Lost Lives

Hello all, and a very warm welcome to Words and Pictures!

It's Tag Friday at A Vintage Journey today... When there's an extra Friday in the month (which happens more often than I'd've guessed) you get a whole extra array of inspiration from the Creative Guides - all tags and all inspired in one way or another by our guiding light, Tim Holtz.

So do hop over there and check out the goodies on offer, but before you go, here's my offering.

I usually take Tag Friday as an excuse to go back to basics and stick essentially to inks and stamps, but it got just a little bit busier this time because of the story which took over the process.

It has an unexpectedly dark underbelly, so be warned.








I started with a wrinkle-free distress background which was hanging around on the craft table.

I'd been experimenting with some of the new Distress colour releases, and this was a combination of Mermaid Lagoon, Twisted Citron and Hickory Smoke.

As usual, I put so much ink on the mat that I ended up with three tags.







This one was the second one - so had a medium amount of inky distress, which then gained depth with added stamping and ink-blending.  Since those new colours were already in action, that's also what I pretty much stuck to as the tag progressed.

You can see the two I still have waiting to play with... that's for another day.










So what's behind this tag?  Well, it's a combination of things... 

(And from here, feel free to stick to just the pictures if you want, as the words are heading to some dark places.)












I watched the Dispatches documentary Escape from Isis which, while it dealt mainly with the lucky few who are managing to escape across the border from the Daesh territory, couldn't help but leave one sickened and despairing for the thousands upon thousands trapped inside, particularly the women and girls.

They will never get to experience a life which we would call in any way normal - compulsorily veiled so that even their eyes are invisible, and told that their voices must not be heard in public; girls as young as nine sold into marriage at slave markets.  Even should they escape, they will bear the scars - physical and emotional - forever.










I wept and I raged.  I sat wondering what I could possibly do.

And I was blown away by the quiet heroism of the men putting their own lives at risk to give at least some of them a chance of escape.












That all then sort of melded with the conversations I have almost daily with our wonderful 97-year-old neighbour.  Until very recently, she was whizzing along, but now her short-term memory is unreliable, and you tend to go around the same conversational circles.








One of the main loops is around her having no family - largely because of the losses caused by war.  There's the story of her father who died in the Great War, aged 26, never having seen the daughter he'd only read about in a letter.

And then her step-brother (her mother remarried eighteen years later) died in World War II, aged just 18.









Neither of them ever got to discover life.

I suppose they are hovering here in the photo of the young man, as are the men from the documentary who are risking everything to give others a chance to discover life.  But so are all those others - male and female - who will never have the possibility or the freedom to explore life's journey.











The rest of us owe it to them to be fully present and to explore, discover, travel and, I think, also to speak out against injustice and wrongdoing.













If I can do nothing else, I can use my voice to speak, to bear witness, to cry for help for those lost women and girls who cannot be heard themselves.  And I can be mindful that the reason I am free to do that is at least partly thanks to all those lost young men.













If you haven't already run a mile, I do urge you to take a trip over to A Vintage Journey where you'll find lots of Tag Friday joy and inspiration from my fantastic team-mates.

I'll leave you in peace for now, and I'll see you out there soon in Craftyblogland.

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me - and there was nobody left to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller