horse – Nancy Tart: Writing for Life

Electric Season

Energy resonates in the clear skies of the seasons changing to autumn.

October 31, 2018

Electric Season

It’s officially autumn.

To me, it never seems like autumn until the sky goes that gorgeous “sky blue,” gentle cooler breezes tousle our hair, and there is a crisp energizing feel in the air.

During these days, I remember the exhilaration I felt as a child when they first approached.

Our first “autumn” day we’d race outside, full of a new form of energy that totally required an outdoor escape. If there was a swingset in the yard, (sometimes just a rope with a stick at the bottom) we were trying to touch the sky with our feet! On our bikes, (we called them horses, since we loved horses but never had a real one) we would ride round and round the house, singing Sunday School songs at the top of our lungs. If I ever had to describe the feeling in one word, it would be “freedom.”

Today the gorgeous electric blue sky makes me think about how God arranges things in seasons in our lives. Sometimes, when a new season comes, it brings the exhilaration of freedom. I’ve felt it before and not understood why.

Life seems to say, “you are trapped more than before, why are you happy?”

But my heart answers with a song called “Happy” because one verse basically says: bring it on, I’m happy and nothing can change that!

I imagine myself telling life that sometimes.

Because I have my root of happiness in Jesus, His joy is my strength, and even if life wants to throw stuff at me and claim I’m worse off in this new season than I was before (usually it’s that I can’t see the positive just yet), I know God has me in His hands – and I choose to be filled with that freedom exhilaration that comes with this new season!

Whatever God has for us, I sense the excitement, and I choose to focus on joy! Let this next season begin!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

Celebration: Disney Springs

How better to celebrate a long first day of college semester than to watch fireworks from three parks atop the Disney Springs parking garage?

August 22, 2018

Celebration: Disney Springs

We love to explore free parks and things to do. Like playing tourist in downtown Saint Augustine, visiting the beach, playing kickball or tennis at Treaty Park, or when Louis wants to “get out of Dodge,” exploring a bit farther away: Daytona Beach boardwalk, Jacksonville Landing, or Disney Springs.

This time he decided Disney Springs. If you don’t go hungry or bring some snacks and water bottles, you can spend hours listening to live music, exploring cool sights, taking boat or bus rides, and spend nothing. (Just the gas getting there, which for us is about $20.) We dream of being able to “do Disney” at the actual parks, which will happen someday, but for now, Disney Springs is what my kids mean when they say “Disneyworld.”

Once we touch the edge of Orlando and see all the tall buildings, the entertainment has begun! The girls and Lucas shout about seeing the tops of rides, “castles,” houses on top of big buildings, and roads going over us and under us!

They are building what appears to be a 5-level overpass system on I4! The kids were trying to count how high it would be – they thought four, then realized we were already over two other lanes! (Yes, we get excited about crazy stuff like being on bridges, overpasses, and parking garages.)

Christina, Rebeccah, and Kimberly start telling stories of their one visit to Universal (Daddy’s birthday two years ago for Rock the Universe). They laugh over Kimberly falling asleep on Daddy’s shoulders during the last concert and marvel at the weird purple mountain that is the icon for the new Volcano Bay waterpark.

As usual, it’s one of the girls who reminds me that I have a camera!

Kimberly took pictures of her favorite “cove” in Disney Springs. This twist of sparkling water and beautiful plants fascinates Kimberly.

The beautiful “chess knight” fountain (the girls call it that because the horse heads remind them of chess pieces) is also Lucas’ favorite fountain.

Admiring the giant Lego statues is a must.

The giant water dragon was admired and discussed for almost fifteen minutes!

There’s Buzz and Woody from Toy Story (Kimberly loves that one).

Jillian and Lucas sat with the Lego Friends statues (and Lucas tried to do what he does to everyone else’s Lego creations, take them apart!).

We watched the Rain Forest Café’s Volcano explode with hot lava across the bay.

Kimberly’s favorite place to wander around is in the T-Rex eatery because she loves to jump when the robot dinosaurs move. All lit up, it looks like a Mayan temple from this angle.

Another fountain picture appears since Lucas loves all fountains.

We raced to the top of the parking garage (we always park at the top level) so we could watch the fireworks from Epcot and Magic Kingdom at the same time! A third park’s fireworks were a bit further in the distance, probably Disney Studios, but we weren’t sure.

We were going to stay to go watch the water parade on the Lagoon, but with everyone zonked from a long first day at college and the inability of the stroller to carry four people, we ended on the fireworks and journeyed home.

Yes, they all slept on the ride home, which made for some Mom and Daddy conversation time!

Thank you, Jesus, for our amazing life!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

Mythical Horses

June 27, 2017

Mythical Horses

They say that in fiction, we don’t really create anything new, we draw on our memory of things we have seen to create something new: Like the Sevokloi in Web of Deception – they are like squids with reptile bodies (leather) adapted for a desert terrain and having two steadying legs like an overgrown insect. I love creating creatures that don’t really exist. I also like to pretend (in my stories) that other mythical creatures are real: like unicorns and pegasi. (The people of my world call them “skyhorses”.)

In our house, each of us have different theories on how the stories of mythical creatures like flying horses (pegasi) and horned horses (unicorns) came about.

My personal theory is that someone in ancient times came across a skeleton of a horse with a bone spear stuck through its skull. Since it was bone, they thought it was part of the skeleton (maybe they’d never seen a horse!) and voila, stories spread of a horned horse!

For pegasi, maybe there were some pre-Ionian shepherds out when Elijah rose up to heaven (it says “there appeared a chariot of fire and horses of fire… and Elijah went up by whirlwind to heaven”) and those shepherds said “Look Joe! Flying horses of fire driving a chariot of fire!” (tada, pegasi!) Then Joe says “maybe that’s how the sun goes across the sky.” Boom! Now there’s the Greek story of Helios driving flying horses in his flaming chariot.

Rebeccah thinks that flying horses and horned horses were mutants of the horse kind. An isolated, now extinct, species of horse in ancient times used an overgrown tooth to dig the ground like cracker cows and wild hogs looking for food. These were unicorns. A few, eohippus sized members of the horse kind, flew-hopped about like archaeopteryx with tiny wings. These ended up being called pegasi!

However you explain the origin of mythical creatures in fantasy stories, they do make the stories far more interesting. (They also let us know that the story world we are entering is not real – so we can expect many strange things.)

I love mythical creatures. I like pretending to create something new. And it’s fun to theorize about how people created them.

Thanks for reading!

Type at you later…

~Nancy Tart

Tag: horse

Electric Season

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Celebration: Disney Springs

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Mythical Horses

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