Something burned and something broken
Something drank and something spoken
Something learned and one forgotten
Something ridded that was rotten
Something bought and something given
Something loosed and something riven
Somewhere quiet somewhere loud
Somewhere far beneath the cloud
Something drawn or made of clay
Something saved until its day
A song a chant a sign a token
Something old and now awoken
Something white and something green
Let not in fire black be seen
Something new and full of life
Keep it separate from the knife
Mind ye what the eye doth see
Lest ye miss the sign to flee
When ye see the storm has passed
Cast no stone upon the glass
Let silence be a gift to thee
Then cast the charm in verse of three
Find the lost, the broken fix
Then mark the time and light the wicks
(This song was [i]also[/i] from a long train ride back from Norwes! But I wrote this one by myself.)
And we'll always remember the names of the fallen,
So we know they are not gone in vain,
they will lend us their strength until Tale's End comes calling,
and I know we will all meet again
Old Charlie he wandered till he could no longer,
And never called no place his home,
But he gathered the wisdom of all he'd encounter,
And carried it on down the road
Cho
And John held his pistol as well as his liquor, till both did him wrong in the end,
A life spent in blood, to hunt down the bad men,
But one more always hid round the bend
Cho
Now Nancy was neither a fighter nor killer, but every foeman feared her name,
With herbs or secrets she healed and she guided,
But war is still war all the same
Cho
And Mara who gave all, to slay the great demon,
who never sought glory nor fame
When she saw that black circle was still left open.
She charged in to set it a flame.
Cho
I've lived in Hillshire all my life. There's plenty of fish in the stream that runs down the mountain, the girls are all pretty, and we make the best beer you've ever tasted.
To the East is the town of Carrick. And between us and them is the mountain we call Grandmother. For as long as anyone can remember, that mountain has kept our village safe. Few have ever climbed her, that just wouldn't be right. She's not some new frontier to conquer.
If you tried to go around, you'd get yourself lost in the dark forest, washed away in a flood, or worse. So when we want to go see our brothers in Carrick, we have to go through the tunnel. I don't think anyone knows who made it, how long the tunnel's been there or why she never resents our passage.
Now, Old Vindell, before his mysterious dissapearance, knew the mountain better than anyone else. When someone would turn 15 or 16, we would send him to Vindell for a few weeks to learn how to pass safely.
The mountain is alive, just like you and me. And when you cross through her, anything you feel, she feels. You have to cross respectfully. You have to learn her rules. Which paths to take and how not to wake her when she's sleeping.
The first thing he'd teach you about were the Guardian Stones. “If you ever lose your path”, he said, “In here or out there, they will help you”.
He told us they protect the travelers, but if you broke one, or you'd never leave that tunnel.
He said if you treat them right they can be your teachers, disrespect them and you'll have to answer to. I could never hear them, but I guess he could.
Second thing he'd teach you was about the mountain itself.
He said there was some things the mountain just can't stand. Number one was a fight. Even the children know you never fight inside the mountain. She hears that and she'll change the paths up on you.
Then he'd tell them about that evil map. There is one map of the tunnels, written on parchment, and ancient as the dirt, but you can't just read the thing. It's all lines and circles and symbols and writing in strange languages nobody can read. And even more than a fight, she hates that map.
We can't take it across for the scholars of Carrick to examine, and we dare not trouble them to make the journey for a thing we all know is best forgotten about entirely. So Vindell kept it where no evildoer could make use of it, if it had a use at all.
He'd also always mention that there's a few other places at the end of those tunnels, but he never told a soul in his life any more that. The rumor was he had been to some of those places, but he wouldn't say and we wouldn't ask.
Nothing ever stays the same in the tunnel. The paths always seem to be different every time, and the Guardian Stones are never where you remember the.
So you just have to trust her. There are all sorts of signs. You follow the stream until the first turn, then you stand very still and listen. Sometimes it will be breathing, sometimes it will be laughter, or sometimes rain, and sometimes she even cries.
Then you keep on going till the next fork in the road. If there is a road with laughter you take it. If there was a road with footsteps that sound like someone pacing back and forth, or with whispers; you would have to take the other one.
Sometimes the signs aren't quite as clear. Sometimes she has a favor to ask or a secret to tell you. Things are be a little different then. Then you just have to trust the stones, trust yourself, and trust the mountain, and you'll always make it out, but never quite the same as you went in.
That mountain changes people. She can be dangerous, but old Vindell loved her. And I think the mountain loved him too.
Another thing he'd tell yer is that you don't just go crossing for no good reason. We don't make friends with the people of Carrick lightly. You're either blood brothers or you do your business and go home as soon as you can. And you never go bothering them with questions you have no business asking.
And so we make the journey when one of ours needs healing, when we need a question answered, when we have a problem we can't solve ourselves, to trade, to see those we know or when were're just passing through to get to the dusty road to the north.
And sometimes, of course, we go just to see her. We go to give thanks, we go to learn, we go alone to find ourselves and we go together to celebrate.
Or at least we used to. Nobody knew the mountain like Vindell did, and with him gone for months now, the parents teach their sons and daughters as best they can, but many have already forgotton.
Some of us still make the passage now and again when we need to. We still follow the stream to the first fork and listen carefully, as Vindell called it. But each time I've been, the laughter is a little quieter(when she laughs at all), the footsteps a little angrier, and when she cries, I know that we have failed her.
A thousand years before Vindell, before anyone had stepped up as Guide of the Mountain, people would send their children to make the journey on their own, telling them only to never take the glowing path, and to trust in the guardians.
Of course, though she is patient and forgiving, she has her rules, and many did not return. And occasionally, when someone grew up and never learned, she would become very angry and send us great storms.
