MY MOVIE GEMS

My husband and I left Spruce Pine and drove to the metropolis of Asheville to view the new Harry Potter last week. Did I enjoy it? I don’t know. By the time the twenty minutes of previews were over, I was shell-shocked and couldn’t concentrate on the feature film. The dozen previewed films included end-of-the-world horrors (New York falling into the sea), screaming, machine gun fire, crumbling and crashing buildings, all at ear-splitting volume. Psychopaths, drug dealers, murderers and corrupt cops stalked one another through puddles of blood. Then came cartoon creatures, supposedly comic relief, whose main charms were belching and farting as well as sassy and low-conscious backtalk. It’s enough to make you believe in conspiracy theories. When I am at my most paranoid, I wonder if the media powers-that-be purposely set out to desensitize American moviegoers to fear and terror and bloodshed. That these things are considered entertainment is scary to me, too close for comfort to the Roman taste for gladiator gore. As for the potty humor – that’s not really my idea of speaking to the inner child. Lewis Carroll did a much more admirable job of that with his Alice, using literature.

Here are ten films I ordered through Netflix (many of them dealing with war), that are gentle, wise, character-driven, and full of insight and hope about the human condition:

Housewife, 49: an ordinary British wife and mother undergoes personal growth during WWII

Kiki’s Delivery Service (Japanimation): a young girl finds friendship and meaning in a lonely world

Grey Gardens (the film version, not the documentary): Streep and Barrymore are exquisite, especially if you have seen the documentary.

The Station Agent: friendship arrives in the strangest packages

Kinamand (Danish): humility, unexpected transformation

I’ve Loved You So Long (French): mystery surrounds a reunion between estranged sisters. Subtle, beautiful, evocative

Last Chance Harvey: virtuoso performances by Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson. Brilliant acting, I don’t care if the critics gave low points to the love story.

The Cats of Mirikitani (Documentary): a Japanese American street artist is befriended by his documentarienne.

Paradise Road: an all-star female cast, a transcendent WWII story

Goodnight, Mister Tom (Brit): a crusty village character takes in a lad from London’s bombing district

Moon Rant

May in the mountains was monsoon season. We have gone from two years of drought to drenching, soaking rain. The grass reaches knee level in two days. Fecundity has reached a new level. I’m glad that I am no longer a breeder because all this green moisture feels like the genesis of a new tribe stirring in the universal womb.

What harm? We need a new tribe, a bunch of folks who aren’t out to play king of the mountain or to argue over who can have the bombs, the biggest and baddest of toys. There has to be a better way to use our time here on earth. The newbies will know.

For one thing, the new tribe will honor wrinkles as marks of wisdom and find them beautiful. They will scratch their heads in confusion when they find ancestral skeletons with squishy blobs of non biodegradable material wrapped among the gnarled dried muscles of the face and ribs and slug-shaped plastic where lips once were.

I want to apologize to the future folk. I’m not sure what went wrong with my American tribe, why they got so silly and vain. Maybe we basked too long in the benefits of the sweat of our forebears and forgot to grow up. Bad guys got in there while we were building MacMansions and trying to have tighter abs.

Somebody tell us what to do. Help, not enough life boats to go around. Rich and richer first, then we’ll see what we can do about the men, women and children.

I’m ranting but can’t help it. Pluto and Uranus are having a field day while Saturn and Jupiter duke it out over who’s in charge. The June moon is full and hovers in a cloudy werewolf sky. Ah-oooo.

POEM FOR A RAINBOW

Divine spectrum

Arch of light

Bowed from mountain to mountain

You answer the rumble of thunder

And the wild mad rain

With Amen, Amen

In the green scented twilight

Under skies soft gray with tears

Your beauty is a fragile chord

Subtly, gently changing

With the shift of light and hue

Lilac and watered lapis

Lime and palest gold

What I could do with such music

I could fly

Stay, stay

Bright vision --

My heart's cry

While moments and moments

Wink past

The heartbeats

The seconds

Bear us away

On the tide.

copyright Cathy Larson Sky 2009
photograph by Brit Kaufman

March Meditation

March, with its overcast days and damp chill that seeps into the bones more insidiously than winter cold. March, with its occasional burst of spring-like days, soon replaced by more drear, which seems even more unbearable in contrast, like a promise believed but broken.

But the gray skies only make more beautiful and luminous the pink weeping cherry trees that grow in our front and back yard. The trees look like divine beings from another planet, reminding me of the delicate, fragile beauty of the moment. Just behind them, garbage cans are in display -- ours knocked down by the city sanitation workers, who seem to derive primitive joy out of flinging and tossing things around.

If I have a prayer, it’s this: Teach me to fill more space inside me with beauty. I still see and feel the garbage in my life: troubled relationships, thwarted hopes and desires, regrets, shortcomings. But let them take up less space than my gratitude and joy when I perceive the tender and tiny miracles that surround me each day.

