Remember now
In all the gloom
Within your mind
To make some room
So in the dark
No time to dwell
We must make haste
To break the spell
To not get caught
In all the fear
And have a focus
Something clear
A feeling maybe
Or thoughts of good
Some quiet time
To be calmly stood
And take a moment
From what you see
Get back to the point
Of just trying to be
~
Yourself
(c) K Wicks
Repost: A trip to the garden centre bought a very special treat while living in Spain a few years ago. I purchase a bright and colourful gaillardia and a heliotrope in the hope of attracting some extra bees to our garden. My love of macro photography needed subjects to come to us, it was too hot in Spain during the summer to go very far on foot, and standing still trying to take photographs meant instant sweating on the spot. I needed them to come to me. Flowers purchased, we returned home and put them in the terraced yard on a table to keep them away from the floors, very hot tiles don’t help plant roots.
Later that day, I had re-potted the plants and given them some water and what do I find? A praying mantis, a cute small adorable little praying mantis! I couldn’t believe it.
But, not only did we find one mantis – but shortly after on the same day, we spotted a second one, excited beyond belief at that point. This one was different though, the first find being a European Mantis, the second one appeared to be an Orchid Mantis or Conehead Mantis nymph, still not sure.
We only had less than a month to enjoy the smaller of the two before nature took its course. They were not contained in any way yet chose to remain on the table in the yard with an array of colourful bright plants to have as their home. But had I known about their temperament, I would have given them separate areas. They are very territorial it turns out and will eat anything that moves, even their own kind. So, within a month we were down to one mantis, but that one was with us for months. We got to see him grow bigger, see him shed and turn into a fully grown mantis. He could have left at any time but didn’t, he stayed and every morning was exciting, to see if he was still there. Being relieved when he was. We had a great number of geckos living there too and at night they would crawl over the walls looking for tasty morsels, so we pulled the table away from the wall to give him a chance.
The time came for us to move, we were heading up into the mountains as a change to coastal living, we were looking for a place to settle and wanted to try all options first. I could not bring myself to leave our little mantis there, it was a stark terrace without our plants and although there were lots of flowers in watered areas, the rest of the area was pretty dry – also being just at the end of a hot summer. So I decided he was coming with us, his adventure would continue in the mountains with a wild garden surrounding us and lots more flora and fauna. He seemed to take to it well, and remarkably stayed in the little mandarin tree I placed him in, safe from the geckos (up there we had more than before), and with lots of bees and flies coming and going for a food. But lets be fair, he had the whole of the outside, he didn’t really need my help.
But there did come the day, about a month after we moved and the temperature was starting to drop, that he didn’t come out of his little tree to say hello. And no matter how hard I looked (in the tree it had become a bit of a Where’s Wally/Waldo game), one day he just wasn’t there. I knew it was coming but it was still harsh and took a bit of fun out of the morning for a while. I like to think he left to go mating and have the life of a mantis rather than anything else. It turns out up there was very habitable for mantises and we saw an array of different ones the following summer. I saw him eat plenty of insects so it’s not unreasonable to think nature took him too (or even another mantis) – and eventually time would have anyway as apparently they only live for around a year. Nature is cruel, but beautiful at the same time. This was a unique experience and one I cherish.
Bobby Mantis
(c) K Wicks
Have decided to try something different and teach myself how to do nighttime fantasy forest scenes. Here is my latest one 🥰
(c) K Wicks
There have been stirs in the world of psychiatry recently, as well as the extended branch of it which is where the issue has arisen, the pharmaceutical area. A rather damning article, referencing a rather damning paper of evidence, published only last month – The chemical imbalance theory of depression is dead detailing these findings. Yet change is not that swift in the real world of medicine, not by a long shot. As of today, it is still clearly noted on the NHS website “It’s thought that SSRIs work by increasing serotonin levels in the brain”.
