My mom gave me a little nudge last night while talking on IM.  She said: “I went out to your blog to see what you had written and there was nothing there!”  Oops. 

I’ve been online, just not here the last few days.  The weekend was spent working while Amira was on her Camp Casey Adventure.  The adventure was a great success, with Amira AND Nana & Papa all having a great time together.  Amira even announced to her Nana & Papa, “We have a big house.  You could come live with me!”  It’s been 10 months, but we think she still remembers when we all lived together.  I’m so glad everything went so well — it opens up the opportunity for more Amira, Nana & Papa adventures in the future.

I have been blogging over at Embracing My Health.  I’m trying to get my routine down such that I am blogging once a day at both blogs.  I’m also looking at a daily newsletter for Embracing My Health.  I’ve been astonished at the number of friends I have who don’t have access to the basic information and tools for better health and wellness.  One of my good friends went to the doctor’s office a couple of weeks ago.  They diagnosed her with pre-diabetes.  I asked what they had suggested she do… what her action plan was…  I couldn’t believe it when she said, they didn’t say anything other than reschedule another appointment in a few weeks to test you again!  Unbelievable!  I’m going to keep blogging on health, both for my own benefit and anyone else who wants to stop in and learn more.

I’m about to dive into a season of focused painting - as my commissioned work for a restaurant in Tennessee has finally come through.  It got strung out for over a month and just last night, I got the green light!  I’m excited!  You can be sure I’ll be posting photos!

Chaya is growing fast.  When we brought her home, she was smaller than Tova.  And while she doesn’t weigh more than him yet, she’s now looking him in the eye.  She’s been good for me, as I’ve been getting out for walks at least once, if not twice a day with her and Tova.  They are a lot of fun and their playtime creates so much happy in me.    Another bit of happy was a cute winter fleece sweater than a friend of mine via Etsy sent me for Chaya.  She loves it!  I’ll get a picture of her in it soon.  It’s big on her, but that’s perfect as she’ll have the full winter to grow into it.

Tova is happy with his new packmate.  They play, tussle, argue, and run together.  It warms my heart to see the two of them together.
Freeni had another stroke.  It’s been so hard watching his body deteriorate.  He can no longer jump up onto the bathroom counter.  It frustrates him to no end.  He’s still fairly quick albeit it tipsy and wobbly.  This afternoon though, I saw him dragging his backend, he’s back legs apparently not willing and able to move.  He’s still with us mentally and doesn’t seem unhappy.  He purrs contentedly while being held, holds his own against the dogs and is engaged.  After his stroke, I cried.  I hate knowing that our sweet boy of almost 14 years isn’t going to be with us always.  As long as he’s happy and comfortable, I’m happy to have him with us each and every day.

Last for this update, Natalie shared the joyous news that there is a new Wallace & Gromit in the works.

I can’t wait — my only complaint is that it will only be 30 minutes long.  I want a full-feature length movie, dangit!    Oh well, any goodness from Nick Park and Aardman is more than welcome… short or long!

I have so many thoughts in my head and I’m not certain how to work them into coherent conversation. (I’m sure you’ve had a sense of that recently reading my blog.) Much of what’s traveling through my head is completely opposite to the other. One moment will be filled with laughter, delight and beauty and the next with anxiety, uncertainty, fear and helpless hopelessness.

The last couple of times I walked outside snapping photos - I noticed nature is a reflection of my mind. There is beauty, endless heart, soul and mind filling beauty. But it isn’t there alone. It lives right next to those things that are faded, damaged, ugly, dying or even dead. Framing a picture in my mind, I wonder… should I crop out the portions that aren’t lovely? Do I filter out the things out of my vision that don’t bloom and dazzle? What is the benefit of seeing and capturing the things that don’t inspire, or worse cloud and dampen, our spirits? Is there one at all?

Paul & I watched Volver this evening. I haven’t been a huge fan of Pedro Almodóvar in the past, but I enjoyed this story. The movie told a story about the beauty and horror that happens and exists in our lives. Although, I confess it is by no means a settled subject for me… the message that I heard in this film began to approach an answer to my question. There can be a purpose in seeing and acknowledging the horribleness that sometimes lives right next to the beauty in our lives. It’s the irreplaceable, raw, and healing power of community, connection, friendship, and love that is found in shared lives… all of it.

Case in point, one of my dear friends is going through a dark, difficult and unexplainable time. She feels guilty for burdening Paul & I. Last night I sent her a quote I’d read recently by Helen Keller: “Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.” I knew I meant it, but now I understand a little more why.

Paul & I finished HBO’s mini-series on John Adams last night. The series was based off David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize winning book. The final part had me wracked by tears.  When John Adam’s wife Abigail dies, he makes a comment to his son:

I cannot believe that God created a creature such as she only to walk, live and die on this earth.

