Sunday, July 25, 2010

The Circle Fly


No Photo is known to exist of this insect.



   I guess I never really gave too much thought to bugs in my life until I got to the Yukon.  Once you get out into the Yukon bush, all of a sudden the endless variety of bugs really catches your attention!  The mosquito of course is king of them all, but there must be at least a bazillion -maybe even two bazillion- other types of bugs that are obviously put on this earth to help mankind remember to exercise properly, and that a nice comfy bed is no place to be laying during those long days of summer.  Much better you should be sitting in the dense smoke of a smudge-fire or buried in mud up to your hair as the insects play their delightful serenades of buzzing wings about your ears, give you close ups of their varied and intricate body designs as they fly into your eyes, and increase your nutritional intake as you inhale them with each breath you take.
   Now, I am no entomologist by a long shot, but there is a species of fly that always fascinated me of whom I first heard of in the Cariboo region of British Columbia back in the late 1960's.  I searched for them for years with no success, until sure enough one day in 1978, I discovered one in Dawson City, Yukon Territory.  Since that day I have been able to determine through various newspaper reports,UTUBE Videos, and first hand conversations that the Circle Fly does indeed exist in various places across Canada, and no doubt all of North America. So in the spirit of helping to advance scientific knowledge on this incredibly unsociable insect, I offer the following story in which I first learned of it's existence.
   I hope you enjoy the story, and if you have any direct personal experience with this critter, feel free to leave a comment here on my site.
  Enjoy  the story!
  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~               ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~               ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

THE CIRCLE  FLY

by
 Rick Mortimer
                                      

     My dad didn't like cops.  So I knew that when Leroy McRobb showed up at the porch door of our farm house wearing his Stetson and his badge, there was going to be some fireworks.
        Leroy wasn't much of a cop really, just the local excuse for law and order around our neighborhood of quiet farms and orchards. The local women felt better if there was some kind of law around, and somehow Leroy got the job.  Well, I guess they got their wish anyway, 'cause Leroy was some kind of cop.
       But now he was standing on our porch and Dad was looking at him with that look he usually reserved for Hitch, our mule.  Or, sometimes, even  for Grandpa.  But usually he had a little more understanding in his eyes when he looked at Grandpa, because Grandpa had an excuse of sorts for doing the things he did. He'd fallen down the back stairs three years ago, when I was seven, and walloped his head.  My Dad had found him laying in a heap, and, thinking Grandpa had killed himself this time (he was always falling off the steps), dragged him inside to the couch and then went out to the wood shop in back and built the old man a nice pine box to lay him out in.  It was a beauty too, and took a piece of work to build, so when Dad came back in the house and found Grandpa sitting on the couch teasing the cat - well, he  was some ticked off.  I guess Grandpa had only been in a coma or something  'cause he was now lively as ever.  Only trouble was, although everything about him seemed to work OK, something funny  had happened to his head.  He was never quite the same after that fall, and sometimes he'd even think my mom was my grandmother, who was dead,  and he'd all of a sudden reach out and pinch her behind or jump up, throw his arms around her, and start gumming her neck.  I used to figure Grandpa must be getting pretty lonely, what with grandma being long gone; but I remember the look Dad used to give him as he'd wrestle the old guy back to the couch.  Just like he was looking at Leroy now.
     "Mr. Harding", said Leroy, "I've got to take your boy into town and charge him with disturbing the peace".
      "You do eh?"
      "Yep," says Leroy getting all puffed up like, and hooking his thumbs on his belt, "He's been fighting with the Johnson kid again, and this time Mary Johnson's laying a complaint against him, so's I've got to take your son down to the station and write him up."
     Now, my dad was a busy man what with a farm to handle, us kids to feed, and a crazy old man chasing his wife half the time, so I had the feeling he'd be putting the run on old Leroy one way or the other.  I just hadn't figured out how yet.
    I stood there, all innocent like, and waited to see what was going to happen as I watched Leroy getting himself worked up into what he thought was a display of officialdom or whatever he called it when he felt important.
 
