You must unlearn what you have learned!

Pick your poison: dystopian novels or Shakespeare.

Forget what you learned (or didn't) in high school English, I'm guessing not much, but here are a couple neat articles about two famous (or infamous) and very different sorts of literature.  You don't have to hate reading, even if Hamlet or Brave New World did unforgivable things to you back in the day.  It's sort of like giving a kid dark chocolate or wine: they just don't appreciate it and it may ruin the experience for life.  Why not give it another try?  You might be surprised!

Bought with a price

I think the Narcissists in my life must have made a New Year's resolution to double down on their activities of late.  To most people this would be annoying or irksome, but having been raised by one, I'm still wired to torment myself in hopes of making them happy, to tying myself into knots hoping to please them.  It doesn't work, it never has.  My mother could no more love me than I can hitchhike to the moon, I can't blame myself for that, it isn't my fault, I have no control over it whatsoever.  So I know all that in my head, but how do you get it hammered into your heart?  Practice I guess, I just need to make a conscious choice to do it over and over again until it's habit.  Isn't there just an app to reprogram my brain or something?

Then I ran across this article which, though mostly unrelated, the title 'You are not your own,' got me to thinking about this whole issue.  Who do we belong to?  The Narcissists would say they own me, and act like they do, no matter how unrelated or distant they still think they should be running my life and get rather testy when I prove otherwise.  American culture would say obviously my body, my life, but that's ridiculous.  I just fell down the stairs this morning, I had no control over anything, it was all gravity and I was just along for the ride.  Sure I can dye my hair or diet or exercise but I have no control over anything really, I'll get cancer or not or my muscles will grow or not without any ability of my own to control that.  So who really owns me?  Who built the house?  Who maintains it?  Who paid for it?

I've rented my entire life, and while I can be quite at home in a rental, it isn't my house.  I can't paint the walls or rip out the carpet without the owner's consent.  Why is it so hard to think that way about myself?  Most people wrestle with giving up their own sense of ownership, I struggle with getting other people's fingers off of my soul.  'You are not your own,' means 'you aren't theirs either!'  Yay!  All these people who KNOW how my life should be lived, the way it MUST be done, are no more correct than anyone who says 'I will live this way because that's what FEELS good.'  The hard part is figuring out the proper way to live, we silly humans tend to fall off one side or the other; now how do I learn to keep to the middle of the road?

Kingdom come

I've been a wanderer, an orphan, a refugee my entire life, at least in an emotional, relational, and spiritual sense.  Here's an interesting article reminding us that we do have a home, and it's here now, not some distant hope, and that it is our job to be citizens of that unseen country and help others to find it!

Ridiculous Road Trips!

Want to feel small, and invigorated all at the same time?  Check out this quick little article on mind boggling interstellar road tripping!  Wow!  My question is, why would anyone want to live on Mars?  First the trip to even get there would be horrendous and once you were there survival would be bleak indeed!  Why not move to Antarctica or the Sahara?  At least you could breathe the air and water is known to exist!  Star Trek and Star Wars give us visions of easy travel and accessible civilizations all along the way, like road tripping between the States, but I wonder how many of these idealists have even road tripped across South Dakota, much less between the empty wastes of space?  But then again, 'if I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,' still He is there! Apparently we've been dreaming about such things since time out of mind, we are just more scientific and less poetic than the ancients.

The Heart of Austen

I read the book 'Austenland' some time ago and just watched the movie.  The book wasn't bad and the movie was ridiculously delightful, in a nerdy, over the top silly sort of way, perhaps a modern Northanger Abbey?  The plot centers around the thirty something Jane who is unlucky in love and dreams of finding a modern Mr. Darcy.  In her obsession with all things Austen, she seems to have developed a few unsettling habits hoping to approximate her beloved era as much as possible, perhaps to an unhealthy extreme.  She spends her minuscule fortune and in a last desperate leap at love, decides to spend a week living out her dream.  A nerdy little romance plays out, worthy of an Austen book in itself, and all is happily resolved.  It isn't classic literature or moving cinema, just a happy bit of fluff that pokes a bit of fun at the modern Austen craze and perhaps even modern civilization itself, but hardly the source of great philosophical realizations, or is it?