I don’t know if that was pulled from an actual historical statement or from the mind of David McCullough or the screenplay authors.  Regardless, it expresses nearly perfectly the anguish and anger I have with death.

I’m not sure why I bring this up or where I’m going with it.

I don’t have a working philosophy or theology around death.  As I get older, I think how we live arises out of what we believe and how we deal with death… of our loved ones and the inevitability of our own.  So while it isn’t a topic that I want to dwell in, it’s one I need to spend a little time with.

Clickie here.

I told you, on Saturday, that I wanted to do something after seeing God Grew Tired of Us. And this is what I’m doing. I’m coordinating a fundraising effort on behalf of the John Dau Sudan Foundation. I’m asking for your help.

After watching the documentary, God Grew Tired of Us, I wanted to do more than shed tears while watching the movie as I was moved by the story of Sudan’s Lost Boys. If you haven’t seen this film, I highly recommend it!

My blog gets around 200-250 visitors a day. With that in mind, I created a goal of donating $2500 (that’s only $10 per visitor!) to the John Dau Sudan Foundation. John Dau is one of the Lost Boys followed in the documentary. He is committed to making a difference for his family, friends and fellow Sudanese. Out of that commitment, he began this non-profit foundation to transform healthcare in Southern Sudan. The foundation has already built a fully-functioning health clinic to fight serious health threats to the people there including: malnutrition, malaria, trachoma, guinea worm, HIV/AIDS, cataracts, river blindness and more. The clinic sees and helps an average of 75 people a day! In the first year of operation, it saw over 200 pregnant women and were the first women in Southern Sudan to ever receive prenatal care.

This is all great work and helps move the country toward sustained peace. But much more needs to happen. That’s why I’m coordinating this fundraising effort and will give to whoever gives the largest donation or refers the largest amount of donations (just have the people your refer write your name in the comments section of the donation form!) will be the proud new owner of my 12″x24″ original abstract painting, Sun’s Set.

Donating through the firstgiving website is simple, fast and totally secure. It is also the most efficient way to support my fundraising efforts.

Many thanks for your support — and don’t forget to forward this to anyone who you think might want to donate too! Fellow blogger friends!!  Blog away and link to: http://www.firstgiving.com/helpalostboy

THANKS!

God Grew Tired of Us is a 2006 documentary on the Lost Boys of Sudan and in particular the few men who were chosen to leave the refugee camp in Kenya and live in the United States. Have you seen it? I remember hearing about it and hearing about the Lost Boys of Sudan - but I finally saw the movie last night.

I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s a tough story, difficult to imagine. It is also filled with beauty, inspiration and hope too.

You can see the trailer here.

I went to bed thinking of Frederick Buechner’s words:

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

John Dau, one of the Lost Boys featured in the film, has a foundation committed to the transformation of healthcare in Southern Sudan. If you search online, you’ll see many of the Lost Boys who were taken in by the United States are returning to Sudan with their education and resources to make a difference for their people. I stumbled on this great video (about 7 mins) that describes their hearts and the needs of their country, their people and their family and friends.

We as a country are helping establish and maintain the peace that was agreed to in Darfur. But as the video shows above, much more is needed. I’m researching today what I and we can do to help. I’ll let you know what I find out and what I’m going to do.

Have I mentioned I’m going to see this? Um yeah, I’ll be there!

I saw this trailer for the first time before seeing Ratatouille. Our DVD, by the way, was stolen by someone who was viewing our house, can you believe it? Talk about petty theft….

Anyway, if you haven’t crossed paths with this trailer… do yourself a favor and check it out. (And a similar, but new trailer here…) It makes me tear up every time.

After 700 years of doing what he was built for, he’ll discover what he was meant for…

Pixar is just so damn good at storytelling.

Oh, and if you haven’t seen the new Pixar short, Lifted — do that now. So, very, funny!

(Don’t read this if you don’t want any spoilers to the movie. I’ve left most of the movie storyline out… but there are still spoilers in here.)

Last Friday evening, Paul & I went to the theatre to see Sean Penn’s newest movie, Into The Wild.

My good friend Shelli down in San Diego saw it too. She didn’t like it much. She had issues both with the movie and with the man who inspired it, Christopher McCandless. Her observations weren’t wrong, but I offered up a different perspective. This post is a reworking of the comment I left her.

In general, I liked the movie. I found it reminiscent of a Shakespearean tragedy. Plot: smart, bright, likeable guy who had to go to an extreme to find wisdom.

Sean Penn was given the rights to make the movie by Christopher’s parent. I felt that his parents were very incredibly brave to allow Sean Penn to tell their and their son’s story. They were willing to show their weaknesses (and even more, show what their son perceived to be weaknesses, true or not) and then the brokenness and heartache they experienced when their son left his family.

