Tis the Season. Merry Happy Ramadan Christmas Vodun Kwanzaa Hanukaa Festivus!!! :)

Holidays are upon us.

That we, reading this, have the luxury of celebration and remembrance and family, is a blessing. Many do not.

 

And we are stuck in the middle.

Time keeps on rolling… rolling… rolling… into the future.

 

Sorry bits of archaic, near forgotten song lyrics, stuck in my head. 🙂

 

Glad for so much here at the end of this cycle of days.

Here at the end of days, glad for so much.

But also aware of so much… that I should have made better.

 

We are almost a hundred years removed from the wonders and horrors of 1920, and almost a hundred removed from the wonders and horrors of 2120.

Here is hoping that in 2020, that our wonders transcend our horrors. That the places where we aspire, transcend the places where we tear down.

Speculative.

All speculative. All we have of any real import, is our pressure on the moment.

Is our will… applied.

Do we make a better world or a worse one.

Depends on you.

It ripples outward.

Intent.

Will.

No guarantees, but we fall down going forward… it matters. The intent transcends the fall.

Rambling.

Slightly.

All this to say… embrace… better. ‘Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable.’, Blanche DuBois said in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. We are all at times cruel, and petty, but I try to always remember that line, and not be.. cruel, or petty.

Because Tennessee Williams was right, right in his 1947 Pulitzer prize winning play, and right in the Elia Kazan, nearly x-rated for the time, 1951 Academy Award Winning movie… deliberate cruelty is not forgivable.

But it is avoidable and it is correctable.

Here at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, with change like the stuff of science fiction upon us, we must hold to that one true thing… to aspire to better. To be better. And to spend less energy trying to make things (our phones, our tablets, our tv, our refrigerator, our voice operated Alexa assistants, our drones)… human, and more time making humans… humane.

God, whatever God or Gods you bend your knee to, bless you and yours, and give you the wisdom here at the figurative ending of days and at the beginning of a new cycle of days, to judge your wrongs… right.

Be well.

 

 

 

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Today’s Deals of the Day.

Prepping for spring Travel: Geographies of Soul and Soil

“I was afraid now, afraid to stop. I began to drive faster and faster, I was in lunar landscape now… the great arid mesa country of New Mexico. I drove through it with the indifference of a fly across the face of the moon.”– from THE HITCHHIKER by Louise Fletcher

Like most people I’ve flown over New Mexico on my way to places east or west. And I, like at least some of those people am always struck by the utter alieness of the landscape.

Think often of that arid, but beautiful, landscape… when the need to travel comes upon me.

Am always struck by that waiting lunar landscape nature.

By what it tells us of distances broad, and distances deep, geographies at least as much soul as soil.

A crystallization of what Tennessee Williams wrote, all those long yesterdays ago…

“I didn’t go to the moon. I went much further — for time is the longest distance between two places. Not long after that I was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoe-box. I left Saint Louis. I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. I traveled around a great deal. The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something.”— Glass Menagerie

To Find What Was Lost

I just got done listening to a radio drama version of Tennessee Williams’ THE GLASS MENAGERIE. This version a 1951 THEATER GUILD ON THE AIR live radio production, as all radio back then was live, starring Helen Hays and Montgomery Clift is well performed if a little too heavy on the humor. I saw Malkovich’s version of it on TV a few years ago, and that captured it. A sense of… longing and loss.

But even on this radio version there’s that great final monologue. And that fantastic line…

“I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.”

Attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.

That line haunted me when I first heard it.

It haunts me still.