Tag Archives: Delta

Cycle

Cycle: (n) any long period of years; age. 

I am not sure if I am offering an observation or a musing.

Just so you’ll know the difference—at least in my mind—an observation is something that has occurred enough times that it causes me to believe there is a trend.

A musing is an action which may have only happened once but foretells a cycle of change.

All that being said (and offering way too much information) I want to put forth the observation (or the musing) that even though we contend that “everything old is new again,” I have begun to notice that fads and tendencies may return, but seem to possess less vigorous authenticity.

In this way, I think the human race is threatening its own demise.

It is not because we fall into repetition, but rather, because each generation loses a degree of passion in chasing the possibility.

I see people wearing bell-bottoms and tie-dye shirts much like the apparel of my friends from my comin’-up years. But rather than holding up signs against war or speaking up for love and peace, they are staring at their phones, perusing a fresh vein of distraction.

When I was a young human, we recycled jazz and blues into rock and roll—but the steaminess, pain and earthy quality of the Bayou and the Delta were translated into “Hang On, Sloopy.”

I think, in our pursuit of originality without duplication of our parents, we must keep a pulse on our hearts, to ensure that we are a purposed people instead of mud-puddles reflecting a murky past.

funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

Acadia

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Acadia: a former French colony established in 1604 in the territory that now forms Nova Scotia in Canada. Contested by France and Britain, it was ceded to Britain in 1763, and French Acadians were deported to other parts of North America, especially Louisiana.

There is so much in that definition of Acadia which is bizarre and imbalanced–but still–quite human.

Let’s start out by saying that the Acadians were living in Nova Scotia, which translated, means New Scotland. So already they were presumptuously dwelling under the false concept that they were still in Scotland–just opening a branch. No one in Scotland wanted them. That’s why they were starting from scratch.

So then the arriving British decide THEY don’t like them. They send them to the great trash heap of all English rejects–America. These Acadians go from one community to another, and finally settle in the sediment of the Mississippi Delta–in Louisiana. The only other place left for them to go was the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s just difficult to build a cabin there.

To the credit of these former New Scotland folk, they decide not to be so picky and intermarried with the Louisiana natives, some of them being Creole. They blend, they blur, they mingle, they mix–until one day we end up with Cajuns.

And these Cajuns, who were rejected by Scotland, the British and all sorts of little, prissy towns all the way down the Mississippi River, ended up taking the best of their surroundings and creating one of the more colorful cultures on the face of the earth.

Without them we have no gumbo, jambalaya, and it would be questionable if New Orleans would be so deliciously flamboyant.

So just as my ancestors were rejected from Germany and landed on the shores of the New World, looking for a place to breathe and live free of condemnation, we need to understand that everybody who lives in America was once a reject, floated down a river or two and plopped in a place where they could be free … and pursue their dreams. Never in the history of mankind has such a clumping of losers turned into such a winning formula–making a little, crawling crustacean called the crayfish into a magnificent mini-lobster treat.