The movie is delightfully satiric when it comes to modern obsessions with all things Austen, especially the romanticization of her witty but cutting social commentaries.  It has succeeded as much as Miss Austen herself, whose books, while humorous, are full of social commentary on her times and humanity in general.  This little gem of a movie likewise reveals something we moderns so ofter overlook: the search for the real.  In a world wherein we feel compelled to create ourselves, to be unique yet all the same, to have no opinion not sanctioned by social approval, and to acknowledge nothing as Truth save that which is dearest to ourselves, this movie throws our shallow reality in our face as suddenly as being smacked with a glove.  Jane doesn't want Jane Austen or Mr. Darcy, she wants real, true, deep things, things that mean Something.

The success of Miss Austen is in her creation of real characters, not fluffy bits of nothing that fall in love and live happily ever after.  Her heroines are flawed, they suffer, they sin, they make mistakes, but they also learn and grow, just as real people should.  Or at least they would in a world that made any sense.  But our world, or rather our perception of it, doesn't make any sense.  We are as feckless, flighty, and vain as Lydia Bennet, Mrs. E, Lady Catherine, Isabella Thorpe, the Crawfords, Mr. Wickham, and dozens of other characters in the Austen canon: characters who do not grow, change, or improve, but rather distort reality to explain away their own discomforts and shortcomings.  We are now a world of such whining, bitter, discontent, and vacuous entities.  And like Miss Austen, 'Austenland' is determined to laugh in the face of the absurd and call us to better ourselves and our world thereby.  Bravo!

Someone gets it!

Most secular Christmas music annoys me, yes that Hippo song is cute the first time and who can begrudge Mommy stealing a kiss from Santa Clause, and everyone loves the upbeat feel of 'Sleigh Ride' and 'Carol of the Bells.'  And then there are the rather innocuous classics like 'Silver Bells' and 'White Christmas' and the kid favorites featuring Rudolph and Frosty, but aside from a few tried and true classics, most of the secular fluff that's come out in celebration of the season in the last century isn't worth the paper it's printed on.  I once endured a middle school choir concert wherein they rejoiced over snowmobiles and snowboarding, ugh!  And I'm not the only one, finally I can come out of the closet!  Find the confession here!

Outlandish Promises

I'm currently going through my extensive body of self-published stories: revising, editing, and the like.  It has been a long time since I've read 'The Serpent and the Unicorn,' and even longer since I wrote it.  I came across one particular storyline that truly made me wonder what I was thinking when I wrote THAT.  Could a person really act like that outside of a sappy, romantic tale?  Then I watched the third installment of the Horatio Hornblower series, the one where the title character and his men are captured by the Spanish and stuck in prison.  He strikes up a friendship with the local Don and together they watched a ship wreck itself on the reef.  This captured Englishman offers to go out and rescue the survivors, at much risk to himself, but the Don only stares at him and says it is too dangerous and only an excuse to escape.  The man promises to return and the Don relents.

After a harrowing rescue the little company is adrift at sea and picked up by the main character's ship.  It is a perfect escape!  Except for that dreadful promise.  But he goes back, his men as well, to fulfill his promise.  They were home free but they chose to return to chains and prison because of a promise.  I know this is a fictional tale but it is a relief to know I am not the only one with such fantastic storylines!  But then it is not such an outlandish tale, at least when you consider that grandest and most epic of all tales, the one the actually happens to be true.

For there was once a Father who made a promise, and though it cost Him the life of His Son, He did not hesitate to fulfill it though the world most certainly didn't deserve it.  This Christmas, remember that outlandish promise, fulfilled in the most unlikely of places two millennia ago, and remember that such love, honor, and sacrifice is never in vain!