mulberryshoots

. . . the next great flood . . .

Having little better to do on a Saturday night, G. and I surfed through Netflix and Amazon.com to see if we could find a movie worth watching. We picked “Noah” with Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connolly, the actors who co-starred in “A Beautiful Mind,” some years back. If they hadn’t been in the movie, probably few people would have decided to view it. Because it was just awful.

I won’t go into all the theatrical aspects of the movie which made it seem sometimes like a “Lord of the Rings” wannabee, replete with animated giant rock robots who fight off the hordes of humanity who want to board the ark before it’s too late.

The reason I’m writing about it in this post, however, is that the message about humans ruining everything is still true: doing themselves in whether it’s due to the introduction of evil in the Garden of Eden, providing temptation through eating the forbidden fruit and making choices that result in defiling Nature’s gifts, killing brethren (Cain and Abel) and conducting wars upon wars (the Middle East, Ukraine, Syria, Al-Queda, Taliban) still goes on and on, everyday. Whether you buy into the religious ringtone around the original sin thing or not, it’s easy to see that we humans perpetrate hardship on each other and that injustice is rampant due to ego, greed and the quest for power and domination. Where will it all end up. . . another flood? If not, what are we to do as we lead our lives on a small scale, trying to get along with those we love and moving on from things that don’t matter any more?

How can we stop the merry-go-round and get off the human centrifuge that spins us around all the time? I’m thinking for myself that it would be helpful not to want anything any more. Not having a bucket list, for example, of exotic places to travel to or museums to see. Or that elusive place to live directly on the ocean with taxes you can’t afford, never mind the purchase price or even a week’s rental fees. Not STRIVING all the time. The energy that goes into striving is a propellant that is hard to defuse. Eastern philosophy says just that: stop wanting and you will be more at peace. Of course, that doesn’t mean we have to live in a treehouse and drink drops of rain off of pine needles at night either.

And what’s a happy medium since we live in America and can’t turn off the news? Stop reading magazines for one–a pet hobby of mine, where emulation and ideas for new things to get are what they are all about. I’ve been going through ones I’ve kept through the years, tearing out a recipe or two and then tying bundles of them up in twine to take out for Tuesday recyling pick-up. What else? For me, it’s to be more effective about living in the present so that the past doesn’t affect me so much anymore. And for things that linger over us that may affect us in the future to stay where they belong–in the future sometime.

In the meantime, we’re trucking along, each of us having survived and recovering gradually from physical injuries this past Spring. My car, which went missing a few months ago, then recovered, then held hostage by the insurance company is almost ready to be repaired. The screw that was holding my tibia and fibula has been removed; and I’m looking forward to taking a trip in September to Puget Sound with my daughter and her family. Looking forward to eating Dungeness Crab is enough for me to strive for these days.

So, until the next flood, wildfire epidemics, tornadoes, tsunamis or attacks on planes somewhere in the world, here’s to living today as best we can, clean up our messes and be nice to the people we care about.

Oh, and to stop making bad movies with money better spent elsewhere.