Merry Mount: Our Place on the Circle of Life

Sometime in the wee morning on January 21^st (Rett’s BD), “BEA” died.  She was Beatrice (from the Latin Beatrix, which means “she who makes happy”), one of eleven hens who reside in the hen house at Merry Mount and provide fresh brown eggs for us.   Bea was a spunky young hen, always competing to grab a bread scrap before it hit the ground and who elevated herself to the top of the peckin’ order in the chicken coop.  Cause of death? Unknown.

Merry Mount is an approximately three-acre plot in Madison County, Ohio where one can experience the circle of life.  A carcass can be buried and immediately thousands of microbes breakdown the body and if daffodil bulbs are planted nearby, within time, beautiful yellow cups lift their heads toward the sun.

From the day we arrive on the planet
And blinking, step into the sun
There's more to be seen than can ever be seen
More to do than can ever be done

Some say eat or be eaten
Some say live and let live
But all are agreed as they join the stampede
You should never take more than you give

In the circle of life
It's the wheel of fortune
It's the leap of faith
It's the band of hope
'Til we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the circle, the circle of life

Some of us fall by the wayside
And some of us soar to the stars
And some of us sail through our troubles
And some have to live with the scars

There's far too much to take in here
More to find than can ever be found
But the sun rolling high through the sapphire sky
Keeps great and small on the endless round

In the circle of life
It's the wheel of fortune
It's the leap of faith
It's the band of hope
'Til we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the circle, the circle of life

It's the wheel of fortune
It's the leap of faith
It's the band of hope
'Til we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the circle, the circle of life

On the path unwinding, yeah
In the circle, the circle of life

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Elton John / Tim Rice

Circle of Life lyrics © Walt Disney Music Company

CPW

A Place to Remember

This photo accompanied an article entitled, “This is One of the Most Beautiful States in America-But I Bet You Can’t Find It on a Map” by Teddy Minford.  I immediately exclaimed to myself, “I’ll take your bet and double it!”  The answer is Idaho and I would have won the bet.

My mind was subsequently flooded with wonderful memories.  In 1976, five months after Rett and I were married, we departed Tennessee for a state that a few months earlier we had to look up on a map and that our only association was with potatoes.  What an adventure!  We were young, brave, and foolish and were happy to have employment. Little did we know what beauty we were soon to behold.

During the summer of 1977, we discovered the awesome beauty of the Sawtooth Mountains including Redfish Lake.  We remember cooking freshly caught trout on an open campfire for dinner as we watched the sun set over the mountain range mirrored on Redfish Lake. Stunning!

Memory is our ability to encode, store, retain and subsequently recall information and past experiences in the human brain. It can be thought of in general terms as the use of past experience to affect or influence current behavior.

-       https://human-memory.net/what-is-memory/

Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain so yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a young and callow fellow,
Try to remember and if you remember then follow.

Try to remember when life was so tender
That no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That love was an ember about to billow.
Try to remember and if you remember then follow.

Deep in December it's nice to remember
Although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember
Without a hurt the heart is hollow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember
The fire of September that made you mellow.
Deep in December our hearts should remember then follow.

One model of memory known as the levels-of-processing model was proposed by Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart in 1972, and posits that memory recall, and the extent to which something is memorized, is a function of the depth of mental processing, on a continuous scale from shallow (perceptual) to deep (semantic). Under this model, there is no real structure to memory and no distinction between short-term and long-term memory.

Idaho 

1861 as a place name, originally applied by U.S. Congress to a proposed territorial division centered in what is now eastern Colorado; said at the time to mean "Gem of the Mountains" but probably rather from Kiowa-Apache (Athabaskan) idaahe "enemy," a name applied by them to the Comanches. Modern Idaho was organized 1861 as a county in Washington Territory; in 1863 became a territory in its own right and it was admitted as a state in 1890.

-       https://www.etymonline.com/word/idaho

My memory of Redfish Lake certainly substantiates “Gem of the Mountains”.

CPW

A Call for Restraint

A Call for Restraint

From:  https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/outbreak-of-world-war-i#section_3

Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a great friend of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, met with him in mid-June 1914 to discuss the tense situation in the Balkans. Two weeks later, on June 28, Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were in Sarajevo to inspect the imperial armed forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina. 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, a member of the nationalist Young Bosnia movement, assassinated Archduke Ferdinand on that date. 

In order to maintain its credibility as a force in the Balkan region (let alone its status as a great power), Austria-Hungary needed to enforce its authority in the face of such an insolent crime. However, with the threat of Russian intervention looming and its army unprepared for a large-scale war, it required Germany's help to back up its words with force. Emperor Franz Josef wrote a personal letter to Kaiser Wilhelm requesting his support, and on July 6 German Chancellor Theobald Bethmann Hollweg informed Austrian representatives that Vienna had Germany's full support.

On July 23, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador to Serbia delivered an ultimatum: The Serbian government must take steps to wipe out terrorist organizations within its borders, suppress anti-Austrian propaganda and accept an independent investigation by the Austro-Hungarian government into Franz Ferdinand's assassination, or face military action. After Serbia appealed to Russia for help, the czar's government began moving towards mobilization of its army, believing that Germany was using the crisis as an excuse to launch a preventive war in the Balkans. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28. On August 1, after hearing news of Russia's general mobilization, Germany declared war on Russia. The German army then launched its attack on Russia's ally, France, through Belgium, violating Belgian neutrality and bringing Great Britain into the war as well.

Over the next four years, the Great War (as World War I was then called) would grow to involve Italy, Japan, the Middle East and the United States, among other countries. More than 20 million soldiers died and 21 million more were wounded, while millions of other people fell victim to the influenza epidemic that the war helped to spread.

The war left in its wake three ruined imperial dynasties (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey) and unleashed the revolutionary forces of Bolshevism in another (Russia). In the end, the uneasy peace brokered at Versailles in 1919 kept tensions in check for less than two decades before giving way to another devastating world war.

With regard to our current situation with Iran, an un-named American contractor was killed in Iraq by a rocket allegedly launched by an Iranian militia. The attack on the U.S. embassy earlier this week was reportedly in response to a series of U.S. airstrikes that killed 25 militia fighters on Sunday. That strike was in turn in retaliation for a rocket strike on an Iraqi military compound that killed a U.S. defense contractor and injured U.S. and Iraqi service members.

Who is the aggressor?

CPW