Tour Diary 10

Tour Diary 10. 7.4.11 Thursday

We were in the most exquisite old Carnegie library in Eureka Springs, which has such amazing charm.... and quaintness.  It is all old wood and fireplaces and looks completely unchanged since the day it was built.

A man was sitting behind us reading the financial times in a rocking chair!.. Only in America... It is located in one of the old Victorian houses, which form the heart of Eureka Springs, up in the woods above the town.  Steve was over the moon as they have hundreds of talking books and I think he would love to spend the next couple of months in this library reading all the books and downloading books to his computer.  These traditional old libraries form the heart and soul of a town and my heart breaks to know that there is a determined campaign to shut down our libraries in England.  Without my library, which was just over the road to where we used to live, I would never have been able to read all my mythology stories.  These were the stories that used to fire my imagination – woke up my ancient memories – and made me think that anything was possible.  Those and our Encyclopedia Britannica books, (which we were lucky enough as a family to have a set of) were the reading material for me, from the day I began to read.

My favourite thing in the Encyclopedia Brittanica were the pictures and stories about the ‘Seven ancient wonders of the world’ I never tired of looking at them and trying to imagine how they must have looked and what the life must have been like in those times.  I think a few of them are still with us, like the Pyramids, but things like the ‘Hanging Gardens of Babylon,’ or the Colossus of Rhodes are long gone.  It’s amazing to think that with the techniques of Past Life Regression so many people are now giving very accurate descriptions of lives lived at the time of these ancient artifacts…

I think the campaign should be to build more libraries like it, not shut them down. We are creating a world where the ability for our children to read and explore in their own minds is going to be only based on what they see on a computer screen. When it comes at them from a computer screen then they haven’t had to use the power of their own imagining, which is so much more diverse.

Today we have visited Pivot Rock, which is an enormous rock - very tiny at the base and huge as it goes up.  It is in the Ripley book of wonders.  If you have never looked at the work of Ripley I would strongly recommend them, he spent his life going round the world drawing and photographing strange people, events and places… I’ve always loved his work.  There are now Ripley museums – we have one in London and I went to the ones in South Carolina and Vegas.  For example he will have the tallest man in the world next to the smallest… now there’s something really Alien!!  I think I came up to the kneecap of the tallest man but… I was marginally taller that the smallest!!  One of the very few people in the world I could laud it over..

The Ozark conference begins tomorrow at noon and Steve speaks on Saturday first thing, which will be interesting as he closed the last conference.  I’ll catch up with some info on the presenters once the conference is under way.

Much love

Annie

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