Thunderbirds Came Out Today To Enjoy The Weather.

Raven Life

Lookit’ me, aren’t I cute? Lookit’ us hop around like tiny lil people. If we act like children will you love us and give us a snack? Aren’t we just adorable? Oh, you think? Would you like to give us a burrito? If I sit on your rear view mirror, will you give me some of your delicious salad? What’s that, a vegetable?? No thanks, can I please just have your croutons, and some of that tasty salad dressing? Okay? Great. Did I just throw all your fast food wrappers all over the ground while looking for a tasty treat? Me? What?? Since I didn’t find a full size burger, do you think you can go to Wendy’s for me? No? Can we share? I’ll just stare at you until you become hypnotized to be my slave and go get me Wendy’s. Yay Wendy’s! Thank you nice person. You are nice. Let’s be friends or at least lunch mates. I love you so much when you feed me cookies and French fries. How am I not fat? One of life’s greatest mysteries. Oh you thought I was stuck to that light pole because it’s -30 degrees Fahrenheit and I’m just sittin’ here holding onto frozen metal without gloves? Nope, because my blood is made from liquid antifreeze. Are you watching?? Lookit’ how pretty I am when I practice my flying skills. I can fly high or low and do summersaults in the wind! Whee! Lookit’ me! You’re watching me because I’m so pretty, aren’t you?? I thought so! Whee! Did I just poop on your windshield? Oops. 🐤

Right away, I knew she was a shape-shifter. She appeared with grey-brown long hair, sitting on a park bench. Her hair didn’t move the way a person’s would. She looked at me for a long time while I walked the path that was in front of the park bench she sat on. When I passed, she asked if there was any fire. She was, in a way, telling me that her kind doesn’t like fire. She barely moved… ancient. I wondered what person she was mimicking. Someone she’d seen long ago whom she’d watched, and was long gone? A beautiful grandmother figure; or maybe just the first human-like creature she’d ever seen?  I told her no, there weren’t any fires coming.  I hope that’s true for her and her kind, and for us, in our tiny town of precious mortals and ancient shape-shifters.

Dream: Shape Shifters Circus, Castle Portal Room, Levitation, Dancing

September 26, 2023 There was a group of shape shifters going down the road together laughing and having fun together. I was trying to talk with one of them and they all shifted into kind of Norwegian people and put on some Norwegian accents, which were good but I knew that they weren’t really Norwegian and they didn’t really speak Norwegian normally. They were being a Norwegian circus of some sort, and laughing and playing as they walked, one was juggling and they were also dancing. I started dancing with one guy shape shifter and he was really strong and could even push me into the air. We paused after awhile on our journey, near a tent, and I wanted him to bring me up into the air like a sort of reverse sky dive. He was on top and pulled me spiraling into the air with him, levitating about 30 feet up. It was a bit scary, but pretty fun. People on the ground were watching and got some videos of us levitating up into the air. Then we went into the woods, walking past all sorts of colorfully and vibrantly painted wooden gnomes, fairy houses, and little mushrooms of a Norwegian style. Then we apparently came to somewhere like a marketplace in Norway that was like Santa’s workshop at the North Pole and we were elves fashioning tiny Christmas ornaments and figurines out of wood and cloth, and selling them there or giving them away to passersby. Then I went to a castle in the Middle East, where there was a portal on the left and a portal on the right, basically into the same type of room but the left side was brighter and newer looking and the right side looked softer, but more aged and not quite as bright. I knew I wanted to go to the right but ended up having to go through the left and around the corner to the right. There were dancers there and we all had on some flowing garments and scarves. We would run at a pool with water and begin levitating just enough to be able to run on the surface of the water, dipping our scarves into the water on either side. That was our dance.

Changeling

The night sky was dark and nothing stirred.  Stars twinkled overhead.  A trailer park spanned the street block and the blue flicker from a television set shone down through an open window to the gravel where nothing grew.  Beer bottles lay strew here and there, along with shards of glass that were the ghosts of beer bottles past.  It was an unusually quiet evening and there were not even the usual domestic quarrels that could normally be heard throughout the park.

A comet flashed briefly overhead, and another, and then another.  No one was looking at the sky, though.  That was okay because it wasn’t long before one of the comets landed squarely on the trailer park.  The residents had no choice but to acknowledge it then.  Thirty people came out from their tiny abodes with tousled hair, slippers and nightgowns to see what had happened.  The only residents who didn’t come out were the two occupants of the trailer that was hit, a girl of thirteen and her mother.

Smoke billowed out from the pink and white trailer.  People began to gather around it and someone knocked on its door.

“Everything all right in there?” the neighbor called from outside the trailer door. 

“Someone should call the fire department!” another neighbor yelled.

 “I’m on the phone with them now,” an elderly gentleman said. 

“What was it?  Was it a bomb!?” one woman in a rose-colored nightgown asked.

 “Probably just a cooking accident,” said a disgruntled, sleepy man with white hair.  This was met with several looks of disbelief and a few shrugs.

Finally the woman and her daughter came out, appearing unharmed, though also looking terrified and exhausted.

“What happened?” several people asked her at once.

“I don’t know,” the woman answered.  “We were sleeping and then it was like a bomb went off; we found this,” she held up a fragment of what appeared to be a metallic substance.

“A meteor?” one man said with an amazed look on his face.

“Wow!” came a chorus of voices but after the fire department came and made sure there was no more danger, they all went back into their myriad trailers and went back to sleep as if nothing had happened at all.

