justdustwords

  Just thinking ....   Well ... long, long ago there was this Irish artist who thought the world was his ... and for a while the world was his. He carried it around in his head like a map with no edges, believing there was not a road he could not walk, a story he could not tell, or a dream he could not chase. He was young enough to think time would wait for him and foolish enough to believe that talent alone could open every door ... even the door behind the Iron Curtain. And maybe that is the privilege of youth ... to stand in the middle of an ordinary day and feel, with all your heart, that the whole world belongs to you. Or maybe it was just being Irish. Then the years came along, as years have a habit of doing, and they taught him something else. Youth and age are not the same thing. The world was never his to own. It belongs to people like you. It was only ever his to wander through ... to marvel at ... to borrow for a little while ... and, if he was fortunate, to leave b...

 Excerpt from my novel FATE. Holy Water and the Jinx of Retribution   Her father, being the exemplary Christian man he was, who had ambitions in his youth of becoming a friar, blessed the house several times on any given day of the week with holy water from one of the several Saint Patrick’s Wells in Ireland, thinking that the Jinx could be warded off through divine intervention and the workings of holy water in the same manner that Patrick had driven the snakes out of Ireland. These wells, steeped in the legend and tradition of having been blessed by the saint himself, were believed to possess miraculous properties.        Fiadh’s father thought these healing qualities in the holy water could influence the Jinx to move out of the Whaling Station, telling his daughter that it was just a matter of having faith in Patrick ... and that the Jinx should be no problem for a man who could...