Author: MKW Publishing

Bobby M – The Wild Pet Mantis

~ MKW Publishing ~ Leave a comment

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.

IMG_2348  IMG_2296

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.

IMG_3416   IMG_2572

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.

IMG_3484 IMG_3650

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.

IMG_5769   IMG_5711

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.

IMG_3158

Bobby Mantis

(c) K Wicks

An Error, But A Big One

~ MKW Publishing ~ 6 Comments

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

Content Donation/Tip for Kat at MKW Publishing – Minimum £1.50

Time and again

~ MKW Publishing ~ 3 Comments

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

Prepped For Disaster, Or Clever Programming?

~ MKW Publishing ~ 13 Comments

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

Content Donation/Tip for Kat at MKW Publishing – Minimum £1.50

Homemade chocolates

~ MKW Publishing ~ 5 Comments

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

Putting Your Best Foot Forward

~ MKW Publishing ~ 2 Comments

The Internet gives all types of people a platform, and in that I have found it can be used to present the very worst of yourself, or indeed the very best. And lots of in between. But this is looking at the worst.

Why is it that some people appear to be happy to expose that part of themselves, either through a hateful, nasty,  aggressive attitude or whatever undesirable trait steps forth? And of course, what is undesirable to one, may not be to another, so opinion matters in this. Where a world of ‘cancel culture’ has been invented they say, to shout down those who are not being acceptable. It is now more important than ever to know what is acceptable, to yourself, and from what you see and goes on around you. And there is a lot of unacceptable going on. But not liking it doesn’t stop it, indeed not. And maybe that is why the internet has become the focus point for much of this outpouring, because you can, and it is so easy, especially while hidden behind a screen so you don’t have to face the consequences as you would have in real life. Keyboard warriors as we know them.

You aren’t supposed to express yourself these days with natural normal feelings, of say, anger, or sadness or even happiness. People will accuse you of minimising them, of being toxic, or hurting them, or of trying to get attention. Just because you are sharing your experience, but weirdly it becomes about them or their interpretation of it, not about you anymore at all. Sound familiar? So, what could have been used for good, has been hijacked through mis-regulation and has been allowed to fester and gather momentum. Because they want to see people squabbling, hating, arguing, mistrusting and fighting. It serves a purpose. Remember what inevitably always happened in the big brother house series? People put together in a fully monitored, controlled environment, with triggers and manipulations to facilitate and study behaviour. Well, the internet is a larger version of that, and a whole lot more car crash because it is more people, a bigger domain with more variables, manipulators and outcomes. It seems that it was always meant to be this way.

Showing the worst of yourself used to be frowned upon, and still is to some and could just be a by-product of our Victorian times. But an interesting and varied band of completely shameless people, across the board, like to stir the pot, inflame things, shout victim and use various manipulative practices to ‘get their own way’ or just to cause drama through boredom or dysfunction. And that is the point, often in these causes for ‘justice’ there is a very personal motive or agenda at play and are working for their own ends. Unfortunately, many seem to find themselves caught up in it, sometimes. Whether you realise it or not, people often allow themselves to be, for a variety of reasons. But bullies, narcissists and psychopaths often have some very likeable traits and aspects of their personality make up, so it is easy for them to be overlooked, mistaken for something else or even accepted as they are. They know to put forward what appears to be the best, with a goal of achieving what they want. That can be useful if the purpose is indeed a noble one, but often that is not the case.

We all have things about us that will be unlikeable to some, and many of us are OK with that. It seems there are quite a few though, who have never learnt to deal with that reality or just can’t accept it. Thinking it is a slight on them, or a dysfunction in the other person. No, just simple, they do not like you. And they do not have to. Having ‘thick skin’ used to be the saying, or ‘water off a ducks back’. To be able to not make a big deal of the small things and try and find common ground, even if you don’t in fact ‘like’ that person. Sounds like wishful thinking doesn’t it? And on the internet maybe it is, but in real life it works for lots of people, and makes for a slightly less stressful life. Not everyone who works together likes each other, hell, even some married couples don’t appear to like each other. Yet a status quo and a civility of conduct is maintained, that is not beyond a reasonable expectation of others to display. Drama will find you now and again through time, experience and no fault of your own, so there is really no need to seek it out or jump on board to be part of somebody else’s. But if you do find yourself caught up in some, know that how you view it and ultimately feed it will help to determine its outcome. As can be said of much going on right now…

(c) K Wicks

Content Donation/Tip for Kat at MKW Publishing – Minimum £1.50