Walking on promises # 22

Ephesians 1:23 "the fulness of him that filleth all in all."
The promise is for me ," the fulness of him that filleth all in all."

Ruby rest of summer

Two weeks ago; when this picture was taken, I still had the chance to save some for the winter.
Now the golden opportunity has past.
Only the photo is left.

The Dream (Graeme Edge)
When the white eagle of the North
is flying overhead
The browns, reds and golds of autumn
lie in the gutter, dead.
Remember then, that summer birds
with wings of fire flaying
Came to witness spring's new hope,
born of leaves decaying.
Just as new life will come from death,
love will come at leisure.
Love of love, love of life
and giving without measure
Gives in return a wondrous yearn
of a promise almost seen.
Live hand-in-hand and together we'll stand
on the threshold of a dream. 

Originated by MaryT, check hers for today

Counting blessings # 1

Genesis 15:5 'Look now toward heaven, and count the stars, if thou be able to count them'; and He said unto him: 'So shall thy seed be.' 6 And he believed in the LORD; and He counted it to him for righteousness.
Sonja's words for today. "Belief comes through trials."

Hommage a Teach Mary

Am car exhibitions are hot here on the North Atlantic border line.
I couldn't help but thinking of teach Mary when I saw this.

Originated by MaryT, check hers for today

Walking on promises # 21

^{2Chor 9:8}
And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work:

BREAD ON THE WATER

Ecclesiastes Chapter 11

1 Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou shalt find it after many days.

My Norwegian/American friend Sonja, has sent me a priceless gift.
A book about her father Armin Gesswein, a biography and a textbook, a torch and a map.

I got it two days ago and I haven't finished it entirely yet, but I need to say thank you to Sonia and tell about how blessed I feel.

Sonja has told, in modest ways, about her father in her blog bits and pieces.
The truth is he was a spiritual leader of world wide dimensions.
He was a theologian, and minister, a viewer, a preacher, a mentor, but foremost he was a man of prayer. He even founded a College of Prayer.

How I wish my father could have met him, or heard about him.
Where Armin Gesswein was a giant, my dad belonged to the small and silent in the country. Even so, they had one thing in common, convincing of
The Power of prayer, and the need for prayer in every aspect of spiritual and human life.

Even more important; they both in similar ways lived the way they learned. Armin Gesswein's life was his strongest testimony, and the fruits of his prayers cannot be numbered by humans.

The book is titled "Everything by prayer", and the reader is encouraged to read slow, to look up verses and chapters in the Bible, think thoroughly through questions at the end of each chapter, and also discuss it within groups or with mentors.

I shall have to read it that way afterward. Just now I'll have read it from A to Z ,while praying in my chamber.

Dearest Sonja, how can I ever reward you for this gift?
It has already broadened my horizon, and let me expect for much more.

Jeremiah15: 16 Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and Thy words were unto me a joy and the rejoicing of my heart; because Thy name was called on me, O LORD God of hosts.

Ruby Penelope Ulysses # 22

Last chapter of both Homer's Odyssey and Joyce's Ulysses; Penelope.

Double glassed beach reading.

Odysseus had returned to Ithaca and was recognized both by his swineherd and his faithful dog.
As he entered his castle he had to shuffle out lots of parasitic wooers, who sought to overtake his wife and his throne.
Penelope didn't recognize her long wayward husband at first. It was not until he could identify some secrets about the matrimonial bed, Penelope accepted Odysseus as her husband.

Leopold Bloom's wife Molly, is the Penelope of Ulysses.
We last left them in a narrow, squeaking bed in 7 Eccles Street.
Now it is revealed that Molly in fact did commit adultery with Boylan this very day. Bloom was aware of the fact, and had even helped arrange the situation.

