I Sifted Through Thousands Of Faces Only Wanting To See Yours.

I woke up with the strangest feeling of loss, grief and regret this afternoon and it's lingered still. I thought of this exchange once when visiting with my parents. I sat at the dinner table in the kitchen while my Mother was making dinner. I was complaining about some problem I had, "I really wish I had listened to my Father." My Mother asked "Why? What did he say?", and I admitted back to her "I don't know I wasn't listening." I thought about Daedalus his son Icarus in the Fields of Asphodel colliding into one another in their grief, both now just souls on the other's side of River Styx, their version of the hereafter. Daedalus holding his son's face in his hands, with streams of tears running from his eyes. "My son I am so sorry" he would say over and over again. "No Father, do not be sorry, it was me I should have listened". Daedalus in his grief and regret "I only wanted you to be free.", Icarus would try to reassure his father despite them both already being dead "I was, I was free, even if only for a moment, from the sun to the sea."

There is nothing I want more than to be aged and grayed. With a porch and chair faced towards a sitting sun. A garden where there is always work to be done. A kitchen with full complements and recipes. Adorned with Wooly Blankets and Knitted Sweaters. And sharing my life with a spouse who is in love with and is loved by me.

So a while back I heard someone say that we appropriated our ability to speak from God. And whether or not this is true, humor me.

I guess let's start from the beginning. In Genesis, it talks about how there was a formlessness , and God spoke "Let there be..." and suddenly there was things that there were never before. Formlessness Defined by Words Divine. Light, Dark, Land, Sea, Skies, and every living thing from just God's "Let there ..." . And then later in the Gospel John it reads "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." That's how John starts his Gospel, that's how he opens his message that's how important it is. That God is Word. From the very beginning.

So now picture this God creates us, Humans. And we are created in God's Image. So we desperately try to communicate with God, and how do we do that? Feebly, I guess. Because what do we do? Speak. God had just created everything with words.

Now that's Blasphemy. Because would it not be? Blasphemy, is using Words Sacrilegiously. And Sacrilegious is the misuse of anything Sacred. Words are the Tools of Creation. So Words are Sacred. Our Words or Use of Any Speech is Blasphemy!

Now, most of that is me, way over thinking and stretching that to the extremes. But do you see what I mean? Words are powerful. With tact they can sway minds and hearts, and some words are carried across time. They build relationships, people, promises, companies, and nations and according to the bible all of Creation. Words are powerful things, and once dispensed they can't be returned or given back. Just as much they can build and create, they can destroy and take. And that was everything I was trying to convey.

A gentle breeze rustles the trees. A Streetlight’s light casts yellow over green leaves. Your head on my Shoulder. Mine in your hair. In a backyard. On a trampoline.

Death does not invalidate Life. Death does not seek to destroy you. It is not partial or bias to you.

Our Atoms are not our own. They did not belong to us before our birth. They do not belong to us after our death. They return to the Earth and become apart of everything.

Our Mannerisms are carried on by the people who loved us in life. And our spirits I believe live on forever in love.

Death is no more the enemy of Life. Than a period is the end of a sentence. And that's the nice thing about it. Is even after a sentence ends. Another one can keep going. We keep going.

“For some time, Hollywood has marketed family entertainment according to a two-pronged strategy, with cute stuff and kinetic motion for the kids and sly pop-cultural references and tame double entendres for mom and dad. Miyazaki has no interest in such trickery, or in the alternative method, most successfully deployed in Pixar features like Finding Nemo, Toy Story 3 and Inside/Out, of blending silliness with sentimentality.”

“Most films made for children are flashy adventure-comedies. Structurally and tonally, they feel almost exactly like blockbusters made for adults, scrubbed of any potentially offensive material. They aren’t so much made for children as they’re made to be not not for children. It’s perhaps telling that the genre is generally called “Family,” rather than “Children’s.” The films are designed to be pleasing to a broad, age-diverse audience, but they’re not necessarily specially made for young minds.”

“My Neighbor Totoro, on the other hand, is a genuine children’s film, attuned to child psychology. Satsuki and Mei move and speak like children: they run and romp, giggle and yell. The sibling dynamic is sensitively rendered: Satsuki is eager to impress her parents but sometimes succumbs to silliness, while Mei is Satsuki’s shadow and echo (with an independent streak). But perhaps most uniquely, My Neighbor Totoro follows children’s goals and concerns. Its protagonists aren’t given a mission or a call to adventure - in the absence of a larger drama, they create their own, as children in stable environments do. They play.”

“Consider the sequence just before Mei first encounters Totoro. Satsuki has left for school, and Dad is working from home, so Mei dons a hat and a shoulder bag and tells her father that she’s “off to run some errands” - The film is hers for the next ten minutes, with very little dialogue. She’s seized by ideas, and then abandons them; her goals switch from moment to moment. First she wants to play “flower shop” with her dad, but then she becomes distracted by a pool full of tadpoles. Then, of course, she needs a bucket to catch tadpoles in - but the bucket has a hole in it. And on it goes, but we’re never bored, because Mei is never bored.”

“[…] You can only ride a ride so many times before the thrill wears off. But a child can never exhaust the possibilities of a park or a neighborhood or a forest, and Totoro exists in this mode. The film is made up of travel and transit and exploration, set against lush, evocative landscapes that seem to extend far beyond the frame. We enter the film driving along a dirt road past houses and rice paddies; we follow Mei as she clambers through a thicket and into the forest; we walk home from school with the girls, ducking into a shrine to take shelter from the rain; we run past endless green fields with Satsuki as she searches for Mei. The psychic center of Totoro’s world is an impossibly giant camphor tree covered in moss. The girls climb over it, bow to it as a forest-guardian, and at one point fly high above it, with the help of Totoro. Much like Totoro himself, the tree is enormous and initially intimidating, but ultimately a source of shelter and inspiration.”

“My Neighbor Totoro has a story, but it’s the kind of story that a child might make up, or that a parent might tell as a bedtime story, prodded along by the refrain, “And then what happened?” This kind of whimsicality is actually baked into Miyazaki’s process: he begins animating his films before they’re fully written. Totoro has chase scenes and fantastical creatures, but these are flights of fancy rooted in a familiar world. A big part of being a kid is watching and waiting, and Miyazaki understands this. When Mei catches a glimpse of a small Totoro running under her house, she crouches down and stares into the gap, waiting. Miyazaki holds on this image: we wait with her. Magical things happen, but most of life happens in between those things—and there is a kind of gentle magic, for a child, in seeing those in-betweens brought to life truthfully on screen.”

A.O. Scott and Lauren Wilford on “My Neighbor Totoro”, 2017.  

Who knew feelings were this hard to understand, sort and satisfy.

I wish to be like a cold winter’s day. Atmospheric frozen solid. An optimistic indifference. I want to be the tingling sensation in someone’s toes, fingers, and nose. I want to be the warmth on their back. The reason why they curl up in a blanket at night. The reason why they don’t want to leave it in the morning. The thing that their very breath catches on. I want to be like a cold winters day. 

I would take clouds of grey, and rainy days if it meant she was my sunshine’s ray. I would take all the thorns of those briar rose if it meant she was the one I could love and hold.

 She is my delight, my joy, she is my comfort, my piece of mind. She is all the things that are good and Devine.

I love her.

Seek after unconditional love and it's definition, all other things will follow.