Descending order

After a long longing I have finally found out more about my family tree. I am descended from farming stock! Its really surprising to find this out and not what I expected.
In this photograph is my great great Grandfather Archibald, with the horse and cart at the back of the picture. He was a dairy farmer and is pictured here outside his own dairy buildings at Rhu, near Helensburgh on the north Clyde estuary. In front of him is his son John, about whom we have no dates or records yet, so guessing John's age in this picture to be about 30, and taking a date between his siblings, Neil,(b.1867) and Isabella (b.1872) then maybe this picture was taken in 1900. Maybe a special occassion to mark the turn of the new 20th century?

So now I am a little less lost and have my descending order;

Neil McLellan (Ploughman)
Archibald McLellan (Ploughman, then Carter) b.1839-d.1910
Neil McLellan (dont know occupation) b.1867
Archibald McLellan (Doctor, Captain British Army) b.1900 d.1942
Neil McLellan (Doctor) b.1931 -
Gavin b.1970

Between

I am between jobs just now and in this verse I have tried to capture the various moods and phases that I've been experiencing recently.


Between jobs feels like
the gap between Trailer and Feature.
A departure and a lounge.
Relief comes in making the announcement, disclosing;
'I am leaving.'
Then an ebbing of one's power,
'When I'm gone'
Especially when making the surreal expression
'for my successor'
Then maybe that can be done, or maybe not
Suddenly one's opinion is inconsequential

Then comes the revelation of your real Identity
of one's true Companions,
staying with you after the Emmaus road.

With breath withheld
Comes the silence of Critics,
after the gavel drop proclaiming your verdict;
'I'm done here.'

Messages surprise
warm the doubtful, wavering heart.
Doubt flutters and fades,

Then Importance suddenly shows herself,
Priority crystallises,
Promise glitters
and Resolve beckons.

Defining Hope

Brazilian theologian, Ruben Alvez, described hope in this way:
"What is hope? It is the presentiment that imagination is more real and reality less real than it looks. It is the suspicion that the overwhelming brutality of fact that oppresses us and represses us is not the last word. It is the hunch that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe, that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual, and that, in a miraculous and unexpected way, life is preparing the creative events which will open the way to freedom and to resurrection. "But, hope must live with suffering. Suffering, without hope, produces resentment and despair. And hope, without suffering, creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness. So, let us plant dates, even though we who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see.

Photo I took on my trip to Palestine of YWCA workers in Jericho polishing locally grown dates for sale.

Random commentary verse #1

This is a mash-up rip-off scrapbook poem composed from random phrases taken from press commentary on the current economic meltdown.


We are living through
first intimations
of crisis, crunch, collapse
nobody has been able to understand.
Each attempt to deal
consumed by an irresistible,
often concealed within the balance sheets,
abject surrender to the new orthodoxy.

The last came
triggered
by oil price spike
dramatic rises
to inflation
ending a long boom
after the war
consolidation.

Now
we are living
through price hike, triple spike, off mike
commentary
narrating Google streets
everything public
but no-one rules the world
after the squeeze.