I live in a very rural area, yet I'm not one of these people.
Outsiders (and some insiders) look at this state as the land that time forgot.
Well, it is to be perfectly honest.
But I see it differently: I have sloping hills, long green pastures, ponds, creeks, dense forests, plus I'm arguably in the foothills to the Ozarks.
If anything, I'm not in a land of backwards people: I'm in Middle-Earth. But I'm fortunate enough to have most of the various landscapes all wrapped up in a roughly fifty mile radius (or less) region that encircles me.
I have plains to the west, valleys to the south, high mountains to the north, and this particular area has rising and falling hillsides that are pretty much everywhere, as are the untouched woodlands.
There are, as Bilbo describes to Gandalf, forests, fields, little rivers.
I might as well be Frodo, living at peace in the Shire, hearing of tales of the outer lands but being quite content to stay here as well.
I'm also the only one here who would proclaim I have no need of the six (6!!!) churches in my very tiny community. If anything, I'm closer to being a follower of paganism.
And its in paganism I find my next major project will take place (although it won't happen for a few years.)
I say to myself that one day I will buy a house in Ireland, lock myself away there for a year in an attempt to absorb the culture, the language, and the old world beliefs of the people, and begin writing a collection of old fashioned fairy tales.
Then there's the gaming geek in me that is gathering unused sources around me that would make for an epic video game story. Such sources include Caitlin and John Matthew's "Encyclopedia of Celtic Wisdom - A Celtic Shaman's Sourcebook," and Pierre Dubois "Great Encyclopedia of Faeries - Secrets Revealed."
But that's just two sources. I will need more.
I say this is for an epic video game for a reason - I could take all this material and make it into another movie series (as I'm doing with the six part "Interesting Times" series I'm working on), but in the last year I started returning to my gaming roots.
My dad bought me a refurbished, first generation Nintendo for my birthday, and I was able to play all my old favorite games once again that I'd been without for a good fifteen years.
I never threw away my games or such. I kept them, mostly for sentimental reasons.
But then I could play "Mega Man" again! I was finally able to beat "Zelda II - The Adventure of Link" for the first time in my life. The same goes for "StarTropics," and several others.
When this happened, I started looking around for Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 games, and have managed to expand my gaming library considerably.
But I lost touch with the gaming world when the GameCube came out, and even more so when the Wii arrived. I'd love nothing more than to play both, and I've even bought a few strategy guides for "Zelda - Twilight Princess" and "Metroid - Prime Corruption" because, you never know, I just might be able to buy them one day.
So the Celtic mythology and such I'm researching will hopefully, one day, be used for a massive gaming project.
I'm going to end this particular entry with a song I'm quite fond of that usually comes on the New Age music channel, Spa, on XM\Sirius Radio.
All Souls Night
by Loreena McKennitt
Bonfires dot the rolling hillsides
Figures dance around and around
To drums that pulse out echoes of darkness
Moving to the pagan sound.
Somewhere in a hidden memory
Images float before my eyes
Of fragrant nights of straw and of bonfires
Dancing 'til the next sunrise.
I can see the lights in the distance
Trembling in the dark cloak of night
Candles and lanterns are dancing, dancing
A waltz on All Souls Night.
Figures of cornstalks bend in the shadows
Held up tall as the flames leap high
The Green Knight holds the holly bush
To mark where the Old Year passes by.
Bonfires dot the rolling hillsides
Figures dance around and around
To drums that pulse out echoes of darkness
Moving to the pagan sound.
Standing on the bridge that crosses
The river that goes out to the sea
The wind is full of a thousand voices
They pass by the bridge and me.
