COFFIN HOP 2014

Welcome to the 2014 Coffin Hop!

Please visit all the other authors after you are done here by clicking the horrible pumpkin button ---------------------------------->>>>

My Coffin Hop challenge this year will test your mind reading capabilities.

I will choose a series of FOUR letters from the alphabet and focus the energy of the letters on the crystal ball in front of the mind reading gypsy. Please use your psychic powers and see if you can tell what letters have been chosen, and put your answer in the comments below. (The four letters do NOT form a word and were chosen yesterday and sent to Axel, the Big Daddy of the Hop, to keep everyone honest.)

At the end of the hop, the person who has the best psychic abilities will win GHOST WRITER ~ a miniature, leather-bound book about a tiny ghosts who faces the same problems as we the living have here on earth.

Ghost Writer has issues with grammar, syntax, punctuation, and has a pile of rejection letters as long as your arm. 

The book is hand-bound with wax coated string, and has original art on each of its ten pages.


Please, please, please SCARE ME!

Thanks for stopping by dearies. XO

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Angels

I have an aunt who loves angels. She believes we have guardian angels, and that there are other holy beings that protect us from the bad guys, getting into accidents, or just straying off the good path. I know many who feel the same way. 

In the bible is says that God made angels one at a time, and they cannot die. Even if we are super good here one earth, we would never become angels. The number of angels never increases or decreases. Some say there are at least as many angels as there have been people who existed on the earth.

I asked one of my friends who wholeheartedly believes in angels what she thought they looked like. She told me that angels look exactly like we see them in pictures; beautiful, typically clothed in white, with wings and if not a halo, a very holy countenance or glow. She also described a female entity.

Another friend, a born-again Christian, believes they are huge. Not seven or eight feet tall, she means bigger than your house. She said they are fearsome creatures, wielding swords of fire...and these gargantuan beings look like humans--really big ones.

I think if I asked 100 people in the United States what they believed about angels I would most likely hear 100 different answers. It got me thinking--do we think angels have blonde hair? Blue eyes? Are they ginormous sword-wielding super spirits? Or do we imagine angels look like US?

I took a poll in a spiritual group I belong to and asked what they thought angels looked like. All the respondents here gave different answers--some said angels were spirit, and did not have a body we could see, others said some angels looks one way, and others another way.

I imagine that our personal visions of these divine beings make us feel comfortable and safe. We lie down in the snow and recreate the lovely wings and heavenly skirts we imagine them to have. They grace the highest points of our Christmas trees, and we make holiday cookies with wings and halos. We envision them playing saintly music on their tiny harps, and protecting us from evil with their shiny Swords of God.

In the bible, Daniel saw angel with polished-metal arms and legs, and a face like lightning. Christian text says since angels are not human but spirit, they are not visible to us at all. When anyone did see an angel in biblical days, they fell down and covered their faces in awe.

NOT how you would typically imagine an angel

But if we are talking about the angels from the bible we are a bit off track. First of all, most of the angels there do NOT have wings. As a matter of fact, most of the angels described sound a bit more like something from a sci-fi movie than a heavenly book. For example, seraphim, the highest ranked of the angels, have six wings according to Isaiah, two to cover his face, two to cover his feet, and the other two for flying.

Cherubs, or cherubim, those cute little Valentine flyers, have four faces, a man, an ox, a lion, and an eagle. NOT cute. The thrones are even creepier, described as a wheel within a wheel, their rims covered with hundreds of eyes. The dominions are described as the human-looking angels with feathery wings--not so bad. Nephilim are a whole different story because they are giants who supposedly resulted from the unscrupulous affairs between angels and humans.

The word angel comes from a Greek word, aggelos, and the Hebrew word mal'ak. Both words mean messenger.

A CBS News poll reported that nearly 8 in 10 American people believe in angels. Women are more likely than men to believe in angels, and 4 out of 10 people who do not attend religious services of any kind still believe in angels.

But not every angel is a good-guy!

There is a faction of angels that went to the dark side and followed Lucifer, the fallen angel who dared to challenge God. We call them demons.

There is a supposed fight going on in the invisible world between good and evil, a fight between the good and bad angels. Although hard to understand why this would be allowed to rage on, the bad angels or demons are supposed to serve some type of purpose in the eyes of God, and when they have completed what needs to be done, God will put an end to it.

Ooohhh I want to believe I have a guardian angel! A benign and beautiful being floating around, always on the alert, and keeping me from harms way. Doreen Virtue says we can talk to angels any time we want--and they will listen and help us because that is their job. But we have to know how. We need to be specific, and truly ask for what we want. Well, it's worth a shot.

