Tag: quiet mind

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Blustery, Howe Sound, Sea to Sky Highway, Near Lion's Bay, British Columbia, Canada

Bluster ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #296

With some bluster
Does the wind complain
Drives the sea
And the clouds
To fraught disdain

In these throes do I
Count my many blessings
For the calm
Which stills me
Deep inside

Unlike the waves
Upon the water
And the sky
My mind is quiet
Without torment to promote a cry

And while horizon
Soon the sun obscures
The star within
Shines bright
With everlasting light

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Yellow Chair, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Sunshine ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #264

It waited for her
The little yellow chair
At the back of the house
In the little nook
Hidden away
From anyone’s eyes

Late afternoon sunshine
Filtered through
The winter boughs
Eaves and overhangs
Sheltered her
From the usual Vancouver rain

But today
The sun
Fell on
Her little sunshine chair

A cigarette
And long moments
Filled with thoughts
Without consequence
Smalltalk daydreams
To pass the time
In seeming silence
While she chattered
With herself
About nothing

Beside the red house
Which was all red inside
Though the walls were white
And the Late Colonial furniture
In browns and blues

A quiet little moment
Of no small function
Before returning to
The dysfunction within

A small, life-saving moment
Of manufactured sunshine
Amplified
By the trickle of sun
Passing through naked branches

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The Maw, Palau De Les Arts, Ciutat De Les Arts I Les Ciences, Valencia, Spain

Fear ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #250

The maw which devours me
Consumes my will
My strength
Is naught but the workings
Of my fearful mind 

I breathe
Speaking the words in my mind
Over the chatter of thoughts

Breathing in
Breathing out

Displacing the chatter
My thinking stills
So that the maw closes
Upon the vacuum
That is the peace
Of a quiet mind

Without fear
To sustain it
The maw dies
Revealed as an illusion
Created by fear

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The Touch of... A-Maze-ing Laughter, Yue Minjun, Morton Park, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Being ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #191

This is a bit of a rough sketch for a chapter in a series which began with Come It Said and continued to Like a Hammer on a Drum. These stories revolve around the idea of a sort of ‘electric Buddha’ I’ve been toying with for years.

Also, my apologies for the lateness of this week’s challenge. I had to work today, and then this much prose takes much longer to pen than a poem. 😉

The situational awareness of a Series 25 is pretty hard for a mere human to wrap their head around. While these battle droids are equipped with a pair of excellent optical sensors, positioned to replicate the appearance of a predator’s stereo vision, it is their internal sensors which provide the bulk of their operational data. These include radar (both atmospheric and ground-penetrating), with full sonic and electro-magnetic spectrum arrays. Their entire body acts as an antenna, collecting sensory data in a sphere up to a one kilometer radius. The Quantum Processing Unit parses and analyzes this data in real-time, determining all relevant threats in the sensory sphere and developing ongoing action plans for eliminating them.

I talked with a droid designer once who said there was really no way of putting an upper-limit on how fast a 25 can assess and respond to every situational detail of a battle in terms I could understand. “But,” she said, “if you can imagine beating Bobby Fisher at chess one hundred million times in a nanosecond while simultaneously playing every instrument for a full orchestra’s rendition of the William Tell Overture, you’ll have an inkling.”