"Fire purifies. Fire makes people stronger"

PLEASE NOTE: 

The beginning of this post is about religion and why it relates to the post title. 

If any of this is offensive, please understand that I am not trying to upset anyone and am only trying to figure out how to relate the title to what's after the explanation of its context (kind of). It's going to circle a lot of ideas and thoughts, and I truly mean no harm. 

Please come back another day and read anything new I put up here, if the start of my comments below are not something you care to discuss or read. 

Trust me; I have little expectations and experiences myself some times. It's when I get on a squirrely roller coaster, I end up letting everything come out, free write and all (as noticed some days by my other tangents). 

I try not to put up a lot of religious stuff when I don't know anything about it, as well as not posting political information. I don't make the attempt to turn people away, but if there's something that piques my interest (an obscure quote, for example), I'm going to try to find out what it means for me to be able to share it here, when I talk about other things. 

Therefore... 

I was watching TV the other night and the news was on. 

They were talking about the New Years Eve attack in New Orleans and the New Orleans police chief included the single lined (blog title) metaphor as part of her speech. I thought it was interesting, and I wanted to put that passage in some where here. I just didn't know how I was going to incorporate it (I found a way; give me time and I'll get in to it).

I have to preface this by saying, again, I'm not religious by any means. I do not follow any of the Christian archetypes or denominations (my family is Jewish). When I googled the phrase, lots of hits came up, saying it is attributed to "Refiners Fire" in the Book of Malachi (specifically 3:2-3). 

However, the segment doesn't say that exact line. 

According to what I've found line for that specific scripture, it reads as follows (with 3:1-4 as context):

"I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the Lord Almighty.

2 But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. 3 He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, 4 and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years."

Everything I am finding keeps pointing to Refiner's Fire and those lines. So to take it out of context and twist it a little, a refiner creates things out of fire (like man), makes it clean and pure, and those things (men) can continue the cycle to make positive changes to their surroundings. 

Hey, I'm trying there. I see your eye roll and disgust that I am doing this wrong.

I don't totally understand it, in order to deconstruct it and explain it. Again, this (religion) isn't my wheelhouse. 

I don't want to take someone else's words either, and mix them up. 

From what I read (a little before and after), a Refiner's Fire is used to break down precious metals (like gold and silver) and get out the defects in them. Make the metal pure, since the fire heats it up to such a high intensity, anything negative should fall back into the fire or on the floor. Melt away. In context to the Bible, the fire is to cleanse people so their sins wash away (with the launderer's soap) and their bad isn't with them anymore. They then can go help the next group of people get their sins expelled and the cycle continues.

Didn't the Indigo Girls sing about washing sins blues away back in 1997? (track 1 for reference of the link)

Damn, I should have bought the "All my thoughts are Indigo Girls lyrics" (or something like that) shirt when I had the chance.... 🙎

So for the police chief to say this, she was saying how the New Orleans people are a strong people and they have to go through a constant fire to rise above it all and be a better community. It takes one bad event or person to take everyone down and create chaos, but if humanity can get together and go beyond the bullshit (sorry), the city can rebuild and get better. Be a phoenix among the ashes. 

Terrorism and any other attack is never good, and it does take the will of the people to join together and over come it all. Yes, people are hospitalized and have died from this. Yes, it's a hard lesson for everyone. It's not so much that "this too shall pass", but it's how you can create another layer of resiliency. In the years to come, people will (hopefully) be in a better place and (hopefully) the groups who feel like maintaining evil will go away. We need to force them into a space where they disappear, but do it by choosing good over evil. Don't fight back with weapons if you can. Fight back with the power of kindness. Show these assholes you mean business by being amazing. 

(I heard tonight on the news that NOLA residents are cleaning up and using the power of music to come together. Not a party per se. It's being used for healing and making sure people are okay. It's what they're used to; being vibrant as hell and taking no prisoners)

I know it's hard because the mean ones caused a lot of problems and you have to retaliate with what you have, but this also shouldn't happen. It's a core group of thinkers who don't know how to do good or separate good from bad. Everyone sins, but to cause that kind of evil, is just well, evil. There was no need for the people on Bourbon Street to be attacked like that. Everyone was trying to have an amazing end of 2024, and some man got it in his head that no one deserved to be festive. It's No Bueno for him!! 

