Patience Reminder

One of necessary qualities in this long uphill hike:

Nothing good can happen before its time.

Relax. Keep the Faith. Be happy.

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Epic Review

I have been working as a substitute school teacher for a while.

Yesterday I was at a high school and my lesson plan, assigned by the regular teacher who was ill, was to show the fairly new nature fantasy movie/video EPIC, a state of the art full-length cartoon.

The students liked it and so did I.

There is a motto stated  by "Leafman", an insect-sized hero in the movie : "Many leaves, one tree", which is a cool new way of stating one of the old spiritual ideas--we are all separate but still connected. No one is alone. And a wise old caterpillar says: "Just because you don't SEE the connection doesn't mean they're not there."

I thought this very old wisdom was presented in an easily grasped way for a new generation.

I also appreciated the advice given by the Queen of the Forest to the teen age heroine: "You get back what you give." The girl goes on to save the forest by using her father's technology which I thought was a nice touch--a teen age woman saving the natural world with technology.

This film is not everybody's cup of tea, of course, but, for its targeted teen-age audience, I thought it was carefully crafted and well done..

Everything good in our own little patch of forest after the spring rains.

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Cats of Mirikitani

There is a video called "The Cats of Mirikitani" that I especially like.

It tells the story of the life of a young Japanese man who is put onto a concentration camp in California at the beginning of the second world war. His "crime" is that he is Japanese. After the war he stays in America and has a solitary life as an old artist eventually living on the street in New York and selling his art work--mainly pictures of cats--to the city people who pass by.

In the winter of 2011 when the New York towers are attacked by Islamists he survives covered in ash. He is befriended by a younger New York woman who helps him find a place to live and to sell his work.

Maggie, our part-time pet in Redding.

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Inner Space

A gentle reminder from this blog of December 9, 2008:

"Nothing good can be accomplished before its time, so have faith and relax." (Paraphrased from Joseph Campbell, "The Inner Reaches of Outer Space".)

The good wine from the California hills doesn't happen in a day.

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Overcome

Spirit must overcome technology.

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Reify

"reify" (definition): To regard an abstraction or idea as if it had concrete or material existence. (reification)

I think this is may be a useful word to popularize. Reify was not in my computer's spell check list, but the word seems to encourage thinking about many of the problematic states of mind caused by a confusion between reality and imagination or ideas about reality.

It seems to me that many items of belief fall into this category of confusion--things perhaps believed in which are not actually real.

Isn't it?

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