No, this isn’t a story about the new royal baby in England. It’s about my very own royal family: Princess Sophie and Prince Ben.
Lovely Lucia with droll on her chin. (Photo by Dom with the SLR.)
On Monday night Dom was in the yard firing up the grill for some steaks. I had Lucy in the swing for the very first time. She sort of liked it. Sophie wandered out and asked if I could fasten her dress for her. And then she was so darned photogenic I had to take a bunch of pictures. I’d brought out my phone to take pictures of Lucy, you know.
Mama, Mama, can you do my dress?
I’m happy to be the lady in waiting to this smiling royal.
Can you see that she has a second dress up dress, a lavender one, under the blue? She got it into her head that princesses wear multiple dresses.
She traipsed around the yard, making a charming pictures as she stopped to pick clover and grass.
Completely absorbed, she didn’t even notice me as she sang her little songs.
And then Ben came out with his new knight costume.
Bella says this is the king going down a waterfall.
The knight climbing the castle wall.
He joins the queen in the castle.
The king and queen on the battlements, Bella says.
I love the way Sophie just takes charge and Ben becomes her supporting cast. He looks like he’s not having fun, but really that’s just Ben.
The king and queen.(Photo by Dom)
This one especially makes me laugh. She’s singing her heart out and he’s… the reluctant hero. (Photo by Dom)
Is he threatening the paparrazi or saluting? (Photo by Dom)
My little queen. (Photo by Dom)
I wish I’d been able to capture her song she was singing.
And then there’s Lucy and Ben. These two have something special between them. A beautiful thing how this little girl makes this often dour boy light up.
Wow, thanks for the really words.
Don’t know if you saw my reply to one of your comments, but the Waste Land app has a nice set of notes—both Eliot’s and later annotations—that are quite useful, as well as various performances and readings of the poem.
Thanks again for the compliments. I got a lot of criticism from Catholics (and, of course, from New Agers) for this series, but I hope by the end I made clear my point: that when we reclaim a piece of our Catholic heritage and clear away the myth, we gain and the occultists lose.
“really KIND words,” he meant to say.
Oh yes. I have the Waste Land app. Love it. I think I’ve mentioned it on my blog, but haven’t done a full review yet, mostly because I haven’t really had a chance to fully explore it yet.
I think your series is a definite win.
E,
Now that is truly interesting. I love the insights that come from knowing the meaning of all the details. The Magician as demagogue, huh.
I found this very interesting. I still would avoid Tarot cards and not try to promote them. There are some things that can’t be “undone”. The symbol for the Nazis was a Christian cross, but not any more!
+JMJ+
A friend of mine has also been exploring the symbolic meanings of Tarot cards. He says he wouldn’t use them for divination any more than he’d use Rorschach blots to tell the future, but he thinks the images are excellent ways to condense complex truths into a simple form.
The latest one he looked at was The Magician. He said that the items on the table in front of the character would be immediately recognisable to a medieval as symbols of the four classes of society: a sword for the nobility, a chalice for the clergy, and a coin for the merchants. But the real key is the wand or baton that the Magician is holding, which symbolises the peasant or labourer class. Of all the weapons the Magician could have picked, why the “lowliest” one? My friend said it’s because the Magician is using the brute force and numbers of the peasants to keep the nobles, the priests, and the merchants in check—and he added that we can still see that wherever we look in modern history and find a mob terrorising everyone else. But our mistake is fearing the mob rather than the Magician, the one whose power over words can incite great numbers of men to violent revolution.
Yeah, I wouldn’t have them in my house or promote them either. I think there’s too much room for confusion and scandal not to mention children getting the wrong idea. It would be imprudent.
Just to be clear, were you interested, you can get French cards, which have never had occult images or connections, but usually just show scenes of country life. Even the suits are the familiar heart, spade, club, and diamond. They look like this:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godandthemachine/2013/07/how-to-play-tarot-an-explanation-with-sample-rules/