  I also notice my dad's eyes.  They were staring over the top of Leroy's head and going in these crazy circles.
     "Anyhow, Mr. Harding", says the local protector of our rights, "the thing is, I don't like to be hauling your boy off like this, but I got no real choice.  Me being the only lawman around and all."
     My dad's eyes hadn't missed a beat, and  they were still circling Leroy's sweat stained Stetson hat.  By this time, Leroy had finally noticed them too, and  he sort of glanced up over his head, like he thought there might be something flying around him.
      "Leroy", says my dad. "You know as well as I do that my son is only ten years old, and that's what ten year old boys do.  They fight with their neighbor's kids.  So why don't we just stop all this time wasting and you go on back into town and I'll get some work done."
And all the time his eyes haven't slowed a bit from going 'round and 'round above ol' Leroy's head.
      Our local hero by now was getting nervous.  He not only didn't know what  kind of trouble he was going to have with my dad, but I could see  that those eyes doing circles over his lawman's hat had him thinking for sure something was about to dive-bomb him.
     "Now dang it , Mr. Harding, I'm just trying to do my job here", Leroy whined, "You know I've got to uphold the law around here and.....what the heck are you looking at over my head anyway?"  says Leroy, as he whips off his Stetson and takes a swat in the vicinity of his bald crown.
     Dad never even slowed his eyes down.  In fact, I swear they started going faster yet as he calmly replied, "Oh, don't worry about it any Leroy, it's only one of those circle flies."
     "Circle fly?" Hollers Leroy, now swatting furiously at thin air over his head.  "What in the heck is a circle fly?  Do they bite?  Do they sting?  What do circle flies do?  I ain't never heard of them before!  Do they hurt you much when they get you?"
      "Well", says Dad, in that voice he uses when he's talking to Mr. James, the preacher in town,  "If you spent more time outside doing some honest work, instead of hiding in that office of yours, or riding around in that air conditioned car the taxpayer's bought you,  then you'd know what they are.  But you don't need to be too concerned about circle flies, Leroy.  Mostly they just fly around the back end of old Hitch, and don't do a darn thing."
      Now, as I've said, Leroy might have been a bit dense. But he wasn't dumb.  He just kind of looked at Dad,  and with a sort of sad voice said, "Mr. Harding."  "Are you calling me a horses ass?"
     "Why Leroy!", says dad, with a look of utmost piety.  "Of course not.  I'd never call an officer of the law a horses ass!"
       Leroy started to look a bit relieved.
     "But, on the other hand", Dad continued,  "It  sure as heck is hard to fool one of them circle flies!"
     

  
                              








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Saturday, July 17, 2010

Get Ready to Recieve






Photo by Rick Mortimer



I’m sure we’ve all hear the expression, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears!”
And how true that is!  It is a fact of this life that you do not get the things you need until you are ready to receive them.  For example, I never got my first driver’s license until I had a need for it.  I did not receive training on how to pack a horse, until I had need of packing a horse.  I did not receive medicine until I was ready to be healed… the list is endless.  It is just the way things work in this world and it is how we learn by acquiring knowledge at the time and place that we need it.  Before we need it, we don’t need it! We have no use of it.  We are not ready to receive it.  
What I am getting at here is that you do not seriously expect to receive a thing, until you have a need for that particular thing.. whatever it may be.  And when you believe and are ready to receive it, you will receive it.

Many times we ‘wish’ or we ‘hope’ for something… a new job; a vacation; a nice house with a view - whatever it may be.  But what is a wish?  A wish is really just a desire with no action behind it. No goals set nor passion to achieve it – nothing more than an expressed and longed for want.  A hollow thought for something.
  Hope, on the other hand, seems to have a bit more passion behind it.  “I hope I can be allowed to go to the game.  I hope I can get a new car.  I hope I can get that pay raise.  I hope, I hope, I hope.”  We can spend our lives wishing and hoping.
   The thing about hoping is that it is always in the future.  If it was past tense, we’d already have it.  If it was present tense, we would not need to hope for it because we would be receiving it now.  So hope then, is always in the future tense.  “I hope tomorrow is a nice day…I hope I get that pay raise next month…”