Many people, including Shelli, felt that Chris was leaning on the side of mentally unstable. I didn’t feel that. I did see him as thoroughly selfish and hard-headed. And, I think that’s where the tragedy comes in — he was finding and maybe had found wisdom but the journey to get there exacted too high a cost.

William Hurt, who plays Chris’s father, has a scene at the end of the movie just about killed off Paul & I. It’s amazing how watching movies about parent/child relationships shift once you’ve had a child. (or at least, it has for me) It was BRUTAL watching him, not knowing where his son was and why he choose to leave his family and disappear, collapse in grief in the middle of the street. Painful.

There are two quotes alone that made the movie more than worthwhile for me (probably a few more, but these are the two I remember):

So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

–Christopher McCandless, taken from his journal

and

“When you forgive, you love. And when you love, God’s light shines upon you. ”

–Ron Franz, a friend Chris McCandless made during his journey

Whether the movie conveys it or not… I think Jon Krakauer, the author of Into The Wild, sums Chris up well when he wrote this about his own experience:

“It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough , it is your God-given right to have it. . . I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-ridden logic. I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams. And I lived to tell my tale.”

I think Chris McCandless would likely have been able to share similar wisdom, had he survived to tell his tale.

What does it mean that Amira enjoys watching the storyboard animations for Castle in the Sky more than the finished movie?

Anyone else love them some Miyazaki as much as we Moments do?

I know this is “so last year”… but I just watched the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. What did you think of it? Are you convinced of global warming - and that it’s cause is manmade? Do you care?

According to National Geographic Magazine, the general assertions of the documentary are true. There are steps we can take individually and as a society to help reduce our impact on the environment… but it seems to me the biggest deal is going to be the creation of new technologies. Robert Samuelson of The Washington Post makes the same point. He takes a fatalistic attitude about whether our individual efforts will make a difference, (in fact, he says they won’t) and that global warming will only be solved by the creation and implementation new technology.

So, in keeping with my conviction that we make a difference… here are 100 Ways That We Can Save the Environment.

If you do NetFlix… check out the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car.

It’s worth seeing.

It’s not a perfect telling of the situation (see Wikipedia), but it brings into sharp relief what we are up against. Change doesn’t come easy.

Movie synopsis:

“It was among the fastest, most efficient production cars ever built. It ran on electricity, produced no emissions and catapulted American technology to the forefront of the automotive industry. The lucky few who drove it never wanted to give it up. So why did General Motors crush its fleet of EV1 electric vehicles in the Arizona desert?

WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? chronicles the life and mysterious death of the GM EV1, examining its cultural and economic ripple effects and how they reverberated through the halls of government and big business.

The year is 1990. California is in a pollution crisis. Smog threatens public health. Desperate for a solution, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) targets the source of its problem: auto exhaust. Inspired by a recent announcement from General Motors about an electric vehicle prototype, the Zero Emissions Mandate (ZEV) is born. It required 2% of new vehicles sold in California to be emission-free by 1998, 10% by 2003. It is the most radical smog-fighting mandate since the catalytic converter.

With a jump on the competition thanks to its speed-record-breaking electric concept car, GM launches its EV1 electric vehicle in 1996. It was a revolutionary modern car, requiring no gas, no oil changes, no mufflers, and rare brake maintenance (a billion-dollar industry unto itself). A typical maintenance checkup for the EV1 consisted of replenishing the windshield washer fluid and a tire rotation. But the fanfare surrounding the EV1’s launch disappeared and the cars followed. Was it lack of consumer demand as carmakers claimed, or were other persuasive forces at work?

Fast forward to 6 years later… The fleet is gone. EV charging stations dot the California landscape like tombstones, collecting dust and spider webs. How could this happen? Did anyone bother to examine the evidence? Yes, in fact, someone did. And it was murder.

The electric car threatened the status quo. The truth behind its demise resembles the climactic outcome of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express: multiple suspects, each taking their turn with the knife. WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? interviews and investigates automakers, legislators, engineers, consumers and car enthusiasts from Los Angeles to Detroit, to work through motives and alibis, and to piece the complex puzzle together.

WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? is not just about the EV1. It’s about how this allegory for failure—reflected in today’s oil prices and air quality—can also be a shining symbol of society’s potential to better itself and the world around it. While there’s plenty of outrage for lost time, there’s also time for renewal as technology is reborn in WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR?”
–© Sony Pictures Classics

The last three days have been filled with Wallace & Gromit’s The Wrong Trousers.

Amira signs ‘penguin’ (which is the cutest thing in the world, by the way), the trumpets sound and we watch the nefarious workings of the criminal mastermind. She loves it.

It pleases me that she is already showing such good taste in media.