Now here is a seeming exception to one of the angel rules; Metatron. Ancestor of Noah. Enoch was transformed into an angel and named Metatron. I know, I know--angels are made by God one at a time and NOT from humans...sigh. Don't blame me--I'm just passing along information. You'll have to take it up with someone higher up than me. 

Death Day

By Paola Cirmia~http://tinyurl.com/phz2zaw

I love spring when life is stirring. Of course summer thrills me as the suns warms me for a while. But we are coming to that time of year where the invisible bones of my dead relatives walk through my yard, and the darkness that resides in us all peeks from the creaking closet door of our childhood nightmares.

Oh, Halloween, my October love. Your brittle embrace allows us a small glimpse of death before our time. 

As I sit on my front porch at dusk and watch the sky turn from orange to purple, I wonder why so many of us are moonstruck in the fall. Some of us feel the familiar pull, the same kiss we read about that turns mortal into beast; and with the waning moon, back into a human being. 

It is more than our memories of trick or treating in the dark, crunchy leaves blowing at our feet, and the crooked smiles of glowing Jack o'lanterns grinning in a slightly sinister way. It is something more primitive, an ancient stirring we feel calling to us, but we don't know how to answer. It confuses us because it is delightful and wicked, but makes us feel very, very good. It is related to death, but we don't know how to celebrate death here in the United States.

We mourn our dead. We have somber ceremonies because a loved one has passed. But we don't celebrate what they were or the spirits they are now, happily haunting us for the rest of our lives. We wish their spirits would stay with us and never leave. We would not fear them.

We are only afraid of the ghosts that don't belong to us. 

Whether it be a simple memory or flash of movement out of the corner of our eyes, our private ghosts are precious. Far too few of us admit a belief in the otherworldly, but October thins the veil between our world and theirs, and the lovely creature-under-the-bed feeling we all experience in the fall is nothing but a temporary stroll between two worlds.

We don't realize it, but we have a foot in each of these worlds. We spend much of our time being rational and logical, states that can be overrated and over valued. But our beloved science is a study of humility, discoveries and revelations constantly being overridden and facts found to be false. 

Knowing when the phone is going to ring, saying the same thing at the same time as a close friend, and a flash of insight about the right thing to do are all tiny windows of our intuitive side, the B side of logic and rationale. Some say children and animals have a natural connection to the great beyond because no one has talked them out of believing, or told them they it is all their imagination. Maybe they trust everyone because they are being guided by the invisible hands of the dearly departed.

The sun sets earlier now, and we are exposed to the dark for longer periods each day. We think differently at night and fear different things. Our belief in the supernatural blooms during these long-shadow days, and we prickle with a faint knowing we don't understand. Why does it feel so good to decorate our homes with trappings of the dead for Halloween? Death is so sad, after all. 

Or is it?

Is this our secret way of celebrating death? Of allowing our intuition to embrace the knowing we have deep in our hearts that our loved ones have simply moved to a different location?

In Mexico and other countries they celebrate Dia de Muertos, an official holiday that honors the dead with sugar skulls, favorite foods of the deceased, and visits to the graveyard. Ghosts walk freely among the living during this three-day event, and friends and relatives do not feel so alone.

We Americans would never admit to celebrating death in such a way. But we will:

* decorate our houses with skulls, monsters, bats, and Jack o'lanterns on Halloween

* get dressed up as Dracula, a mummy, zombie, or any number of undead creatures and go to a party

* call psychics, astrologists, and tarot card readers to hear about our future or contact a dead relative or loved one

* attend a seance for messages from the grave

* watch shows like Ghost Hunters for clues and signs of spirits

The difference is we will do it in the name of FUN. We don't take any of these things seriously, right?

Maybe we should.

Maybe that sigh we heard from the kitchen was not the dishwasher again, and maybe the flickering light in the laundry room was not a loose wire. That perfume...isn't that what Gramma used to wear?

Maybe our minds are naturally more open during this spiced cider time of the year, when we are a bit more in tune with the other side, and the thoughts we have might be more than a little influenced by those we had known and had to bid farewell.

Zero by the amazing Nate Wragg--more here:  http://tinyurl.com/pghs2fd

I call for a Death Day of our own here in the United States to celebrate the lives of our lost parents, children, grandparents, friends, family, and pets. They deserve more of a place in our lives than just a picture on the mantle. October 30th sounds good to me.

So keep a cup of tea close at hand and don't be so quick to cover your eyes when you feel a shiver of fear. You never know who is close by.

For Marg <3 Woof