a blue true dream of sky

"To watch the image of a young girl burbling with laughter as she runs atop cresting waves in “Ponyo” is to be reminded of how infrequently the movies seem to express joy now, how rarely they sweep us up in ecstatic reverie. It’s a giddy, touchingly resonant image of freedom — the animated girl is as liberated from shoes as from the laws of nature — one that the director Hayao Miyazaki lingers on only as long as it takes your eyes and mind to hold it close, love it deeply and immediately regret its impermanence."

***

Ponyo was one of the most fun movies I watched last year and the NYT's review is spot on. So few movies these days are as filled with joy - not even the children's animated films. Ponyo, running across the waves encapsulates exactly how I feel when I'm being whirled around a dance floor, moving in time with the music and laughing. It's those moments where liberation, love of music and life fuse together and bubble up within that keeps me coming back to the dance floor again, and again.

There are times I stop and think reverentially: thank you God. For all this, this love of life, this existence, this joy.

Thank You.

***

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
wich is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e.e cummings

***

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

***

Note: I originally posted this with just the ee cummings poem and not the Hopkins but I came across the Hopkins poem later in the day and just could not resist. I don't care if I'm going to be accused of being twee or Pollyanna-ish but there is just so much beauty around us. People, friends, I exhort you. Stop and look.

In the last month, I have seen:

a strangely vermilion sun hanging neatly in the grey sky
the silhouette of tree branches backlit by the sunrise
towering giraffe cranes quietly stalking amongst our city woods
a chattering brown squirrel, who accused me of disturbing his peace

friends around a table, tasting laughter and cheese,
eating joy with chocolate dipped strawberries


Mediate revelation indeed. He does show Himself - only we have scales and logs and things and need them peeled back, removed.

***

I pray for:
humility so that I may learn
the peace that surpasses all understanding,
truth that will make us wise for salvation,
so that I may have
strength to do the good works prepared in advance for us to do
endurance, to run this race set before us.