   Enter Faith.  Faith is far beyond hoping and wishing.  Faith is knowing.  Faith is now.
To have Faith is to believe.  A belief is something concrete.  You know that you know that you know.  For example:  you can have Faith that your kids will turn out alright, because you put the time and effort into them to bring about that result.  You can have Faith that God loves you, because you have seen the proof and understand what Christ did for you on the cross and you take His Word for it that it is done.  He cannot lie so it’s a given that the thing is done.  You cant’ see it, but you know beyond factual belief, that the thing is so.
   There are two kinds of Faith…one is sense-knowledge Faith.. and one is Spiritual Faith.
Sense-knowledge Faith is the kind of faith that lets you walk into a room and flop into a chair, ride an elevator, get in an airplane, and a thousand other things we do each day.  We can flop into the chair because we can be pretty well assured that the chair will hold us.  We see it has all it’s legs, it looks solid, or we may have seen someone else just get out of it.  But we apply what we know by our senses before we actually do any flopping.  Or airplanes – we may not actually see the pilot but we know that the law protects us in that an airplane must have a sober pilot.  Our senses give us the knowledge that we can act upon a thing.

 Spiritual Faith is different.  This kind of Faith is an expectant Faith of a future event based on what we believe.  Again, there’s the example of our Faith in our kids turning out right.  The example of having ‘Faith’ that God’s laws and principles are true.  Having Faith in your ability to do the right thing.  Faith in the things you cannot see but believe for – that is the kind of Faith I’m talking about here.
   Hope is for the future, but Faith is NOW.  
  Scripture defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not yet seen.”  (Heb 11:1).   So, using the example of the kids turning out ‘right’ you can see that the ‘substance of things’ is the teaching and the effort you put into raising them.  The evidence of things not yet seen’ is your knowledge of other kids turning out right from proper teaching, even though you can’t see it in your own as yet.  So you can have belief and Faith in the result.
  Belief and Faith differ though.   I can believe through sense-knowledge for the physical things in my life.  “The chair will hold me.  There is a pilot on this plane.  My car will start.”   I can believe those things, but I can also do so without needing faith.  I’m simply believing in the proven – facts.
  Spiritual Faith takes us into another realm altogether.  Faith in God.  Faith in your righteousness in God.  Faith that you can do all things through Christ who strengthens you.  This kind of Faith is knowing passed and beyond hope.  It is knowing beyond a belief.  This kind of Faith is when you know a thing simply just is or it will be.

   I have wrestled for a long time over exactly how to understand why Faith is such a force, for my own understanding.  I think I finally have it!

   In Mark 11:23 (KJV)  Jesus put it this way:
       “For verily I say unto you.  That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea, and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass, he shall have whatsoever he saith.
Vs 24:  Therefore I say unto you. What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that receive them, and ye shall have them.”

  I don’t know how many times I have read those words. Quoted those words! But last night as I lay reading them over once again, the light went on!  
       In order to believe for a thing, you must be ready to receive the thing!
Remember the opening statement above?  “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”  Well, it is the same creative principle at work here.  When you are ready to receive a thing, it will appear if you speak for it out of your readiness to receive it.  Not think about it, but say it out loud.  Jesus used the word ‘say’ three times here for a reason.
     “…For out of the abundance of the heart, his mouth speaks.”  (Luke 6:45)
Awesome!  I will take some of that please!

    First we speak about that for which we desire.  We talk about our dreams and our visions, our deep desires. and the things we are excited about.  We use our imagination to see a thing in our possession.  In other words, we make ourselves ready to receive it!  We prepare for the event!  We ready ourselves to possess it!
Think about it!  I remember as a child, when we -as a family - got word that the adoption papers had been approved; we prepared a crib and a whole room for a new baby’s arrival!  So first we talked about it and expressed our want.  Then we believed we would receive and put the thing into action.  We readied ourselves and kept speaking an expectant faith in the achievement of our dream.  We do the same process with all things!  If you are getting a new car, you clean a space for it in the garage.  If you buy new furniture you prepare a space to put in it before the deliver man arrives.  You talk about it and you expect it to come to you. Expectant Faith.  This is the creative force!

