Underwear Bombs and Lost Colonies, Lost Edens

My brain is full of strange thoughts today--so, for those of you who like an orderly essay with a thesis statement and 3 main points--well, those people probably stopped reading this blog a long time ago.

I had a strange dream, so my brain has been making intriguing associations, even as I sleep.  I dreamed I was in my grandmother's apartment, which wasn't any apartment she'd had in waking life.  I was visiting for Christmas, and I didn't realize/remember she had died until I went into a seldom used bathroom to see an art installation that my parents had created in the bathtub out of her Christmas linens and decorations she had made during her life.

I'm trying not to spend too much mental energy on what it means. In my waking life, I am all too aware that my grandmother is dead.  Sigh.

I'm also feeling oddly fascinated by underwear bombs, a fascination that would have horrified my grandmother, who would not have approved of a public discussion of underwear.  If you were an underwear bomber, would you buy something new and special for the mission?  Would you wear an old, ratty piece of underwear because why waste something nice or new on a bombing mission?  In my daily life, when underclothing chafes, I find myself wondering about bomb design and how it impacts the way the underwear fits.

I also find myself wondering about these bomb designers who spend so much creative and intellectual energy on such a destructive object.  Is it evidence of creativity gone wrong?  Could that energy have been redirected at some point along the way?

Ah, the eternal questions:  how would our world be different if more people worked for good than for evil?  And how to convince more of us to apply our creative energies to building up the world, instead of blowing it up?

I loved Hannah Stephenson's poem today.  What interesting connections she makes:  ribs of all kinds, Adam, Eve, original sin.  A delight!

I also found inspiration by Beth's post on images of the Annunciation.  The earlier paintings show the angel Gabriel with rainbow-colored wings.  Later images take the color out of the wings.  I wonder if anyone has written about this.  I wonder if rainbow wings were common or if Beth chose them because they were so uncommon.

In all my thoughts of angels, I never considered wing color.  Hmm.

I'm also fascinated by this story that looks at patches on a map to try to solve the mystery of the Lost Colony of 1587.  I have this line that may find its way into a poem:  "The Lost Colony lies beneath a golf course." 

For those of you who didn't have the same childhood obsessions as I did, the story of the Lost Colony may not have haunted your imaginations.  But I was stunned and still am.  How can a group of settlers just disappear?  What did that word "Croatoan" mean?  If the colonists fled in terror, how did they have time to carve that word on a tree?

Yes, once again, my thoughts turn to the earliest English colonists.  I also think of my own habit of thinking that if I could just move to a new location/job/house, my whole life would change for the better.  I would have been one of those colonists who fled England, only to realize, much too late, that it's hard to immigrate to a new land.

Perhaps it's this disappointment of the dream of a new/better life that leads people to design underwear bombs.  But some of us build bombs, while others of us say, "Well, this colony didn't work, but I bet if I just started over again, at a better settlement site, I'd be able to create a new Eden."  Even more of us just moulder in place.  Why?