The fall-out from this on the ground though is what is important, not whether they can agree or not. It’s real people who have been living with difficulties for quite some time in some cases, taking medication that they are now hearing, may in fact be useless. And these medications are not without risk, the side effects leaflets are really quite scary. And speaking as someone who has taken them, and suffered side effects, I can attest to that. They were enough to make me stop taking them, and try and assess what it was in my life that was making me feel so unbalanced, or unstable, or emotional. Taking into account everything, not just cherry picking the bits that seemed to fit at the time. I wanted to feel on an even keel, and I never did while taking pharmaceutical medications. And also coming to learn with age, that many of those feelings were actually perfectly normal for the situation at hand, or the time of life I found myself in.
But it seems there is much being revealed of late about what the effects of all these drugs really are, aside from the actual known side effects. I have written about it slightly in my article Memory, covering painkillers, and have given thought over the years to it anyway. And it seems an odd thing, and has for a while, that you would expect your body to regulate and balance itself, while taking something that is fundamentally intefering with that, on an enhanced specialised chemical level no less.
Thoughts, thought processes and emotional impulses are all working together, most the time for most people anyway, and if you encounter an overload it can tip the balance and destabilise the system. I guess they believe by shutting down or dampening one of these systems, it can relieve the pressure as it were. And I get it, in theory the idea is sound. But it’s on the premise that we are all wired mentally the same, and we are all capable of dealing with said chemical changes, hence the prescriptions seems to be at an alarming rate these days. That is not the case, as we well know, with awful suicide rates and more mental illness being identified or labelled to deal with what they say is the rise in mental illness. And I don’t deny there is a problem, we have a weird, shitty, soulless world being constructed around us, with constant manipulation and mental intrusion. I would be worried if people weren’t dissatisfied with that and showing signs of struggling. Instead of coping mechanisms though, and assessing if people are meant to be treated this way, it seems ever important to blame people themselves, and demand they adapt to the ‘new world order’ that creeps its way into our psyche. As anyone would do who is trying to make them the centre feature of your life, trying to take all your attention, telling you you’ll never survive without them, trying to turn you against your friends and family. Sounds like a terribly abusive scenario doesn’t it? And what I have learnt along the way is that people don’t always recognise they are in it, because it makes it a bit easier to make excuses or just shy away from a painful truth. Imagine how much easier it would be for that abusive person if they were also able to convince you that you were mentally dysfunctional, and needing medicating. It would serve a purpose for them in the end, making people think they are in need of extra assistance that only one can give, to dismiss others who would ‘invalidate’ their condition.
We all have hard times in our lives, and I will never deny that things can happen that will take the rug from under you and change your whole life, traumatic things, hurtful things, shocking things. But these things will happen, to you, or to those you know. And imagine a world where there isn’t a doctor to just write a prescription, or a pharmacy to just cash it, what would you do? Grief, despair and heartache. Sadness, loss and fear. They are all feelings, and ones of life despite what they represent. You wouldn’t want to take something to stop you feeling happy and joyful, would you? We embrace certain feelings in life, and seem to shy away from or try to eliminate others, but they are necessary and character building as they say. And maybe it has been too much time now and too many people switched off those feeling for too long, and don’t know how to feel properly anymore. Maybe that was the point of all the drugs after all. Who can say for sure, but I will keep giving it thought.
(c) K Wicks
(c) K Wicks
It’s a precious thing, time.
Experience teaches you so much, perspectives and ideas change, you develop and change, and what you wanted of your life, will hopefully develop and change. It would be weird to think you were still the same person really from when you were a child or teenager through to being an adult who has perhaps already lived two lifetimes. Time is pivotal in that, without time, you aren’t able to really appreciate experiences I have found. When thrust from one scenario into another, whether it be a societal one, or a personal one, you can end up staggering mentally from one experience to another. It is only with time and reflection that I have managed to get meaning from those events and therefore actually benefitted from the experience.