Awesome!   Get ready to receive!




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Saturday, July 10, 2010

Do Not Doubt --Only Believe







Photography by Rick Mortimer






    I was just lazing about here on this hot afternoon thinking about my grandson Glen who came to stay and be with me at my Father’s Celebration for Life.  How nice that was of him to come down and spend that time with me, and for me to be able to introduce him to  a lot of my relatives – many of whom I myself had not seen since back in the early 1970’s when I left the coast to go live up north in the Yukon.
   Unfortunately, when it came time for Glen to fly back home to Whitehorse, we found that had missed his flight.  When you buy your tickets online you get an email with flight times on it and these are in military time.  Glen, being a young fellow and unfamiliar with military clock workings, got the hours mixed up and as a result we showed up two hours late at the airport on the night of his returning home.  At least we had lots of seats there at the check-in booth!
  
   This is quite an expensive mistake and I do highly recommend to anyone flying anywhere to check your times!  In Glen’s case he ended up purchasing another full fledged ticket since the airline would not give him any kind of a break on his no-show.  Not necessarily unfairly on the airline’s part either, but still… a downer for Glen.

    On the way back home I was telling him that one of the things I’ve learned in my life is that not everything we see as ‘bad,’ is in fact, bad.  Since I am firmly convinced –unshakably so- that as a reborn Christian, I can claim protection and power and Grace, in the name of Jesus Christ, that is not available to people who have not accepted Jesus Christ as their saviour.   I have seen many examples while living in the northern bush, of this protection in situations where something I at first perceived as ‘bad’ turned out to have saved my life.  Some of those happenings involved grizzly bears, and many involved bad ice on the rivers and lakes.  Some involved trees being blown over where I would have camped if the timing had been different, or if the horses had not run off.  In other words, what was ‘bad’ at first glance, turned out to be even life-saving in hind-sight.
    God uses all things for good to those who believe, and a lot of the doing of this turning what we first think is bad to good we are not aware of in the physical realm.  A good scriptural example is Elijah (Elisha) asking God to open the eyes of his servant, when they were surrounded by the army of Syria.  In looking at things through the physical senses, they were in deep trouble with no hope of a way out.  God saw it otherwise and in the spiritual realm, the servant’s eyes were opened and he saw around Elijah and himself, a whole army of horses and chariots of fire ready to fight for them and to protect them from the Syrian Kings wrath.  (2Kings 6:17,18).

    I was telling Glen of this and of the stories behind the attack on the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11 where thousands of lives where lost.  What we did not hear of on the nightly news (tip there!), was that hundreds of lives where also saved.  I believe the number was around 300 if memory serves, who –for various reasons- had not shown up for work that day in the towers, and so lived to talk of it.
  One such person I remember quite clearly;  his dog had eaten his shoe-laces during the night and he had stopped on his way to work to buy new ones.  He had some difficulty finding appropriate ones to go with his shoes, and the delay saved his life.  He was still in the store, many miles from the Twin Towers when the airplanes where flown into the buildings.
   Another was of a lady who, during the previous night had come down with a case of food poisoning and so she too was spared of being caught in the holocaust of the collapsing towers.
   These are only two examples and again, if memory serves me right – there where over three-hundred people who did not show up for work on that day, resulting in their lives being spared.
   Now, when you stop and think about it, did the lady with food poisoning during the night think about how lucky she was to be so sick?  Did the guy needing shoe laces get excited about his time lost from work?  (I can’t imagine it would be too exciting to have to phone your boss and explain that the dog ate your shoelaces!).  Truth is that I doubt if very many of those three-hundred people where thinking in terms of how ‘lucky’ they were that morning – while the towers stood as they had for many mornings before.
   But they were lucky; if you use the word ‘luck’ as the world uses it.  I no longer believe in luck myself.  The word ‘luck’ is like the term ‘coincidence’ or the word ‘try’… it does not exist in reality.

