In Healing the Earth, You Heal Yourself

When John Beal was told he had less than a year to live, he made the decision to put his time and energy into cleaning up Hamm Creek, which runs from White Center ending at the Duwamish River. Today, this once polluted and neglected 3.5 mile stream has been brought back to its natural state where fish and other habitat have begun to thrive thanks to Beal's unparalleled commitment and vision.

John Beal was not your typical environmentalist.

He was a smoker and a Vietnam vet who called the industrial neighborhood of South Park home.

Yet for nearly three decades, Mr. Beal was one of Seattle's most aggressive and effective environmentalists.

Almost single-handedly, Mr. Beal brought a moribund tributary of the befouled Duwamish River back to life. In the process, he constructed a living, breathing testament to the restorative powers of nature — when it's given a little help.

"I consider him a true inspiration," said Kathy Fletcher, the executive director of People for Puget Sound. "He's the guy that had the vision that such a damaged area could be restored and could be healthy again."

Naturalist John Beal, 56, was hero of Hamm Creek

THE WORLD NEEDS MORE JOHN BEALS!!!

Pilgrimage (Caiseal Mor)

Ciaseal Mor is one guy I just love listening to.
His music is just pure magic to the ears.
Above is his latest tune called Pilgrimage where he walks around the Glastonbury countryside on a spiritual pilgrimage.

I would encourage anyone to checkout more of Ciaseal's work at his website; http://www.mahjee.com/index.html

You'll be doing yourself a favour ... trust me. 

Note: Recently it appears that Ciaseal Mor's website is down, but you may be able to check out his work by following links from the Wikipedia links -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caiseal_M%C3%B3r 

Taking a Stab at It

My Dead Fred, has now passed on*-)

Over at Synchrosecrets there is a story about Jeff Lindsay 
(the author of the Dexter books) and the knife-block that he has on his kitchen bench.
A Stabbing Synchro

Jeff's knife-block on his kitchen bench

I was saying how I once had a similar styled pencil holder on my desk, which consisted of the pen/pencil holder ('Dead Fred', or maybe 'Dead Darren' in my case) and an IKEA pencil inserted through the heart (which I had to assemble myself;-)

Jeff Lindsay at the 2013 Texas Book Festival

Jeff said the knife-block was symbolic of the fact that he saw it right after getting his first royalty cheque  from Showtime, for the TV show that was based off his Dexter novels.

My pen/pencil holder was also symbolic to me for reasons I won't go into at the moment, but anyone who has read through this blog, could probably read between the lines, without me having to spell it out for them.

 I'm not a fan of the Dexter novels (not that I have read any), but my youngest son is, and he has quite a few Jeff Lindsay novels, along with Stephen King novels, sitting in his bookcase.

When Jeff was out here at The Brisbane Writers Festival, I took both my boys to hear him give a talk about his novels, and to give my youngest son an opportunity to get Jeff to sign his Dexter novel.

My son's novel and Jeff's autographed Dexter

Jeff Lindsay and Stephen King have been a big influence on my youngest son's ambition to write novels himself, and he has just self-published his first novel called Teen Assassin (I haven't read it yet) which will be available in bookshops soon.

Doesn't really look like my cup of tea, but then neither do the Dexter novels and half of Stephen King's stories, but it doesn't stop them from laughing all the way to the bank.

A least they're taking a stab with their story writing, while I feel

too much is at stake with my day job, to have a stab at doing something a little more creative for a living, at the moment;-)

P.S.

I ended up giving my Dead Fred away to a nephew, hence the caption in the above photo about Dead Fred  having now passed on ;-)