A BEAUTIFUL FRIEND

This evening I learned of the death of a special friend. He was a mustang quarter horse and his name was Romeo. I met Romy in 2005 when I attended a three-month class called Women's Intuitive Horse Riding at Blue Skies stables in Chapel Hill. Deborah Pearson-Moyers, the instructor, allowed me to follow my heart's desire: to seek, as an adult, the answer to why I had so longed for horses when I was a child. In the most painful years of my childhood, I had an imaginary horse named Ronnie who greeted me at the door when I went outside, and stayed by my side while I roamed the woods beyond my house. In 2005 the deaths of my mother and closest friend left me feeling very much like the frightened child I'd been at eleven. At age 57, I decided to pursue a special relationship with a real horse. I was not disappointed. Romeo welcomed me, nickering softly, the first day I attended class. His wisdom, kindness, and willingness to share his life with me was remarkable during that enchanted spring. Almost every person, child or adult, who met Romeo felt the loving and generous soul of this incredible horse and became a better person for it. I wrote this poem for Romeo four years ago. Rest in peace, dear and treasured friend. I love you.

ROMEO’S SONG

At the water trough

Once my thirst is gone

I hold my lips

Above the quiet pool

Tasting the coolness there

I carry its peace with me

As you lead me.

Ring of metal, gate’s skirling sweep

The round pen

A circle of earth

Where I may graze.

You have work for me

I can yield, even as I must

Keep watch over my Others

My ears scan the air;

Their hoof beats, their calls;

Their rhythm

All resound

Here in the velvet of my chest

Here where I am tender

Here, where I am strong.

Your fear makes you slumber

And I trick you awake,

Teasing your will

Or make a wall with my Nature

As I graze,

So you cannot enter.

This is often my way.

Today you have come

Singing of love,

Your heart open

The sun streams over our shoulders

You wave the gnats from my eyes

Two-footed handmaidens,

With soft, laughing voices;

We are one.

Once I greeted you at the tall gate

And you were frightened

By the bony crunch of my teeth

But you heard music there

And did not run away

We mingled our breath.

Now I will carry you

Though all your bones are aching

I am your sacred ground

Your heart, beating slowly.

June 13, 2005

Copyright Cathy Larson Sky 3-06-2009

COLLEGE TOWN, CABIN FEVER

Next month Spruce Pine votes on a referendum allowing liquor to be sold in this stolid Christian “dry” community. The ruckus over this is unpleasant. Everything’s on my nerves. I’m still peeved about the way the local Republican party bombarded us -- registered Democrats -- with junk mail every day preceding the election (including a right wing propaganda DVD) and flooded the answering machine with ugly phone calls. My husband is an outspoken supporter of the pro-alcohol campaign who vents his opinions as editorials in the local paper. His volley of letters with Ruby, an elderly Baptist local who is anti-drink and anti-Obama, has escalated into a mini-war. An example of one of her headlines: “Obama is a Communist and so was MLK.” Now Ruby’s writing us directly. Her recent letter, on pretty bluebird paper, enlightened us with the 'fact' that the president is by-sexual!

I got fed up last week. On Thursday I drove the four hours to Chapel Hill and reveled in the psychic oxygen of culture, good food, and the company of my adult kids and educated, funny, articulate friends. For the last three of the eighteen years I lived in Chapel Hill, I complained about the town’s ubiquitous and often posed political correctness, the encroachment of the upper class, and the compulsive drive toward development and greed: rising rents driving local businesses to bankruptcy. Now I’ve swapped those social tensions for those of Spruce Pine, these ills don’t seem so bad, especially when a distracting riot of films, restaurants, coffee bars, shopping, and museums offer their charms.

It’s been difficult this week re-adjusting to small town mountain life. I am home, but simultaneously longing for home. My heart is in two places. How many homes do we have in a lifetime? What is this concept of ‘home?’ Every place, every thing is flawed; I know this, but I’m still confused. The crippled real estate market makes relocating implausible right now, so I've got to learn to be happy where I am. The Toe River rolls along in deep green currents, clean and fresh, but the cold wind makes my face raw while I’m walking there. My friend the kingfisher chirrups from his hollow on the river bank, but he’s not showing his face.

St. Brigid's Day Poem

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IMBOLC, AT THE WELL

Water soothe my burning head; fire

stream o’er the rocks, through crevices

of my frozen will.

Bark and lichen

silt and earth,

steady the pilgrim way.

Water, receive these weary feet.

Bless this brow, these eyes,

these cheeks.

Laurel and pine

hide my grief

in the weft of bough and leaf.

Weave me a new fabric

Whisper to me of tomorrow.

(copyright Cathy Larson Sky 2/02/2009)