Large Fierce Mammal

The seemingly lowly leaf of the Bay Laurel tree, but appearances are deceiving. (Source here)

In this age of divided loyalties and unending crisis, some cower. Some assert themselves from the perceived safety of throngs screaming a common slogan understood differently by each throat and hearing ear. Some look to a saviour. Still others understand that if there is a saviour, in the hour of need it’s going to have to be them because the “first responder” in that moment is already there well before any finger dials 911.

Of those latter, some label themselves and others as “sheep dogs”, “wolves”, and “sheeple”. Their every move, the way they dress, the words they speak, the tattoos they wear and the bumper stickers they apply to their vehicles, identifies their chosen way of being, because a lot of them want everyone to know it.

The risks associated with much of what one sees abroad upon the land, including that part of the land called “the Internet”, are obvious. Unless you’ve chosen your audience with discretion, you are making yourself a target. Anyone can be gotten to no matter how prepared, but he sleeps best who doesn’t hide a key to the back door of his castle in plain sight.

But there is another subset that is both well represented and hard to spot unless you know what you’re looking for, and that’s the point. I speak of the Grey Man — variously defined as, “An average, forgettable man who does not draw attention or stand out in a crowd.” Note that this isn’t a recent development. Spies and assassins have been doing it forever.

Sheep dog, wolf, sheep, grey man, however you see yourself, I am here tonight to tell you that all of these epithets fall short of the mark you should be aspiring for.

I say, be as the Bay Leaf.

Be As The Bay Leaf

By LFM

The unassuming Bay Leaf, known to ancient Greece and Rome
Is in your kitchen, like as not, and in most every home.
To leave it out when called for is impossible to hide,
“What does it do?” is understood by everyone who’s tried.

It looks like many common leaves you’d find a day afield,
And whoever first espied its ways is ne’er to be revealed,
Much is lost from then to now for mysteries remain,
And he who’d name it “common” would had better think again!

The Bay is what it is no matter what travails befall,
Boil it, bake it, steep it, it will stand before them all,
Coming out unaltered ere it joined the bill of fare,
And leaving things much better for its simply being there.

And he who fain would masticate this gentle leaf of power
Will find himself in battle pressed more hotly by the hour,
For even when its done its job, Bay’s vigour isn’t spent,
With back of throat sensations urging sinners to repent!

To staunchest chews it shows disdain to hold its shape and poise,
To swallow any part forbids the utterance of noise,
So bring the best to everything you touch whate’er befall,
And hold thee to this guidance, be as Bay Leaves one and all.

Back on Day 8 we had Pig. Today, Oh Sheep!, a six-and-a-half minute dark comedy in the form of an animated short film from the ever fruitful Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg GmbH., brought to my attention by the Filmbilder & Friends YouTube channel. (more…)

Still Life With Feathers and Tincture (Mrs. LFM — click to enbiggen) Read on for more on this.

The elements of the picture at the top of tonight’s Dark Sentiment combine thoughts placed here seven years ago as Dark Sentiments Season 8 — Day 3: Of Mini-miracles, Odd Synchronicities, and Sublime Messages, and more recently in On the Weihnachtsjäger Trail.

The feather gifted to me, and spoken of in the former, is the longer of the two. A jar of tincture made from the Monotropa Uniflora (Indian Pipe in the vulgar tongue which we will employ from here) spoken of in the latter provides the support all else rests upon, and brings us directly to the story of the yellow feather with its black tip and white quill.

That feather is from a Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus), a species of woodpecker common to my environs. Notwithstanding the common nature of its source, this specific feather came into my possession by the kind of uncommon circumstances that most would consider coincidental, mildly unusual perhaps, but otherwise in no way representative of any form of “Communication“. But I am not “most”.

My discovery of Indian Pipe, and equally its discovery of me, is a story for another day. The matter of the Flicker feather came from the second year of my studies into the Nature of its Medicine and my finding that unlike the previous year, it had begun appearing in  the woods very near my home. Leaving there to walk straight into the woods one soon found a well worn path that went at first straight from its start for about 30 paces, then made a 90 degree right turn to run straight another six paces, before making another 90 degree turn, this time to the left, and thence running straight through for a distance that has no bearing on this story.

