Spirit of the Scarecrow

Robert Connolly

Description

One strange evening, an alien spaceship descends on a tiny rural village. A week later, an animated scarecrow intervenes in a terrible crime. Only one man knows the truth behind these events. Robby led a quiet life, admiring nature and rambling with his dogs, before he was contacted by a silent voice in his head. Now he must overcome his instincts and connect with his spiritual self in order to prevent a tragedy and ensure that justice is done. The Spirit of the Scarecrow is a philosophical tale of love, spirituality, the progress of humanity and the curse of greed.

Sujets

• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 08 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780722349090
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Spirit of the Scarecrow
Robert Connolly
ARTHUR H. STOCKWELL LTD
Torrs Park, Ilfracombe, Devon, EX34 8BA
Established 1898
www.ahstockwell.co.uk




Copyright © 2019 Robert Connolly
First published in Great Britain, 2013
Republished in Great Britain, 2019
Digital version converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
Cover design Jacqueline Abromeit.



The Road to Enlightenment
Out of poverty I have sprung,
That circumstantial trap wherein
Untold songs lie in agitated sleep unsung,
Awaiting illumination to erupt from the spiritual haven within.
I was born in Dublin city in troubled
Times, poverty’s child,
When pneumonic plague was decimating
little children in merciless execution,
But I, somehow, survived the onslaught raging wild
And I was speedily moved south to the
Sliabh Blume mountains of Laois, far from
the plague’s culling persecution.
And there I grew to adulthood thru’
austerity’s years,
Spilling the sweat of my teens in toil
among fertile fields,
Where the eyes of God serenely smiled and
the notes of joy were sweet music to my ears,
And oh! What a feast of knowledge those
distant memories still yields.
I studied long and hard, but pressing
family commitments interrupted my evolving pace,
As my bond of love for siblings made of me a slave,
Whose every ounce of energy spilled in
Toiling sweat helped to feed each hungry face,
And memories were all that was left for me to save.
In later years I wandered aimlessly from
job to job and sacrificed all in my
prolonged search for the enigmatic purpose of existence,
and most importantly of all to discover the
reason why God endowed man with the miraculous
gift of creative intelligence, his mysterious legacy.
I spilled my mental sweat in exhausting
bouts of deep thought and committed
myself to the task regardless of distance,
and after untold configurations of mental
complexities I was duly rewarded with
enlightenment and the impact of its veracity.
And now I know what I am, who I am and
why I am and the reason why I have creative ability,
and that knowledge elevates me to a higher
plain of thought beyond compare,
Where the essence of existence is simplicity,
And every human being has the ability, thru’
their creative mentality, to seek the
liberating truth if they but dare.



