April 17, 2003
"Minding The Mending Moments"
Although tired, I am much better mentally today, as the glum of early yesterday is gone. Actually, by work day's end, I felt better for I'd had an incident to cheer me. While walking the long path to where Julia was parked waiting for me, I saw a man meditating crosslegged in the shade provided by a large bushy tree.
Enjoying the cool breeze
I smiled as I saw him, for the breeze WAS just right in the shade, and he looked so peaceful. As I passed him, he declared, ''Beautiful day, isn't it?'' And it was, at that moment it was.
So I forgot my mouth sores, and the e-mail mess, and how rushed I am at work, with the other seamstress gone, and this complaint and that, and for a few lovely moments, just enjoyed the breeze and the meditating man.
Images like that, you don't want to lose. This morning, I played further with a month-old image of some bottlebrush blooms that had cheered me on a gray and miserable day last March. With further alteration, I was able to capture a sense of the center bloom dangling down in my face. Having done so, I placed it in my special photo gallery.
Bottlebrush Blooms
April 19, 2003 - A
"Musical Magic"
An eerie beginning to the music I am listening to, from the soundtrack of Gladiator. Once again, I see it is the fine work of Hans Zimmer who created it.
How I am lucky that music inspires me so.
Then a bristly chill and a deep tenor calls out, and guitars brace for tension growing arcs, along with the drums, who have never really let up. Then trumpets enter the torrid mix and it builds until it thins, ready to open a panorama. Then it builds again, percussion keeping remorseless. My emotion rises with thrill. Power is coming, is coming, chills build, the hairs on my arms rise, I am ready, ready for battle. Come the power! Elevate the spirit! We will not be defeated! The echoing tremors, percussion keeping remorseless, Quieter, then louder, then the gradual rising again. The power builds, it is a frenzy, orgasm soon, snare drums fan out into a peaceful tune seamlessly. A woman sings in pure alto, beauty will endure in the face of all horror, beauty will endure. We will endure, if we believe. Defeat can only last so long, this prayer, then it is quiet again.
Track five, and a woman keens in sorrow. And six returns to a mellow but haunting single woodwind that sings like a voice, that keens also like a woman in sorrow.
Damn! This music is great.
April 19, 2003 - B
"Movie Magic"
What to watch on the weekend? I pored over our local theater's websites, and Rotten Tomatoes and decided it would be HOLES. Holes is based on the award-winning book by Louis Sachar, who also wrote the screenplay. From my experience, it's better if the author of the BOOK, also does the SCREENPLAY.
Billed as 'children's fare adults can enjoy', it is more than that. The main character, Stanley Yelnats IV, is doomed with bad luck owning to a curse put on the FIRST Stanley Yelnats. He's faced with the choice of 'Camp Green Lake' or jail. The choice is easy. But when he gets there, quite a surprise awaits them.
As part of the treatment 'to build character', he and the other six campmates must dig holes the width and depth of a shovel length. None of the boys know the real reason they're digging all these holes, but Stanley soon begins to question why the head of the camp is so interested in anything "special" the boys find. He makes a special friend in the small boy nicknamed 'Zero', and together, they solve the mystery.
I knew it had to be good when even the criticism sounds like praise: ''A certain level of grotesquerie in a children's entertainment is essential, but at some point grotesquerie is just . . . grotesque.' That's what Walter Chaw of 'FILM FREAK CENTRAL' thinks. THAT really whetted my appetite. There is nothing 'grotesque', but QUIRKY, there is plenty of QUIRKY, which is part of its charm. Also, besides the colorful characters, is the way the author introduces various subplots and at the end, ties them all neatly together
I must admit there is another reason that led me to pursue this movie. Early in Laura's life, she sought a shrink who advised her to 'give up reading science fiction, fencing, poetry, and art', because these had 'feminine connotations'. What to do with the resulting spare time? She, then still identifying as 'he', was to 'spend two hours digging holes, and then two hours more filling them up again'. Years later, Laura wasn't surprised to learn this quack shrink had been disbarred.
She had doubts about his 'cure', and never dug any holes. However, the movie HOLES is one I really 'DIG'. If you like your 'quirky' with a not-too-preachy moral, served up with lots of fun and thrills, then this is your type of movie.
The only thing I'm left wondering is, are there really 'spotted yellow lizards'?
The Australian 'frilled neck lizard' is its closest 'cousin'
It is Easter morning, for those that mark such things. I am up early with a sore back, and hope to return to bed when the back has eased. I did get a call through to my Mother. It was nine o'clock her time, but she has always been the night owl. We talked for about an hour, and then she said she 'had to run'. I suspect there was a movie on cable she was keen to see.