Indian Pipe begins to make its appearance here in July and so I begin looking for it from the first week of that month. So it was that in the second week of that July, and on a whim, I headed off into those woods and just after making the first right turn on the aforementioned path espied a large eruption of Indian Pipe pushing up through the carpet of pine needles directly ahead of me, just off the path where it made its left turn. The plant’s colour and position made it impossible to miss, and drawing closer to examine it, I soon learned that the number of stalks was even larger than first appeared, with many still hidden beneath the loam. Turning back homeward, I immediately spotted another growth nearly as big to the left of the short central path in the dog leg formed by the 90 degree bends, and another very small one — no more than three stalks by appearances at the time and much smaller in height and stalk thickness than the rest — growing about a pace and a half off the path, on the edge of a small clearing where we would occasionally go to picnic. (more…)

Representative sample of a “best day ever” highlighting both the ephemeral nature and extreme subjectivity of the interpretation. (Buffalo Hunt by self-described “Artist by night”, deskridge. See more on the Artist’s website here. Click to enlarge.)

“Best day ever!”

An all too common utterance from the mouths of the same subset of the Great Unwashed who seasonally prattle on about their “Resolution” for a new year, and the check boxes (most of them fated to remain unchecked) on their “bucket list”.

Spoken as though the speaker is dead but refuses to acknowledge it. Like there’s only one such day to a customer and they’ll never have another. As though they’re the same person frozen in stasis from the moment they became a vampire a week before puberty kicked in so their sense of what a “best day” even is will remain forever stunted.

As offspring of Adventurers, the LFM Sons are steeped continuously in an atmosphere of teachable moments hung on a framework of mental and physical challenge. Their understanding of people, heritage, Tools, the meaning of being the Animal called Human. Food, its flavours and contexts, meaning and origins, stand in extreme contrast to that of not only their contemporaries but a large component of the “adult” population within their sphere. As vital contrast, all this is backlit by Tradition and Ancestral History.

It is not unusual to hear some variant of the utterance, “Best day ever!” coming from one of them on the trail, at the serving of a meal, or a combination of the two seasoned with some wider experience. Occasionally the question is asked of me or their Incomparable Mother — “What was YOUR best day ever?” — uttered from an understanding drawn of their own lived experience that life is dynamic, and so a “Best day” of a month ago may have since been supplanted in the new reality of the one being asked.

For my part, and in answer to that question, I certainly  have had, and fully expect to have, many Best days, however none of them will be Best ever, nor even Best so far. That would imply I indulge in some kind of sorting or grading system and that, my fine Boys, runs a bit too close to examining the dentition of an equine endowment for my liking. The final ruling on my own Best days will come when I stop having days altogether, but I will posit that at that point, I will have had the Best of everything Real and True in this world.

To that I would add that a Life well Lived is not about seeking and experiencing a single “Best” day, but rather “Best” days that are part of a larger framework of Worthiness. Worthiness for the Day, and for the very Best of travelling companions.

Secret Ingredients

By LFM

Seek for those things that need to be sought,
Catch onto those things that need to be caught.
Teach thou those things that must needs be taught,
Then repeat all again lest life matter for nought.

Source here.

Back on Day 3 we had a word from Maestro Adam Crown that, if you haven’t yet heard, you should go and lend an ear to now. We’ll be hearing from him again tonight as we look at a question that is both Naturally simple, and made more vulnerable thereby to being convoluted by certain elements in society to benefit the dark side. The road to Hell and all that.

He achieves no benefit to himself or the greater good who willfully undertakes to render himself harmless. He may be made that way no matter what, but to intentionally follow that path is not, in itself to assume a mantle of goodness and moral virtue. Rather, that one who is willing and able to bring force to bear in the face of imminent harm or death, has studied the realities of such encounters to the point where his skills aren’t limited to those of the fight, and willfully looks first to every other reasonable option beginning simply with his way of being in the world — that one, I posit, may lay claim to the epithet of “good” vessels of moral virtue because they are decidedly not harmless. Although only those bent on committing outrages upon him and that which he holds dear, will ever meet that side of him, their number tends to include a subset of the aforementioned “harmless” who find disquiet in in its mere existence.
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Source here. Click to enlarge.

People really need to be careful of the tattoos they get put on themselves. Marking yourself with a character from an Asian language you don’t speak yourself, only to find out too late that it means something embarrassing, isn’t even close to being the worst thing that could happen. Some languages were never meant to be spoken by human tongues.