The last chapter is one coherent text without punctuation or paragraphs.
We are let into Molly's head, a stream of thoughts vaulting out, like a barricaded flood let free.
At times, I must admit, I feel Joyce is belittling his wife. The language is vulgar and the detailed descriptions, even worse. No wonder the book landed directly on the feared Index list of the Catholic Church.
Even so, my sympathy is with Molly.
She's mourning over her dead son and is also worried about her young daughter. (The daughter of Nora and James Joyce was diagnosed with schizophrenia and their efforts to get her cured all failed.)

Molly (Nora) is a middle aged, fading singer, who now has to perform in faraway Belfast,- with young Boylan.
She's clinging to memories from her youth, being a celebrated belle at Gibraltar, (Galway, actually).
She has no hopes for a future with Boylan. She knows in her mind, her heart and will are set to stay with Bloom.
She remembers Poldy's proposal on June 16th 1904, now famous as Bloomsday all over the world.



"miss Stack bringing him flowers the worst old ones she could find at the bottom of the basket anything at all to get into a mans bedroom" James Joyce



"he knew the way to take a woman when he sent me the 8 big poppies because mine was the 8th" James Joyce



"the ships out far like chips that was the Malta boat passing" James Joyce


"coming back on the nightboat from Tarifa the lighthouse at Europa"James Joyce


"I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning" James Joyce


"they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons ", James Joyce


"yes he said I was a flower of the mountain" James Joyce

"the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets "James Joyce.



"then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." James Joyce

Originated by MaryT, check hers for today

Walkimg on promises # 10

Isaiah 43:2 "Fear not, for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name, thou art Mine. 2 When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee."

Ruby Ithaca Ulysses # 21

Jaeren this week.

The chapter about both Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus returning to 7 Eccles Street, the Ithaca of Dublin is called the chapter of questions and answers. Maybe because of the painful things Bloom presumed waiting for him at home, he searched for every way possible to distance him from the
real fact, and in all possible ways procrastinating the moment he had to face his fears. (Had Molly been unfaithful or not?)
The first 3/4 of the chapter, Bloom and Dedalus, (He and he), discuss everything under the sun in minutiae details. All actions are also described the same thorough way.
I wondered where have I read a book in similar style? A.A. Milne, (the Disney version doesn't count), and his stories of Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh.
So this week I have been reading Joyce by daytime, (lots of words used in this chapter, which even giant Webster had trouble to explain, and I could not lie in bed with two tons of books beside me). Therefore A. A. Milne became my bed buddy, and the conversations between Piglet and Pooh as always gave me many good laughs and sweet sleep.
I did in fact look up to find out who of the two great authors inspired whom. Joyce won the price or race here too. Ulysses was published in 1923 and Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926.

The little white chair from my childhood, my teddy, Serina's book.

While Bloom was making Dedalus cocoa they discussed every topic under the sun, in the universe, as a matter of the fact, macro and micro cosmos, religion, psychology, politics, agreements and disagreements. They laid plans for the future and by sunrise said goodbye. The only thing Bloom could not offer Dedalus, was a "shelter from the storm," a room for the homeless.
He had to literally face the music, find out what had been going on, while Molly and Boylan had been rehearsing for the upcoming concert.
Did he find evidence of foul play?
He did.
Even so he did not confront his wife, but laid down beside her, fearing that his enemy had been there just some hours earlier.
Why?

Yours truly seeking shelter, while reading Ulysses on a local beach. Shortly after, I fell asleep.


"What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon." James Joyce


If you double click some red attached to the divers foot.



This matchbox lay in the car Serina inherited after my dad. As the car was handed over to a cousin, Gunnar put the box over in our Land Rover. We were camping this week, and needed light. Gunnar fetched the box, and we suddenly met my dad again. One safety pin, one paper clip and some valve parts put there for emergency use. Ten years ago.

"What proofs did Bloom adduce to prove that his tendency was towards applied, rather than towards pure, science?