I'm so getting off why I wanted to write that title. I know I am. And I'm sorry for not making sense, if you're still following me this far and are confused.

The reason I wanted to use "Fire purifies. Fire makes people stronger" is because we have a ghost in our house. We've had one since we moved in. 

We probably have a few because there are different times that different things happen. 

So ghost. Plural. 

I know of at least one ghost, because the original owner of this place turned it into a shrine for the girl (who died young) and we still get her mail (occasionally). One of them is not The Ghost With The Most. Nor is it the family he haunts. That's for damn sure.

Things happen in our house that we can't explain. 

When we first moved in, I had carpet in my room. It was the only place in the whole house that had carpet too. There were days that I'd smell cigarette smoke, even though my mother and I don't smoke and we had no one living directly next to me at the time (we still kind of don't, as those neighbors are snowbirds, but they moved in after we switched from carpet to tile). We had the house deep cleaned when we first moved in, so there's no way the smoke lingered from anyone prior. Considering there was no furniture in here at the time, there was ample opportunity to do a good scrub. Since tearing out the carpet and getting tile, I still occasionally smell smoke. 

My friend Cat says it's probably someone doing something malicious, but it could be something else too. You just never know, and there are too many spirits out there that could do any thing at any time. Cat's in to abnormal and paranormal, so she tells me stuff. Hi Cat 😀

Every once in a while, I'll see shimmering. My mother has said she'll see that too, but it's not often. The only way I can describe it is "you know how movies show a car heat on the road? Sometimes you can see it too, when you're driving and stopped at a light or something, especially during summer? You see the road kind of waver and there's a clear movement in the air?" that's what we see. Some sort of heat or gas or translucent movement that appears out of nowhere and quickly vanishes. 

However, it moves left to right or right to left, depending on where it's "walking" to, and in front of.

Like the other day, when we were watching the news, I had to rewind the segment to see if I was watching it correctly. I told my mother that "someone's here" and said that "the TV shimmered". She didn't know what I was talking about because she was engrossed in her game. When I went back to the point in the program where I saw the shimmer, it didn't repeat itself. So the person obviously kept going. They came from the right, which would have been the dining room or even from the hallway (my bedroom or bathroom, the guest room, front door or laundry room). It went left, as if to go directly to the lanai. My mother didn't see it, however, she said "maybe it was the people walking in the background of the shot", and I said "it wasn't. It was one of the ghost. She shrugged it off, but she has seen it in the past. 

I should have known something was up when I saw that, because I had used my bathroom soon after. 

TMI, I know

This is where I have to admit, I have a "ducking problem", if I haven't talked about it before. 

My bathroom has shelves of rubber ducks in it, including a 12x12 framed art piece of "Bath Ducks" (by a guy named John Booth... had to research his name). 

The ducks I have, range from teams (Man Utd & New England Patriots) to Countries (Union Jack) and Cities (Austin, Amsterdam) to the MCU (two different Batman, one Wonder Woman and one Joker [I call the César Romero version]) and everything in between (Disney, Pixar, confetti, hearts, charities, etc). 

People would buy me one for a holiday present or my birthday. It got to be a big deal. 

So the other day I had taken all the ducks off the shelves, cleaned them, and put them back. 

A few kept jumping off the shelf, but I put them back on and kept going.

I had peed a little later and thought that it was odd that one of the shelves was a little more askew than normal (none of them were perfectly straight, but they were secured on the wall). Then I saw the ghost shimmer. An hour or so later, I was in my room and CRASH! The shelf was completely off the wall. Ducks everywhere - my sink, toilet, floor. 

I don't know what happened or how. The shelves were fully hooked to the wall, and this has not happened before. My mother and I tried to get the shelf back up and hooked, but it wouldn't latch. So I ended up taking all the ducks down and boxing them up. 

Last night, I patched the holes and painted the spots. It's like nothing was ever there, even though you can kind of see a little mark in places. It's not great, but it's covered enough that you really can't tell. 

Which leads me to the quote. 

It's high time to smudge the house (again) because someone has effed with us. Again. 

My mother and I have previously smudged (saged) the house, so we have our own kit (Amazon sells various types) and intend on using it tomorrow. Today got a hold of us and we didn't have time. 

Since it's going to be cold tomorrow, we're intending on opening the windows (and doors for a minute because we don't have a screen for the front and don't want to let any critters in.. which is another story) and getting all the bad out of the house (again). 