Who Ate Cock Robin?

By LFM

Dark and edgy, brooding, wafting airs of dark intent,
The way you dress, the words you speak,
Ne’er meaning what is meant.
The books you have on proud display
O’er one apartment wall,
All speak of darksome magicks
And you claim you’ve read them all.
Your fingers gleam with silver
Formed as pentagrams and skulls,
Their light calls to the edgy girls
As rotten fish to gulls.
And further down another mark,
For favoured ones to see,
The tattoo ’round your boyish pride’s
What sent its call to me.
A black cat drinking absinthe’s
How you see yourself tonight,
I see but a kitten that has had its last delight.
I’m that beauty in the corner you’ve been eyeing for an hour,
Now drink up boy and come along, you’ve something I’d devour.

“Society collapses as a group of animals exploit a sleeping pig by connecting a power grid to its snout. Watch as they deplete their resources and keep lookin’ cute while they do it!” ~ Pig

Welcome back Goode Pilgrim.

Tonight’s Dark Sentiment, Pig, is a short film that does what speculative fiction is intended to do — take a known set of circumstances and run with them through a cohesive tale to an outcome that you may or may not resemble. Best of all to my mind, notwithstanding its obvious environmental “to Hell in a handcart” framing, this film carries a stout dose of “fuck around, find out, and not learn a god damned thing”. Because there’s always another pig, right?
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Origami Demon Heart as presented in Fearsome Origami Devils and Demons (Click the image to enbiggen)

Paper as an element of expression is not limited to a simple passive platform for paint or ink, and tonight’s Dark Sentiment offers two delightful examples from that other fold — Origami. (more…)

Curiosity Shop, NemoArrigo (Source here)

It is a not uncommon experience among Writers to feel as though the words being put upon the page are being dictated from somewhere else. So it is with tonight’s Dark Sentiment.

A nonsense poem of sorts, Dudley’s Shop was written in a state of flow, exactly as you see it here, and while it contains manifestations of old time wisdom, I can offer no other meaning.

See if you can find any.

Dudley’s Shop

By LFM

Dudley runs an antique shop that is exceeding odd,
It has such things as spoiled the child — the very spare-ed rod!
The pot that watched would never boil, it hangs there on a hook,
Emblazoned with a label warning buyers not to look.

On the ceiling hangs a lantern, and the brilliant light it lends
Comes from but a single candle, burning fiercely at both ends.
There’s a peephole in a panel where a favoured few that tries
May find pleasure in the viewing of a sight that cures sore eyes.

Dudley even has a stable down the hallway past the loos,
Where a man to see about a horse awaits as you may choose,
And further back, a pen of swine lies through another door,
Every one for sale complete with pearls to cast before.

The barn cat’s even odder than the beasts it lies among,
Returned by scores of buyers with complaints it got their tongue.
The tree that stands beside the barn calls nearby dogs to song,
And those that do bark up it are invariably wrong.

Notwithstanding its fallaciousness, each dog that deigns to bay
Cries out in joyful knowing that it’s sure to have its day.
The place is built from trees cut five score years ago December,
The axe forgetting in the shed, though all the planks remember.

They creak their tales beneath the feet that come to browse the wares,
Through rooms where discontented men will find no easy chairs,
But discontent’s not Dudley, nor the horse behind the cart
And those rare days of his absence raise the fondness of his heart.

Widowed now a dozen years, the shop to calm his grief,
Dudley lives the promise that he made ere death’s relief,
So as when nothing’s broken there will be no need to fix it,
A promise is a promise however many times he licks it.

Sword, Pistols, and Teacup — James Reeve Stuart (1834 – 1915) (Source here)

“All this to bring us here tonight where no man is of a piece, unless that’s all you’ve left of him.” ~ Dark Sentiments Season 15 — Day 2: Authority

With your blood clearly still up from last night’s Sword Dance, I would be remiss in abandoning the saga of Donald McBane whose early experiments in “take your kid to work day”, examined through the lens of 20-20 hindsight, would be unlikely to win him a Father of the Year Award, in any time and place.

But that being said, we here understand there are times, and places, that fall into the sweet spot lying between “no other options” and “it seemed like a good idea at the time”. (more…)