Everyday Canvas

Magic and Both Sides

For "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" 

Prompt: Flash Fiction-- You live alone and have just finished playing at your piano. Someone starts clapping for you. And???

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My fingers ache from playing for hours at a stretch, and with arthritis, my joints are now swollen to an astronomical size. I have more than an octave and a half of reach, which had awed the teachers in my youth, but the pain is too much. My hands deserve better. Time for medication and a soak in hot water. So, I stop.

Yet, I still feel music still circling inside my head and running through my fingers like blood.

I rise. Suddenly, I hear the clapping. I turn around, staring at the empty room, and lower my gaze to my slippered feet. Then I lift my head to the ceiling like a shipwrecked person looking at the sky on an empty beach, and next, to the wall behind the piano. There, my glance finds the photo.

My mother’s picture, her eyes filled with tears, smiles at me, at her peppery, obstinate daughter, and I recognize everything at once. She was my audience, even though the tide of life stole her away together with my career. Her huge brown eyes stare unblinkingly at me, as if saying, “I knew you could do it. That’s why I pushed you.”

Right then, I grasp it, for sure.

The clapping was real, not in my head; it came from my mother. She clapped loud and with passion for me to be able to hear her.

I bow in front of her photo.

Today, the magic between us has worked…finally.

For: "Space Blog" 

Prompt: From Prosperous Snow celebrating ’s "The Brightness and Color of Stars" 
“Religion and science are partners and not enemies.”

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It is proven that the perplexity between the tenets of science and religion has existed throughout the centuries. In the earlier times, this rift caused major problems for mankind with scientists being persecuted for their findings, some factual and others not, while the religious were thought of as being dogmatic and thick-headed. Even today, the idea of evolution gets both parties in a tizzy.

The problem is, inside both science and religion, controversies exist, as each side tries to explain its perspective while sticking to its stand. The way I see it, theology is more even and inflexible than science, while science, most of the time, can offer proof based on itself.

Religion deals with moral and aesthetic values. Science deals with the facts of nature as observed and tested by the humankind. This clash of ideals, however, should be an opportunity and not a defeating set of opinions. As human beings, we have the problem of partiality, just the way we take sides in sports events. The minute we take a side, we tend not to budge.

Still, when we can see the benefit in both sides and take the entire evidence of both into account, I hope, we will be able to merge the ideals of both sides to our benefit. This isn’t easy to do, especially with the several dogmatic religions worldwide and the hard-principled scientists who reject any or all kinds of religious and spiritual beliefs. I believe and hope, however, that we are slowly closing the gap and accepting the teachings of both judgments, as science has begun to prove the truth in some of religion’s concepts and religion has begun to adjust itself to the scientific approach.