Three weeks later, the mother was dead and Lilly, the daughter who’d kept the shard, was fighting for her life and no one could figure out what was wrong.  Her fever had been 114 at one point, and no one expected her to live after that, but she did.  She should be brain dead, blind, deaf and dumb but she wasn’t.  She went in and out of consciousness but there was no loss of sensation, when she was awake, and she could still remember her own name.  She would classify as a medical miracle if she got better and they told her so in an effort to cheer her up.

It took three years for the fever to fully pass, and two years of intense physical therapy for her to be able to walk and talk with ease.  She wouldn’t ever be normal again, though.  She spent a lot of time reading and trying to catch up on a life that had passed her by.  She dreamed of doing normal things, having a boyfriend, going to college, taking walks in the park.

Very soon, she was doing all of those things.  She found a tutor and within a year had her GED and a full scholarship.  She had a dark haired and mildly-chubby boyfriend, whose name was Ethan, with whom she spent her days.  He made up for his chubbiness with his good cheer and kind ways.  He always opened the door for her and made every day special, which meant a lot to her, since she had fewer days than most.  Together, she and Ethan made every day special.  Although she was doing well, she felt that it was only a matter of time before the shadow cast over her short life would unequivocally reappear, and without warning.  Next time there might be no miracle for her.

She enjoyed their days together immensely and more than he ever knew.  On one of those sunlit days their walk had taken them to the heart of a forest park.  They were pushing back branches from the path when a branch broke off in Lilly’s hand.  Something about it caught her attention.  What was it?  She couldn’t tell.  It was as if she became frozen in rapt fascination.  Her fingers glowed, ever so slightly, and then turned the exact color and texture of the branch.  Then they turned back as easily as they had shifted.  Ethan turned around and looked at her.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said, although her heart was pounding.  She was wondering if she was hallucinating, actually.  She dropped the branch and Ethan put his arm around her.  They held hands the rest of the way home.  If he suspected anything, he was quiet about it.

She developed a fascination with colors.  She especially liked solid, bright colors.  She would put her hand in front and watch the skin morph its color to the exact same shade.  It didn’t take any effort.  It was effortless, even natural, to her.  She began to crave new and different things to morph into.  When she meditated, she began glowing and becoming translucent so that she could view her own insides, the structure of bones and ligaments, and the pulse of her heart pumping the liquid light through her veins.

It was hardly the shadow of death that she’d expected to fall over her life again, but she wasn’t sure what Ethan would think.  She felt a gnawing realization that he wouldn’t be able to deal with it at all.  She was certain that he would leave her if he ever found out about her newfound ‘ability’. 

Depression came and went for Lilly.  She was moving to college soon, anyway.  Ethan didn’t know what preoccupied his Lily.  He only felt her becoming more distant and he assumed it was another guy.  When she moved away to college, he felt it in her voice, that she was saying goodbye, goodbye.  He had no choice but to accept it.  He held her in one final embrace before she departed; he tried not to think about a future without her.

“I got you this,” he said, fighting tears.  He held up a golden necklace with a heart-shaped pendant of blue crystal.

“Thank you,” she said.  She took it and put it on.  She was desperately trying to hold back her tears, too.  “Goodbye,” she said.  She turned away and boarded the plane.

It was the last time he ever saw her.  He didn’t have another girlfriend after that.  He stayed chubby and good natured and went to church and gave all his money to the poor.  When he was forty, a bird came to visit him.  It appeared to be a raven.  It would fly near his house every day and even seemed to wave to him.  Eventually, when he began feeding it, he thought he heard it say “hello,” back on more than one occasion.

After some time, the raven left, but an enormous eagle came to eat the breakfast he left for the raven.  Ethan thought the eagle had the most beautiful golden eyes he’d ever seen.  They actually glowed.  He was sure of it.

He made a leather sleeve to wear so that the eagle could perch on his arm.  They spent many years together, like this.  Occasionally, she would repay his kindness by bringing him freshly caught fish to eat for dinner.  One thing puzzled him, though.  Sometimes, she appeared golden brown, and other times reddish brown, and sometimes almost white.  Every day her coloring was different. When he was very old, long past ninety and nearing one hundred, when his curly dark hair had turned white, and his heart had not many beats left in it, the eagle came to him one last time.  He ambled, with some trouble, to the open window where the unearthly raptor perched, waiting for him.  In her beak she carried something shiny, golden and familiar.  The years of solitude and loneliness melted away as he recalled, in perfect detail, the day he’d given it to her; it was the golden necklace with the blue heart-shaped crystal pendant.

Shape Shifter Invisibility

Shape shifters can be invisible, specifically transparent, especially if they want to watch you and learn about you without being seen. When they’re invisible, you can still see a faint outline of their body, which is more obvious if they move around. They can hang upside down from your rooftop to look in at you through your window and then run off through the trees like a squirrel or monkey, but you can still see their outline, if they’re big enough. They can move pretty fast when they want to, like most wild creatures, so you have to be looking at the spot where they are to be able to see them.

The feathers on these plants look like real bird feathers 🙂

Christmas Tomato Olive Salad All ingredients to taste. Cherry Tomatoes Green Olives Sliced Olives with Pimento Fresh Chopped Garlic Olive Oil Fresh Parsley Leaf Fresh Chopped Basil Leaf Fresh Oregano Leaf Italian Seasoning Slice the Cherry Tomatoes in halves and add to bowl. Slice the Green Olives in halves and mix with Cherry Tomatoes. Add all remaining ingredients to the bowl and mix well. Enjoy the holiday reds and greens, and the sweet taste of Christmas in your mouth and in your heart. Then you can say “Olive you,” to everyone you meet. P.S. But try not to breathe on them. 🫒