#ripple effect

Ripple Effect - Antonia Tyz Peeples

American , b. 1957 -

Morning Meditation 5:20am

one of my hands down favorite moments of this is when hohenheim confronts edward about burning down their family house. hiromu arakawa does an excellent job not showing what hohenheim is really thinking then. he isn't looking at ed. when he turns to him, the reader (and ed) can't clearly make out his eyes because of the glare of his glasses. he physically towers over ed and casts him in shadow and we STILL can't see his face. this is a man who hasn't been here for YEARS during all of ed's most horrible moments, but he immediately clocks the one thing i think ed was already aware of himself.

but then ed gets pissed at him, and we suddenly see hohenheim's face behind his glasses. he just looks like a guy. he doesn't seem frightening at all. we watch him follow ed and try to have small talk with him, and we once again don't really fully see his face. instead of a threat to ed's self-identity, hohenheim is the nuisance that ed was seeing him as when he first noticed him by trisha's grave. we don't see hohenheim's eyes when he remarks that ed was just like him when he was that age. if it's your first time reading this manga, you assume that ed is right in thinking hohenheim doesn't know anything. how could this guy ever be the same as him?

the next scene, we see hohenheim look at ed as ed is supposedly sleeping. this is the next time that we get a glimpse of his eyes, which is also the moment that we get a brief panel flashback of ed and al as kids. even without knowing the full story, you can tell he's thinking about how fast ed and al grew up. we don't see ed's face (or even a front body shot) in this scene until right after hohenheim decides to leave the room. and the way that his eyes are brighter than the rest of the room really draws attention to the fact that ed was very much aware of hohenheim being in the room the entire time.

within a single pair of scenes, the reader gets an idea of just how complicated their relationship is, while also getting the inkling that hohenheim isn't just the monster under the bed.

THIS is what someone who deserves a Nobel Peace Prize looks like... Venerable Bhikkhu Pannakara lives for peace!

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“If a stone is thrown into a pond, waves are produced that travel throughout the pond. Every wave produces effects in every part of the pond, resulting in some influence or other. Similarly, the wave of individual life through its activity produces an influence in all fields of the cosmos.”

- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Science of Being and Art of Living

[Alive On All Channels]

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All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.