Certain possible inventions of which he had cogitated when reclining in a state of supine repletion to aid digestion, stimulated by his appreciation of the importance of inventions now common but once revolutionary for example, the aeronautic parachute, the reflecting telescope, the spiral corkscrew, the safety pin, the mineral water siphon, the canal lock with winch and sluice, the suction pump."James Joyce

Boat passing lighthouse at sundown

"He reflected that the progressive extension of the field of individual development and experience was regressively accompanied by a restriction of the converse domain of interindividual relations.

---

As in what ways?
From inexistence to existence he came to many and was as one received: existence with existence he was with any as any with any: from existence to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived." James Joyce

Originated by MaryT, check hers for today

Walking on promises #8

Psalms Chapter 91

"1 O thou that dwellest in the covert of the Most High, and abidest in the shadow of the Almighty;
2 I will say of the LORD, who is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust,
3 That He will deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.
4 He will cover thee with His pinions, and under His wings shalt thou take refuge; His truth is a shield and a buckler.
5 Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night, nor of the arrow that flieth by day;
6 Of the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor of the destruction that wasteth at noonday.
7 A thousand may fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; it shall not come nigh thee.
8 Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold, and see the recompense of the wicked.
9 For thou hast made the LORD who is my refuge, even the Most High, thy habitation.
10 There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy tent.
11 For He will give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways."

His promises this very day!

Ruby Eumaeus Ulysses #20

Female sailor making her way to Ithacan coasts

According to Homer the swineherd Eumaeus was the first person who met with Odysseus and his son Telemachus as they finally returned to Ithaca.

Jame Joyce let his two alter egos, Leopold Bloom and young Stephen Dedalus enter an old, somewhat dirty coffeehouse, after being saved out of the claws of Circe and her maids.
The inn keeper was said to be the once so famous Skin-the -Goat, a member of the invinsibles. The legendary gang who stood behind the successful and gruesome murders in the Phoenix Park.
They became heroes among the common Irishmen, but most of them were caught and hanged.


"They used knives. Knives are not an Irish weapon. Maybe they were Italian," Bloom wondered.


Dedalus is encouraged to drink some strong, obscure coffee brew to sober him up, and also try eating " a roll of something".
"Liquids I can eat,"Dedalus answers laconically. James Joyce

They soon also meet an old sailor who seeks their company to do what old sailors are best to. Overwhelming an audience with weird experiences and a
firmly timbered view of life, society and politics. The long months and years in crowded cabins at sea are the sailors finishing schools. Many never made it to the end though, kept floating among pubs in the brackish water close to the docks.

"His Eyes were thick with sleep and sea air." James Joyce

"Illfated Norwegian barque," James Joyce

For a long time the conversation takes up various Irish topics. The betrayal of the Church (esp. considered Parnell, who almost gathered enough voices for Home Rule for Ireland, but was garotted by his own, for having an affair with Mrs. O'Shea.One of the saddest moment in newer Irish history.) The exploitations of farmers, and for that sake Irish land, used for export and high income for English noble landowners. Shipwrecking of tallships (on the one cliff of the huge Galway Bay) to crave insurance, and loss of work places for the Irish.

Jews. "He took umbrage of something or other, that muchinjured, but on the whole eventempted person declared, I let slip. He called me a Jew and in a heated fashion, offensively. So I, without deviating from plain facts
in the least, told him his God, I mean Christ, was a Jew too, And all his family, like me, though in reality, I am not. That was one for him. A soft answer turns away wrath." James Joyce
Norwegian tradition of barrel making for freighting of herring.Trade called cooper.

Both Joyce and Bloom are heavily influenced by their contemporary majors. Freud's and Darwin's ways of thinking are evidently coloring the conversation.
Joyce has many almost prophetic statements from his own bosom as well.
"Turks, it's the dogma. Because, if they didn't believe they'd go straight to heaven when they die, they'd try to live better.At least so I think". James Joyce
A striking pendant to the suicide bombers of today.

A typical Penelope handicraft demonstrated.