   So I was able to help my young grandson see that there is more than one way to look at things.  What you see as ‘bad’ may in fact be ‘good’.  How do we know that if he’d caught that flight, he might have ended sitting next to someone with an infectious disease?  Or that perhaps we where spared the timing of being involved in a horrible car accident if we’d left for the airport earlier?  So in fact, his bad fortune was actually, his good fortune!
   How do we know?  Put pure and truthfully…we don’t – in the sense realm.  But 2 Corinthians 5:7 tells me that as a Christian I am to walk by Faith and not by sight (sight meaning ‘of the senses’ or with my ‘earthly’ mind) .  In Faith I know that as a Child of God that I am protected and loved, and that God has promised in His Word that I have the power to ‘tread upon serpents’ and be protected in the name of Jesus. (Mark 16; 15-18)

   What a blessing it is to have learned these things in my lifetime and to be able to teach it to the next generation!   By the time we got home from the airport that evening, Glen was smiling again (albeit a lot poorer financially), and I had strengthened my own Faith in the teaching of it.

  God is awesome!  And so:
As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord!

   
 
 

Friday, July 9, 2010

What's next?

We miss you Dad 



     My goodness how the time goes rushing by!  I've been calling myself a 'blogger' as if I really was one, and here a whole month has gone by since I dripped a single drop on here.  This is a strange thing since I enjoy writing.
   I think sometimes, we just turn fun things into projects somehow.  Instead of just writing for the fun of it, I get to thinking I must have some great, long, and wise sounded statements going here.  Why this is I don't know.  I mean, the Prime Minister does not read my Blog I'm pretty sure.  (why would he? After all, he phones for advice everyday anyway!).

   So, I'm back. I want to say that much has changed since I was last here. First of all, my Father died on June 11th.  Dad had put up a strong and courageous fight against Lymphoma -which he was winning!- and then caught a lung infection in the hospital that he just could not fight off due his being so 'low' from the Chemo-Therapy.  He never came back home.
    We held a ceremony of his life on July 7th -just two days ago now - and I was happy to see so many of his old friends and so many relatives there to honour him.  And much honour they gave him!  Dad was a well liked and respected man, who went through life making friends and spreading a lot of happiness around.  
  Many of the people who came to celebrate his life had known Dad since his early boyhood years.  Dad made many lifelong friends.  I was proud to see my grandson Glen Skookum come down from Whitehorse to pay his respects to Dad also.
   I was blessed to be able to spend the last year here living with him, and we grew to be good friends.  I had been away for a lot of his later years, so it was a true gift for me to have this time with him.
  Hugh Mortimer.  Father.  Friend.  I miss you.   

   Life moves on.   I am now onto the next adventure myself.  I need to find work and a place to live.  The house here has been sold, and renovations will have to happen in this basement suite, and so it's time to move on.   I don't have too many prospects open for work here right now, but now is the time of testing for my own Faith.  I don't believe the Lord brought me this far to desert me now!  In fact, He said He would not.   So I'm walking in His Words..."I will never leave you, nor forsake you."   I know that God feeds His sparrows....Ive always been one of them!  I also know, that I see the sparrows out in the back 'forty' scratching around looking too, and that is what I must do now.
  So the job search has begun now in earnest (dire earnest you might well say! lol ) and I'm accepting all prayers, believe me!
  But I am continuing to Walk by Faith and not by sight as 2 Cor 5:7 admonishes us to do.   The situation may look daunting - in fact, hopeless even!- but my God is much bigger than hopelessness.  It's amazing how praise combined with speaking words of faith, will activate those Words to become creative power.   We create by speaking God's Word.  Just as He did in the first Chapter of Genesis.  "And God said....."
   Hope is nothing more than a wish for the future.  Faith is an action word for today.
  Hebrews 11:1 says "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not yet seen."
    I like that definition of Faith.  NOW faith...why, that must mean right this moment...
           Praise God!