Tulip Power!
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the once again, seasonably reasonable, sunny, gorgeous and rather breezy island of Nantucket! Great to be with you and yours on this April the second, 2013, a Tuesday morning to be sure and I wish you a fair adieu. I watched a movie, the other day, what a shocker, that struck me as one of the year’s top picks for a “life time achievement award” from the directive forces of the Oscars…food for thought for next year ladies and gentlemen! It is an old movie, if you are 18 or so, but to us rather middle aged folks, it is as true as yesterday, bringing those aforementioned people back to who they really are. Not only does it make social statements that are true today in politics, religion and money in general, the only ‘issues’ that seem to sway the media these days, but it rings true to what is really going on in this old world of OURS–all of us, not just Americans. I quote the great author T.S. Elliot, “We shall not cease exploring, and at the end of our exploration, we shall return to where we started and KNOW the place for the first time…”. The movie in question is still haunting me, for there have been so many that meet this marker. A great man once said, “WE WILL BECOME LIKE CHILDREN AGAIN.” I believe that to be true. For it is finding that movie, book, play, song, picture or work of art for oneself that WE actually get in touch with our most inner and authentic selves and by doing so, as the great German philosopher Maslow once said in his ‘hierarchy of needs’, that action supersedes even the air we breath, the food we eat or the water we drink. That ‘need’ is that need for self actualization, finding your own voice, knowing, rather than being told what to know, what is right and what is most clearly wrong, is the key to true contentment and happiness. One movie I could throw out there would be “Out of Africa”, starring of course the greats’ Merrill Streep and Robert Redford. A film produced in 1985 in and about the Sahara of Kenya, on the continent of Africa, a place I was honored to visit when only an impressionable 17 year old kid, circa 1980. I saw the giant African Elephants, the Leopard and her cubs, the great Lions, the Alligators, the Hippos, the Cheetah, Apes of all sizes and shapes, the Gazelles, the Zebras, the Rhino, the Cape Buffalo and the seemingly billions of birds living on Lake Victoria… Quite an experience on Safari I can assure you. What those 18 days in the Masai game reserve as well as Samburu, not to mention Tanzania, gave to me personally is that ‘knowing-ness’ that WE are all interconnected, that our actions, words and indeed thoughts can be used as either weapons or for the sake of LOVE–the real reason we are ALL here to begin with. It was a bitter sweet movie, as the struggle for independence, war and a love affair brought everything into focus, regarding the single minded ‘connection theory… and as the players on the stage of art imitated life, the movie brings emotions that one may never have given a second thought to, but are the emotions and heart that drive the vehicle that IS your soul. I pray that you might pick it up someday, for nature and this world may depend upon your discretion to this most pressing matter at hand as the world continues to warm– those precious animals, including the Polar Bear, disappearing from the world forever. Pity that! PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
