Tag Archives: vermin

Antibody

dictionary with letter AAntibody (n): a blood protein produced in response to and counteracting a specific antigen.

I know I encounter futility when I come across someone who tells me that life is complicated.

Actually, life is amazingly simple–as long as you’re willing to accept how it has progressed instead of creating your own “revolution against the evolution.”

This becomes evident to me when I realize that in order to build up resistance to disease, you actually have to encounter the vermin and have your body react with the positive energy to reject the infection, and make sure the varmint doesn’t return again.

Why wouldn’t the parallel be just as true in our emotional, spiritual and mental lives?

Emotionally, if I don’t encounter all sorts of personalities and even struggles, do I not become a hermit–or worse, a bigot?

Spiritually, if I don’t understand how my faith stacks up against other ideas, realizing where there are similarities and also aware of the differences, how will I ever have the endurance to achieve the end and be saved?

And mentally, if the ideas shared by my upbringing are not challenged and questioned, so that I can derive the best of the precepts for future use, will I not become a mere provincial buffoon?

I love antibodies.

It’s physical evidence that we have been through the battle and we have won.

Stop complicating life and realize that it comes down to simply being willing to place yourself in the mix and trust that your ideas, your spirituality, your feelings and even your immune system … are strong enough to survive the competition.  

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Thank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix

Aluminum

dictionary with letter A

Aluminum: (n) the chemical element of atomic number 13, a light silvery-gray metal, the most abundant metal in the earth’s crust, obtained mainly from bauxite

It is amazing how words, ideas and concepts are all related to our personal experience rather than the reality of what they may be.

For after all, hearing the word aluminum, I might think of cans of soda, which I certainly have enjoyed over the years.

I might conjure an image of aluminum siding, which permeated the thinking of my townfolk growing up, as everyone deliberated whether it was a good alternative to the peeling paint on their wooden homes or the crumbling mortar on their brick ones.

But for me the word “aluminum” has an entirely different representation.

When I was a kid I lived in a household where various plans were hatched to attempt to make extra money or projects were pursued which were deemed worthy of our attention because they were new and innovative.

For instance, my dad bought a piece of multi-colored plastic which he was convinced could be placed over our television set to give the illusion of color TV without having to buy one of those more expensive brands. But of course, all it did was make the picture appear like fruit-striped gum.

Likewise, somewhere along the line my dad devised a plan to build a storehouse for boats to be held during the winter months in Ohio, when things were not sea-worthy. (Or since Ohio is landlocked, shall we say “lake-worthy?”)

This was an investment. And I remember that the main part of the investment involved purchasing huge sheets of corrugated aluminum to place on the building to protect it from the elements.

Well, here’s what happened. My dad laid the foundation for the warehouse, put up the boards for the framing and ran out of money before all of the aluminum could be attached. Even though he did put a couple of ships into the lean-to, it was never completed, and piles of the aluminum material were stacked nearby. They seemed to stay there forever.

Matter of fact, they remained long enough to become the home for all sorts of vermin: spiders, rats, possum, raccoons–any number of less-than-fortunate creatures from the animal kingdom did their wintering underneath the pile of my dad’s ignored aluminum.

So to this day, I cannot hear the word “aluminum” without a chill traveling down my spine … as I wonder what’s going to crawl out and bite me.