With Stephen having nowhere to sleep. He was locked out of his tower, and gave his last money to a beggar, Bloom invited him home to the later famous house in 7 Eccles Street.
I presume next chapter will contain a meeting with Molly, Bloom's Penelope.

All pictures are made with my cellphone cam at the annual Harbor Days in Haugesund,

Originated by MaryT, check hers for today

Ruby Circe # 2 Ulysses #19

Outtake from the Underworld; Joyce's Nightworld.

"Stitch in my side. Why did I run?" James Joyce

"Are you looking for someone?. He is inside with his friends." James Joyce
"Bloom. He swerves, sidles, stepaside, slips past and on." James Joyce

The chapter "Circe"is written as a play.
Leopold Bloom is chasing his alter ego young Stephen Dedalus in and out of scenes in Dublin's Red Light District.
In various costumes and roles Mr. Bloom tries his best to save his young image from becoming himself.
A challenging task, which Leopold Bloom take upon whole hearted, and which he inevitably is bound to loose.

The quilt is made of ties. The artist named it "All my men."

"Marion. Go and see life. See the wide world."James Joyce

Likewise our hero is torn between the many tempting females, Martha, Zoe, Gerty, Mrs Breen, Bridie, a Millionairess, a Noblewoman, Mrs. Thornton, Kitty, The Veiled Sibyl and finally the mighty queen; Bella Cohen (with whom he in a burlesque hallucination changes sex). All the time he's preoccupied of the thoughts and doings of his wife Molly, who Stephen met this very day, June 16th, and who now probably is being unfaithful with the appalling Blazes Boylan.

He gave me a flower and told it was a rare species, picked high up in the mountains.

I showed it to a gardener, and he revealed, it was a common hothouse flower.

I know James Joyce has read Henrik Ibsen's play "Peer Gynt", even in original language. Peer has an equal surreal experience in Egypt, meeting the Sphinx, being robbed by beautiful Anitra in the desert, ending up at a Madhouse with people of various nations.
I think, maybe this has been kind of an inspiration to Joyce.
The chapter of Circe is ending in a tragedy. The fighting, but misunderstood Bloom,wearing all mankind's mischief on his weak and bursting shoulders,
meets his dead son Rudy once more.

The rooster crowing about betrayal

"(Silent, thoughtful, alert he stands on guard, his fingers at his lips in the attitude of secret master. Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.) James Joyce

BLOOM
(Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly.) Rudy!" James Joyce
"In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket." (U15.4966) James Joyce

Underneath all the theater, drinking, womanizing, clown making, political issues, religious doubts, love and lust is the deep and unhealed sorrow for his dead son, Rudy. As was the case in Joyce's own life.
I keep thinking of my granddad, Gunnar's father and Terry's father. They all lost a child, and people keep saying, "the sorrow marked them for the rest of their life."
The Nordic skald, Egil Skallagrimsson comes to mind. He was a viking and served viking kings, making great poems about their victories on the battlefields.
Then he lost his son Bodvar, and his grief was so deep, he didn't want to live anymore. His daughter persuaded him to write a memory poem about his beloved son. Sonatorrek
has become unique in Nordic poetry, historic, praised and loved ever since.

Originated by MaryT, check hers for today

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TERRY DEARESTEST

RUBY CARS

This has been a wonderful, active and plentiful summer. Gunnar painted his garage floor red. Serina posing for the cell phone cam in the MG TF
Gunnar and Espen doing guy's work. Changing oil on the automatic gear box on Espen's Chevvy.
Lots of fun at the quays at Harbor Days. "Sons of Norway " lodge 8, with the slogan "We are taking care of our heritage." They were proud to participate on my blog, and said,"We are sending greetings to all Norwegian/American and embrace the Canadian likewise."

James Joyce has been resting this week, too much fun to do, and then the "restless farewell."

Originated by MaryT, check hers for today