Like Crazy (film review)

Tremendous acting - the camera lingers to allow us to see, feel and understand what goes on, between these two young lovers. Not gratuitous at all! The family, friends and world around them also feel real and inform us with a timeless story. Great filmmaking!

--

There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks.

Most of the time we are simply not patient enough,

quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.


-- Linda Hogan

To Heather and Sean

Peonies arranged like jewels,
witness to our joy,
bobbed upon a table
while we ate and drank and danced;
even little boys jumped about
and smiled.
But most of all, it was a family
of blood and not blood too
gathered in loving celebration
for the joining of you two.

In this world
that can snarl and sting and bite,
hold that family to your hearts,
arrange them for their beauty
on the table of your life.
Flowers fade and die away
sooner than do we,
so gather in your loved ones
unto the distant cousins,
mothers and fathers and grandparents, too
to live and love in the garden with you.

-- Barbara Wolf
-- June 26, 2010

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-- William Shakespeare

I live beneath the rocks

"I live beneath the rocks," said he,
"In wooded valley, mossy dell,
Away from angry urban yell."

"My time is never dull," said he,
"I gather berries, roots & bark,
Then sing & dance through day & dark."

"Perhaps you'll soon drop in,' said he,
"It is not hard; let thought unwind,
And wander where you find your mind.'

-- Merlin Sheldrake

There was a little city, and few men within it; and there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it: Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man.

Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man's wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard.

... The words of wise men are heard in quiet more than the cry of him that ruleth among fools.

... Wisdom is better than weapons of war: but one sinner destroyeth much good.

Taps

Taps
{original lyric inspired bugle music}

Day is done
Gone the sun
From the lakes
From the hills
From the sky
All is well
Safely rest
God is nigh

Fading light
Dims the sight
And a star
Gems the sky
Gleaming bright
From afar
Drawing nigh

Falls the night

Thanks and praise

For our days
Neath the sun
Neath the stars
Neath the sky


As we go
This we know
God is nigh.

It is the Soldier

It is the Soldier, not the reporter
Who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the Soldier, not the poet,
Who has given us freedom of speech.

It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer,
Who has given us the freedom to demonstrate.

It is the Soldier, not the lawyer,
Who has given us the right to a fair trial.

It is the Soldier, who salutes the flag,
Who serves beneath the flag,
And whose coffin is draped by the flag,
Who allows the protestor to burn the flag.

-- by Marine chaplain Father Dennis Edward O’Brien
-- -- May God continue to bless America.

kavanah

Jewish word, meaning
"intention"

ubuntu

zulu word meaning,
"I am because we are"

1 I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worth of the calling with which you were called,
2 with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love,
3 endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling;
5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism;
6 one god and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.
7 But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ's gift.

-- - Ephesians 4:1-7, NKJV

29 Let no corrupt word proceed out of our mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers.
30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.
31 Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice.
32 And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.

-- - Ephesians 4:29-30, NKJV

The world breaks everyone -

And afterwards, some are strong at the broken places.
- - Earnest Hemingway

Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.

-- - Hebrews 12:1

And the day came when the risk to
freezing tight in the bud was more
painful than the risk it took to blossom.

~ Anais Nin,
~~ Cuban-French author

"The Bible never belittles human disappointment, but it does add one key word: temporary. What we feel now we will not always feel. Our disappointment is itself a sign, an aching, a hunger for something better. And faith is, in the end, a kind of homesickness-for a home we have never visited but have never once stopped longing for.
-- Philip Yancey

Reflections of July 12

Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down n that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn't make any sense.

-- Rumi

Proverbs 19:8

He who gets wisdom loves his own soul;
... he who cherishes understanding prospers.

-- (NIV)

Ode to Cybele

We were happy together
that late summer afternoon
and early evening----
she on the grass,
front paws crossed
in her customary style---
I on a garden chair.

She had made it across
the rough gravel
on a bridge of cardboard
I'd made for her
to the soft lawn
and was content and alert--
to a plane overhead,
a car driving up the road,
the no-see-ums
she snapped at fiercely.

I drank and wept,
cherishing this day with her.
She was in the now,
I, somewhat further on.
I could hardly get enough
of her beauty, her grace,
this being in this Universe
with me so many years.
Now she is everywhere.


... Barbara Wolf
... May, 2009

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when,
. or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities
. or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

-- Pablo Neruda

Blue of the bay before the snow
was the blue - blue - blue of the kind that

... Tickles the nose
... Gasps the breath
... Leaps the heart
... & dances the most stationary feet
so pure and luminous was blue that
... only more pellucid blue might
re-illuminate its blueness.

-- Henry S. Maas

No two alike

Look then at the faces and bodies of people you love.
The explicit beauty that comes not from smoothness of skin
or neutrality of expression, but from the web of experience
that has left its mark.

Each face, each body is its own living fossilized, record.
A record of cats, combatants, difficult births;
of accidents, cruelties, blessings.

Reminders of folly, greed, indiscretion, impatience.
A moment of time, of memory, preserved, internalized,
and enshrined within and upon the body.

You need not be told that these records are what render your beloved beautiful.

If God exists, He is there, in the small, cast-off pieces,
rough and random and not two alike.

-- from Broken for You, (2005)by Stephanie Kallos