That's been her sole entertainment, outside of what comes to her via mail order. Her car needs new tires, so she's rather trapped in the house. I wish she'd get out more, but at least Dan, my half-brother who I don't know well, is coming to get her for Easter. ''Not before two,'' she told him. So it is good I called when both she and I were at home.
Julia's mother has been in the hospital, for observation after having some fluid removed from the plural cavity. She's been dealing with cancer, but fortunately there were no cancer cells found in the 1 1/2 liters of fluid removed Thursday. However, her lung collapsed some during the procedure, and the lung specialist thinks it should re-expand within one to three days. At the time of yesterday's e-mail from Julia's brother, two days had already passed.
She may not be able to have their traditional Easter dinner out at a restaurant. Julia will try to call her mother today, as the e-mail wasn't received until ten o'clock Maryland time.
Laura's mother may be all moved to her son Greg's house by now. She has some difficulty with her eyes, and can not see at all. I will try to reach her soon.
So that is the 'mama report'. We will not be doing any travelling, so our plans are all local.
Anytime I even think out loud of going anywhere, I am given the 'long lecture' about how the car must be preserved, etc. etc. Thank goodness, we are not trapped in the middle of Nowhere, Arizona. Amusements are near at hand.
And for travel, there is always the web. How I travel the fellowship of friends beyond place in those meeting grounds of mind! I wish to all web travelers who have found my words today the happiest of Easters. You do not celebrate this Christian holiday? Have a happy Sunday, anyway.
On this day of eggs and bunnies, lovely Pagan holdovers, I will give my Monty Python test results, as it is somewhat seasonal. But alas, I am no cute and cuddly bunny, for I HAVE TEETH! And, as I was joking on one vamp-fanciers group, ''I know how to use them!''
Mean lil fellow, aren't you?
What Monty Python Character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
How can my mind grow, so absorbing everything around me? I wish to pin everything down. Today, we celebrated 'Easter' with flowers. The Flower communion service was created by Norbert Capek (1870- 1942), who founded the Unitarian Church in Czechoslovakia. He introduced this special service to that church on June 4, 1923. By 1940, it had reached to the states.
Our speaker gave a bit of this man's history. Parallel upon parallel lines him alongside me. Although born to Roman Catholicism, he soon shed that when he was introduced to the Baptist way. He entered into it fervently, helping to start almost a dozen Baptist churches in Czechoslovakia.
He might have been part of the reason my own Czech ancestors were of that faith. So he and I both began as Baptists. We have also the sewing connection, as he had spent time as an apprentice to his uncle, a tailor whose shop supplied the House of Habsburg.
Religiously, his thought became more liberal and he ''valued the spiritual life above any teaching or dogmatics''. In 1919, he wrote in his diary (YES, DEAR READERS, a journaller like me!), ''I cannot be a Baptist any more, even in compromise. The fire of new desires, new worlds, is burning inside me.''
Capek celebrated the ''hidden cry for harmony with the Infinite'' in every soul. He discovered Unitarianism when he spent some years in the United States, becoming a member of the Unitarian Church in Orange, New Jersey, along with his wife, who was to later become a Unitarian minister herself, in 1921. Later that year, he brought the new faith from the United States to the Czech people.
In just twenty years the Unitarian Church in Prague, with 3,200 members, was the largest Unitarian congregation in the world. But horrible changes were happening politically. On the eve of World War II, in 1939, ''at a time of great sadness for my nation,'' he published a second edition of what he considered his most important work: K slunnemu brehu/Toward a Sunnier Shore, longing to bring hope to hearts torn by the war.
In it, he advocated OPTIMISM: ''people can choose their own moods [and] direct their own feelings," and that they should, above all, "try everything with humor.''
In the face of horror, he kept his face turned to the light.
But as soon as Hitler took over Czechoslovakia, Capek was marked for elimination. The Nazi spies listened to every word he preached. For a time he veiled his message of freedom in Biblical parables and religious double-talk, but inevitably, Capek was arrested and all his writings seized and he was charged with treason.
He was declared innocent of the treason charge, but when the Czech Resistance assassinated the chief local Nazi, the Gestapo, ignoring the court's recommendation, nonetheless sent Capek to Dachau. His papers bore this fatal instruction: "return unwanted."
Living his philosophy, in prison he kept his fellows' spirits up with dauntless humor and a cheerful spirit. Capek's name appears among prisoners sent on an ''invalid transport'' on October 12, 1942 to Hartheim Castle, near Linz, Austria, where they injected him with a lethal poison.
Just before his death, he wrote this prayer:
| It is worthwhile to live and fight courageously for sacred ideals. Oh, blow, you evil winds, into my body's fire; my soul, you'll never unravel. Even though disappointed a thousand times or fallen in the fight, and everything worthless seem, I have lived amidst eternity. Be grateful, my soul. My life was worth living. The one who was pressed from all sides but remained victorious in spirit is welcomed into the choir of heroes. He who overcame the fetters giving wing to the mind is entering into the golden age of the victorious. |
''He who overcame the fetters'' remained triumphant in the end, for his spirit remained undaunted until the end.