Therefore, "fire purifies. Fire makes people stronger". Sage cleanses. If you do it right and believe in it, it purifies the room(s) you are in. It purifies you. It makes you stronger. You can create good out of evil when you do this. Even if you do it often, you keep the bad away. 

Love and light. Love and light 

We want to continue to keep the bad away. 

If all goes well too, maybe the bad will stay away and the housing market will rise and we can move (please?? Can we finally move or do we really have to stay another year? My friends will know this reference, even though I'd do anything to move back north. I'm looking to work back in Massachusetts or New Hampshire if anyone is hiring!!). 

But yeah, it's time to start cleaning. Use these cold Florida winter days to do good and get out the bad. Tell the ghosts they're not wanted right now. 

The critters comment is that my mother's friends (a couple who live a few houses to our left) said that if we see the iguanas this week, let them know. These are the lizards who stay in the trees all day, and when it's cold, they freeze up and fall to the ground. I call them the "plop plop effers" because they literally plop to the ground and play dead. They get pretty big, too. But the friends said that the iguanas are an invasive species here, and it's okay to kill them. They're going to be trying to come in the house where it's warm, so watch your garage. If we spot one, let the people know, and they're come track it and remove it (kill it? Take it somewhere? Just get it the eff out of the neighborhood). I've seen them at one of my jobs and accidentally 4 wheeled one while driving a golf cart. He came out of nowhere and kept running like a bat out of hell once I broke his back. Some gator probably had him for a mid day snack. 

You learn something new every day - these things are legit to be taken out. According to Florida Fish and Wildlife, "Like all nonnative reptile species, green iguanas are not protected in Florida except by anti-cruelty law and can be humanely killed on private property with landowner permission. This species can be captured and humanely killed year-round and without a permit or hunting license on 32 public lands in south Florida." 

So there you go. Baseball bat to the knees! 

Another thing I don't want to do is, try any other flavor of the Wilde Protein Chips. We were able to get the Himalayan Pink Salt Chicken Chips through a store promotion (and not Amazon as linked), and they're not the best. They're chippy and addictive, but that's the salt talking (for the addiction). 

The ingredient list is as follows:

Antibiotic-Free Chicken Breast, Native Tapioca Starch, High Oleic Sunflower Oil, Egg Whites, Chicken Bone Broth, Contains less than 2% of the following: Himalayan Pink Salt, Sea Salt, Natural Flavors, Modified Tapioca Starch, Citric Acids, Spices, Sodium Citrate, Tapioca Syrup Solids**, **Adds a trivial amount of Added Sugar

Small food list, but large information. What is "natural flavor"? (Watch Stink! and you'll ask the same question. Thanks to Michael W. for the rec). My mother said the first thing she tasted was the chicken and that's all she tasted before the salt hit. I couldn't and can't taste the chicken It's not that I'm sick or anything, but I wasn't tasting the poultry for some reason. I tasted salt, even though there is some sort of weird taste to these chips (my mother says "an after taste"). The texture is gritty - in your hands and in your mouth. Maybe it's from the aforementioned salt, I don't know. It's just weird as hell.

I'm all for trying things, and didn't expect a full on chicken dinner in my mouth (if I could taste the chicken). If it was just a regular potato chip with a hint of poultry, sure, I'm game. But this isn't one of those woodsy meats you want to crisp up into a cracker. Unless you chop it finely and actually put it on a cracker. Add a little celery, mayo and whatever else to it... make a meal out of it. 

As its own deal? To each their own. If you're on a particular diet (Keto) and need proteins / gains, sure. Have at it. If you just want to serve this in addition to a chip at a function? Try a sample bag first before you go "Wilde" and buy a big bag. We ended up throwing out as much as we attempted to eat (unfortunately). 

 Outside of eating supper, answering a few phone calls and taking the trash out, I have been at this post for a few hours. I think I've worn out my welcome today, so I'm going to end it here. 

Thanks for staying with me this long, and stay warm if you're somewhere cold. Stay safe if you're somewhere bad. Stay you while being them. 

Cheers;

See also

* Amazon has various links to The Bible - shows and actual books, for those who want to get their reading on and learn more. This includes The Bible App for your smart device.

* Love and Light affirmations on Amazon (and other affirmations)