Chapter One
What’s important about any one day in a lifetime? Nothing except unforgettable memories of events that took place in that pulsating breath of time. We all have such memories stored away on the hard disks of our mentalities, recalled from time to time to generate laughter and to ignite interesting conversations and even to reminisce nostalgically on the childhood days of sweet innocence. But how did we acquire the ability to think and store memories and recall them at will?
Because human beings have been endowed with creative intelligence, but why?
There is nothing that exists without a reason, so there must be a reason for creative intelligence. We wouldn’t be able to create without a memory bank to feed our ability to think. Is it simply accidental? No! Mind is at work plotting our progress through time and reason is at the heart of it. This is my field of study and I have a story to relate concerning my encounter with the unknown. My name is Robby, the pet form of Robert, and my story begins one cold, frosty, snowbound Christmas Eve.
I took my two dogs, Patch and Pedro, my faithful friends, for a late-night ramble to a nearby reservoir. We walked along the outside of the perimeter wall to a conifer wood that extended along the western edge of the lake for its full length, about 400 metres, with its width about half that length. Beyond the wood a wild, desolate, snow-covered moor stretched for miles, a lonely landscape that bore the brunt of winter’s icy breath. A week before I had noticed sheep arriving in the wood from the moorland hills to shelter from the icy north-east wind. It was a bad sign and a day and a half later snow arrived in the wake of the wind. Overnight the snow froze and during the following days snowfalls were frequent, followed by hard overnight frosts. I felt really sorry for the sheep. What an unenvied existence, I thought, forced to spend their short lives on an impoverished, desolate moor, foraging to merely stay alive! How fortunate we humans are in comparison! Their experience taught me never to complain as long as I had an adequate amount of food and a place to shelter.
As we walked alongside the perimeter wall the frozen snow crunched under my boots and momentarily echoed in the stillness of the night. It was 11.30 and families would have been celebrating the Christmas festival in different ways, some in family groups in their homes, others attending late-night services in churches, and the revellers in pubs and clubs enjoying the entertainment. I was struggling to grasp the religious significance of and feel inspired by the ancient event, but my deep sympathy for the plight of the sheep resting quietly in the central area of the wood kept impinging on my thoughts. When we reached the end of the perimeter wall I stopped and allowed the dogs to sniff around the fringes of the wood, investigating various scents and responding to their instinctive necessities.
‘What is life all about?’ I remember asking myself aloud just as I had done on numerous occasions in the past. I had already discovered much in the field of deep thought, but much more needed to be uncovered from the abyss of the mentality and my goal was the enlightenment of deepest truth. I felt a deep affinity with the unfortunate sheep simply, I supposed, because I had suffered severe hardships in my life, cold, hunger and sometimes homelessness and of course the mental anguish that partners all aspects of deprivation, but something deep within me always urged me on and even inspired me to write the following poem:
DILEMMA
I have dreams wherein I dwell
Sometimes in heaven, sometimes in hell.
Between the two a mind possessed
Of noble thoughts and strange unrest,
Where powers meet and disagree
With life’s bliss and simplicity.
Conflicts strife, confusions trend,
The mind’s dilemma the breach to mend.
I didn’t realise at the time just how important the words of this little poem would prove to be many years later, after I had plunged into the deep recesses of the mind in my search for clues that would point me in the right direction and hopefully culminate in the ultimate revelation of enlightenment.
The dogs returned to my side after they had satisfied their curiosities and their needs and we began to retrace our steps along the perimeter wall overlooking the reservoir. I stopped on the way to admire the silvery moon and the heavenly stars scattered in the empty expanse beyond. The surface of the lake had turned to ice and illuminated by the moon resembled a giant, empty skating rink where I imagined invisible ghosts might be silently indulging a spiritual pleasure free from worldly constraints.
As I was thus engaged I noticed something far distant in the northern sky, and from that instant until the object disappeared from sight in the distant southern sky I felt sure that no more than three seconds elapsed. It resembled a glowing ball of fiery orange surrounded by a halo of bright blue and the whole measured about a metre in diameter. Its speed must have been phenomenally fast to cover such a distance in such a short space of time. I was momentarily astounded and delighted by the event. I guessed it was either a meteorite or an asteroid. It had an enlightening impact on me. I felt privileged to have witnessed such an unexpected happening, perhaps even a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.
I kept the image alive in my mind as the three of us returned home, where I, without delay, put pen to paper to briefly describe what I had seen, and the following short poem sufficed for the moment. I later composed a longer poem describing the UFO as an asteroid.
A DYING STAR
One night I saw from heaven fall a dying
Star,
Across the moonlit sky it sped a burning
Scar,
Brightly glowing orange and blue,
It was a rare event,
But I only caught a fleeting glimpse
Before its life was spent.
It was an unforgettable, momentary sighting, a treasured memory, and strangely it had an enlightening effect on my writing output, my poetic compositions and particularly on my field of study at the time, ‘Aspects of Truth’: an effect that erupted into the flowering of enlightenment less than a year later. The enlightenment was as unexpected as the fleeting glimpse of the incinerating asteroid and as silent, but it was dreamlike, although I was wide awake and working on the composition of a poem at the time. I suddenly experienced an exhilarating liberation of my spiritual self from the imprisoning constraints of the natural, instinctive processes of my mind. I was able to see my spiritual self, a bright, misty-grey spectre of myself, as it began to grow upwards out of my mentality to a gigantic height and stood astride the Earth, revealing to me through its spiritual eyes all the connecting aspects of knowledge concerning the beautiful Earth and its vast, complicated ecosystem, including the