards from the purposeful orbs. The gentle hands of the Queen still rest on his shoulders. She smiles, knowing that we have absorbed the essence of this encounter. She brings her face closer to that of the King, and, as their skin touches, we feel her perfumed presence close to our own. It races through our being, filling us with a love and longing that leaves us agape.

Continue reading at The Silent Eye

Posted in Photography | Tagged Active Imagination, archetypes, Carl Jung, The Shadow Self | Leave a comment

Photo prompt round-up: Serenity #writephoto

Posted on September 10, 2020 by Sue Vincent

Seeking solitude

Being lost to find oneself

Nature’s healing touch

The photo for this week’s prompt was taken on the estuary looking across to Edinburgh in Scotland… where I should be by the time this is published!

We liked these photos so much that we used one on the cover of our book, Beck ‘n’ Call.

Please note that there will be no writephoto prompt for the next two weeks as I will be away from the computer…and hopefully without any kind of wi-fi signal at all 🙂

My apologies for a dearth of comments this week…time ran out on me. Thank you to everyone who took part, visited or reblogged the posts or left comments for their authors.

All the posts are listed below, so please click on the links below to read them and leave a comment for the author!

Pingbacks do not always come through… if you have written a post for this challenge and it does not appear in the round-up, please leave a link to your post in the comments and I will add it to the list.

An invitation to writephoto writers…

As there are usually too many contributions to reblog all of them every week, and so that we can get to know their writers, I would like to invite all writephoto writers to come and introduce themselves on the blog as my guest! Click here for details.

Come and join in!