So, how does that fit in with this fast-paced world around us, more, quicker, do it now, there won’t be time. I can’t help but think part of that is so that you won’t have time to experience things, they will pass you by so rapidly that there is no reflection period upon it and your brain will move onto the next stimulating thing to simulate experience, but a fast and unsatisfying version, that is ultimately unfulfilling. It is said we humans crave experience, so is it any wonder we have knowingly lapped up a virtual one they carefully ran alongside the real one. I wonder when the lines will become so blurred it will be hard for many to know the difference. But maybe we do deep down, because we can feel something isn’t quite right and there is a certain emptiness to it. Like a copy of a copy of a copy, it loses something of the original. Like whiskey that you just keep watering down, eventually it’s just a plain, boring glass of water with a hint of what it once was.
Much appears to be getting lost in the drive for everything to be faster and happen quicker. I remember wanting to be like that, when you’re a kid, and it seems to drag on forever, having to wait for so much. Until you’re tall enough, until you’re old enough – which encompasses a lot by itself.
“Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop to look around once in a while, you might miss it”, as the movie quote goes.
(c) K Wicks
(c) K Wicks
Some of us may feel like we saw this coming, the takeover of society by nefarious peoples by way of money, tactics, and well, super villainy. But is it that we were just ‘paying attention’, or is it in fact that we have been primed and programmed like everyone else, just in a different way?
It would stand to reason you would need more than one method to convince, coerce and nudge people’s mentality in the right direction. So, if you can’t get people with good old-fashioned fear, I guess you would want something else, just as powerful and influencing. Hope. And you have your two great motivators and influencers in this. Fear it will get worse, and hope it will get better. They run hand in hand and are two sides of the same coin. But can be used for very different outcomes.
I have made reference to many films in my posts, and use that imagery or strategy in my thinking an awful lot, which I am aware is not by accident. I have been programmed and bombarded my entire life with their slogans, adverts and campaign of fear and propaganda, so must look at what effect that has really had. At the beginning of this decade, it was already well on the way to looking like a digital future, with Monitoring taking on new and quite intrusive measures, and reference to a certain book kept popping up on social media. And I must confess, having read it as a teenager, had also thought of it a number of times throughout the years and in very recent times, because it seemed to fit so perfectly. Too perfectly, and made the following observation;
“Or did he just write the playbook therefore giving them the blueprint for what we see now? I wonder. Prophetic to predict it but what if it helped to create it”.
Given that I have also written about the power of thought, collective thought and creating realities, I wondered if this was just a mental strategy on their part, to instil the image, words and concept of disaster, apocalypse and societal collapse in our mind, so that we are not only prepared for it, we actually gravitate towards it, as it seems familiar in a way. More so than the complete unknown. Two pieces cover this is some way, The three d’s of conversion under coercion, and Films, real life twisted or just fantasy? It is a worry that because we have had the seeds so firmly planted in mind for warfare and cruelty, when it is upon us or approaching, we are familiar to it, and it’s method of being wielded through people and ideologies, that instead of not accepting it, we just seem to accept it. Well, it has happened before, we did see it coming, followed by how could we have known and let’s hope it doesn’t happen again. Seems like we are on a very buckled merry-go-round, but we are there by choice, each person and thought contributing to where we are now, the good and the bad.
So, what can be done? It is enough to just recognise what you have been programmed for, are we able to see through the ‘triggers and warnings’ they have set up for each side, to bring the fear and the hope forward. Because really that is what it ends up being about, and Star Wars nailed it really, with fear leading to the dark side, and a new hope was needed. So, given there isn’t much to hold onto these days, and if we are programmed for what comes next, then I shall try and make the very best of it and realise that the old false hope they dangled for people was just that. We need A New Hope…
(c) K Wicks
Went for making more orange cream filled chocolates as its been a while. Thought it might be nice to make the filling green this time. It looked a bit like snot while mixing the filling 🤣, but I decided on it being apple coloured instead, yes, definitely apple. But tastes like orange.
(c) K Wicks
(c) K Wicks
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