So it was decided that every child must learn from a teacher the proper way to cross.
But now we have no teacher, and the mountain has no herald. When the paths are not as we remember them, the people can only turn back.
And so tomorrow, I leave for Carrick. I will not let this happen. I will speak to their chief scholar. If Vindell isn't coming back, then I will learn all I can. And I will find out why she hates that map, and why it disappeared when Vindell did.
I will follow the stream until the first fork, and I will listen. I will try to hear the voices of the stones I never could hear before. And if she chooses to share her secrets with me, maybe I can figure this out.
Was doing some reading on RoHS compliance in electronics, and it seems like leaded brass might be pretty common,
and just about any machined brass could have it.
I'm not sure what's with the “Letting kids chew keys” thing, but apparently it exists.
When I feel a bit like I'm losing by ability to pay attention to anything longer than five minutes, theres one song I always like to listen to, to remind myself to slow down.
That song is Leslie Fish's Horse Tamer's Daughter.
And I think she might be just what we need to take back some of What We've Lost (that we had in the supposed Good Olde Dayes!).
The main thing people know the song for is that it's *long*. To the point where people complain.
But I think that's a good thing. There's not many songs that really should go on that long (Even Orden Ogan gets a bit excessive sometimes). But some should.
With how busy the world seems to keep us, you don't always have time to read, watch, or listen to anything for ten minutes. And when you do, sometimes anxiety can keep you busy anyway.
But when you can, it's amazing. A lot of modern forms of communication just aren't focused on any kind of extended experience. They're quick briefings of bad news.
Even memes, for all the joy they bring us, have a dark side. They have instant appeal, but they just don't fulfill the need for a deep dive into a work.
Horse Tamer's Daughter isn't your usual tale of heroism. It opens simply enough, describing her life with her mother and father, catching and training horses, and finding an old ruined tower that seems to creep people out.
Statements like “I never called them to the rope, for their trust I'd not betray” carry a sense of acceptance that stands in contrast to the need to always be doing something, changing something, and looking for something new that seems to pervade modern life.
Sure, we all watch Netflix… Or do we? Seems pretty popular to have another screen by your side on the couch. We spend a lot of time on entertainment, but much of that time is full of exactly the thoughts we tell ourselves we're taking a break from.
Later on in the song, we learn that at some point in the past, the wizards were coming and taking the children (For an unknown purpose), and although they are poor, many are just glad to have no such tyranny over them.
Compare that to the present day, when so many are affected by “lifestyle inflation”, unsatisfied even though they have exactly what they worked for all their lives, never noticing the quest for more isn't making them happy.
At this point, the tower is her favorite place to play. It's where she found a magic mirror that showed her visions. She knows it's something special, but she doesn't have big future plans for it.
But as the wizards arrive, they see the girl through her scrying-spell, and the tower itself, full of magical energy waiting to be awakened(“It may be still that within our will that tower will awake again”).
The word “Again” implies they know the tower's history. And the surprise implies they may have tried to wake it up in the past. Whatever they did wasn't working. But something is different now.
I'm not exactly sure how the magic system in this universe works. But maybe the tower wasn't “asleep” at all. It was *exhausted*.
Maybe the wizards used it for so many aggressive, forceful spells that the power just collapsed.
Or maybe when “the land was torn by war”, it really was the enemy who broke it down. In any case, it was loud and aggressive. And the wizards were just trying more of the same.
Someone who just lost a boxing match isn't going to be helped much by more shaking and slaps to the face. If they had any more energy to respond to that, they wouldn't have lost.
So the tower hid and isolated itself, just like a person might, after enough trauma.
But when she came, she didn't make any attempt at all to wake the tower up. She didn't even seem to know it was asleep. It was just a cool old ruins that seemed to speak to her.
Which, at that point, was what it had become. The tower noticed her because she saw it in the present, not some imagined future.
She also doesn't treat the tower like some untouchable ancient relic. She uses the mirror for what it's meant for, she plays in the ruins.
She works with the tower as appropriate for it's present state, without comparing it it's past or present potential.
(Similarly, if you feel like total crap, it might not do much good to try to be Employee of the Century tomorrow, but you should probably still check the mail and do the laundry).
Seeing all this, the wizards run towards the tower. She sends a psychic call out to all the wild horses, and together they raise a ring of light and fight the wizards, who are quickly defeated and decided to leave the land alone.
In the end, although she had no plans to be the tower's keeper, she becomes exactly that. With no robes or blue stone, the tower becomes a place full of fresh straw where the horses come and go (Presumably a big break from usual tower-tradition), and she becomes defender of the land.
This is not a story of winning through you strength or your smarts or some artifact of power.
This is a story about winning through what you *aren't* doing. A reminder to slow down. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast, says the old army saying.
If you look at any fountain pen, you'll find a hole. You wouldn't think cutting a hole in something makes it stronger. But if that hole wasn't there, the gap between the two tines would grow and rip the tip apart.
This song should be a reminder to move carefully, and make sure your actions are really helping.
As I was finishing writing this, I noticed my hands really hurt a lot, on account of too many bus rides and subsequent hand washings. I then caught myself worrying about the time putting on lotion takes. A perfect real life example of an aggressive hurry!
If you can, take the time to fix that hole in your pants, to send that email, and whatever else The Big Hurry is keeping you from.
Sometimes there's a time for(well planned!) active, aggressive action to solve a problem. But sometimes the solution is not to take all that much action at all.
#^[url=https://youtu.be/fuGIBX9FGZQ]https://youtu.be/fuGIBX9FGZQ[/url]