I can't help but think of words our LAURA penned, in her Sorcerer Supreme:
|
Certainly, you can be wounded ... but never broken. Absolutely,
you can be killed ... but not destroyed. Undeniably, you can be
assaulted by the world ... but never once prevailed against.
Captured ... you are never conquered. Imprisoned ... you are
never bound. Weakness, fear, palpable in beating heart, is set
aside. Integrity, truth, and knowledge seize meaning, take form
and substance, become your passion, provide a magic cloak, a
shield, forever molded to your mind. And when you cease to be, eyes shut in black forever, there is one result rests with you: the truth that you have been, and no one, not man, nor god, nor force of nature, can ever take that away. |
My Laura's voice does make good harmony with Norbert Capek, among that ''choir of heroes''.
May I hold fast to such optimism as well.
Many sources were compiled to write this entry
the Unitarian Universalist Biography Project was one of them.
April 21, 2003
"The Mask"
|
The hard pride is
|
April 24, 2003
"The Fascination of Imperfection"
I find the imperfect fascinating. A body that has no scars belongs to a person who may not have ever done anything interesting. For it's in the taking of risks that sometimes accidents and their resultant scars happen.
Most of the scars I've acquired through out life have faded, but a few remain to give testimony. If I stretch out the palm of my left hand, I can see four stitch lines just below the index finger. These were acquired when I was in college, when I spent the summer in a rooming house back in 1980. Many students from China lived in that dorm, and the kitchen shelves were covered with rice pots. Cooking anything was a challenge in that crowded kitchen. I don't remember what I'd baked that day, but I remember the container I used to bake it. I put the still very hot glass baking dish into some cold soapy dish water, and the shock of temperature contrast made the dish break. I cut myself deeply on the broken shards and gratefully, my dorm mates saw to it my shocked and dazed self got to the hospital to have it stitched shut.
More recent are the four small incisions from the gallbladder surgery I had back in 1996. They are just raised white lines now. The cause of them had been quite an experience. I learned rapidly there was a reason for the increasing frequently of stomach upsets, culminating in eight hours of vomiting, and was told I'd had a fairly advanced case of gall stones. The cluster of round stones showed up easily on the view screen. I joked with one of the nurses afterwards that being the rock collector that I am, it was probably only natural I would collect this sort of stone as well.
the longest laparoscopy scar is in my naval
this is how it looks when I'm standing
and this is how it looks when I'm bent over and it's stretched out.
Julia says it looks like a map of Ireland when stretched.
Neither Julia nor I have gotten into our middle years without acquiring scars, but Laura was the one with lots of scars. I enjoyed finding and learning about each of them. Many were surgical. She had a long seven inch gash across her midsection from a gallbladder operation in the days before laparoscopy. More prominent was the long gash from her neck to her midsection that was acquired during her quadrupel bypass.
There were smaller ones, like one on her neck from some exploratory surgery. And then the rest were accident caused. As she aged, many small scratch scars showed up on her hands from when various dogs she'd had bit her. She had all sorts of small memories of old nicks upon her person. But the most unusual one was above her right eye.
It was a very rainy night the day she'd went to pick up Mary, (her ex), from work. Laura had only a motorcycle, as their finances were always tight. She couldn't brake in time, and she slid across the gravel road on her face. I always found the blue line arcing from the outer corner of her eye to above her eyebrow rather like an unusual beauty mark.
if you look closely, you can see the curving arc of Laura's scar above her eye
April 25, 2003
"So Human"
''So human, to want things we can't have,'' rejoiced David's creator, as he snared him back to his 'birthplace'.
The image of the young boy, staring for centuries at the Madonna like image of the Blue Fairy, praying to be made 'a real boy' will stay with me always.
Later, as he has his 'everlasting moment', I could not help but think of all the 'everlasting moments' I've had with Laura, and cried, big heaving sobs I cried. Logic waves its long bony finger at me, and tells me I must be grateful for each one I've had. But I want more with Laura. ''So human, to want things we can't have,'' the screenwriter voiced.
At movie's end, when David lies down, to lose himself in the world of dreams, my heart resonated, ''Yes.'' I, too, lose myself in the world of dreams. This, too, is 'so human'. More than one personality test has asked me, ''Which is more important, fantasy or reality?'' I answer from the gut, and say 'fantasy'. I know this is not logical. A good fantasy will not lift us out of the gutter. Reality SHOULD be more important. Yet, as I lose myself in these worlds, they are a wonder-ful refuge. No, the reality around me isn't something bad that needs to be 'escaped'. I am really quite fortunate in that. Let's just say I like to travel alot.
