Retrospect

Sometimes I could almost pinch myself. Did I really go to Easter  Island in the autumn of 2009? 

The photographs I took there prove that I did. It was a dream come true. There was nowhere on this planet that I wanted to visit more than Easter Island. You can hold a globe in a certain position and it looks as though half of Earth is The Pacific Ocean.

It is massive  and yet the tiny islands that are dotted about The Pacific were populated by Polynesians long before there had been any contact with Europeans. The most distant and remotest island they reached was Rapa Nui - later to be known as Easter Island or Isla de Pascua.

Everyone has seen pictures of the famous "moai" heads. The image is iconic. There are over nine hundred moai statues on the island  and they all faced inland - not out to the endless ocean. They were inward looking, not outward.

It was a world within a world, like a different planet. A society that thrived for perhaps three hundred years in isolation and then declined till when the first white sailors appeared its heyday was long gone. The people who made the moai were already beyond living memory.

I would go back in a heartbeat to walk about the moai once again, to hear the echoes of a lost civilisation, to look out across the wide Pacific, to close my eyes and imagine the first dugout canoes that landed there long ago. Easter Island - the stuff of dreams and legends. Yes - I was there.



from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/3efNvOi

Cwtch

 

I “do” old friends.
I always have done.
Today I met Cheryl, a mate of 35 years long-standing 
We Met in a frigid outdoor restaurant during a rainstorm 
And afterwards we hugged and hugged and hugged as we are now allowed to do in Wales


from Going Gently https://ift.tt/33bHRq9

My flaw

 In your World

You tell us

to refrain

From anger

Lord

I'm angry 

at myself

Who knew

the hardest 

person

to forgive 

would be 

the one

I can't bear

to look 

at in

the mirror

having to be honest

to grow

Acceptance

at its root

Problems

aren't fixed

until they're faced

I have rebelled 

help me conform

to Your will

Mine fails

every time

I always seem

to need reminders

that my strength 

will fade

While Yours

Doesn't

I replay

every mistake

each foible 

release me

from my need

for control

it's elusive 

and exhausting



from R's rue https://ift.tt/3ujc56s