Brave

Hello my fellow bloggers, I hope you find yourselves enjoying this afternoon whether it is sunny, raining, or cold wherever you are. It is sunny and on the verge of being stifling hot. I doggedly tap away on my keyboard just because I know I am going to talk from my heart, and talking from the heart requires courage, and I have used up so much right now, and yet, I know it is required of me to continue using it until further notice. The summer heat supplies such wonderfully natural happy endorphins, and yet at a scorching price to be payed: getting sunburnt. *sigh* I rhetorically ask myself, "What can one do?" However, I was able to see the recent Pixar movie Brave on the weekend it came out and I have been bursting to talk to about it.

The short film at the beginning is my favorite Pixar short film ever, no doubt whatsoever. It is about three generations, a grandfather, father, and son that row out in a little dingy every night, put up a ladder and climb up to the moon. On the moon is where falling stars land and is where they sweep/rake up as many stars to give the moon its phases. The film encompasses the night the grandfather and father take the son/grandson up to the moon for the first time to teach him the family tradition. It is a beautiful and touching excerpt about learning the tradition we are born with to build yourself a foundation and then venturing out and finding your own way to build and expand tradition so that with each generation it evolves and betters itself, by learning from mistakes and each person recognizing the difference of individuals. It touched me, and quite honestly a day doesn't go by now, that I don't think about the moon and look forward to seeing just so that I can imagine them up there having cleaned up fallen stars.  Looking, as always, for the irony in life, I smile realizing my Nana loves her hot tub and atrium so she can look up at that "beautiful moon" and now I love it too; funny how those things work out.

I do not want to give away too many spoilers about Brave.... Skimming over what I summarized about the mini film, I realize that if Brave was a paper, the mini film is the beginning paragraph of that paper; it is the suggestive beginning of the feature films theme. So, I will tick off the main things about Brave that stood out to me.

1. Born into privilege/gifts requires great responsibility.

2. Tradition is a foundation, but only a foundation. A foundation does not build a house. Individuals build houses.

3. We are not our parents, and we are not our parent's mistakes. Coming of age happens at different ages for everyone, but once we do, we are not children anymore. We are adults. We are individuals. Free of our parents pasts, only responsible for our own history that we have created and only responsible for our  stories that are not reflections of our parents history.  We are born with this strange sense that we are born into living out and correcting our parents lives and where they went wrong. But that sense is misleading, because we are all born with our own destinies free of what our parents were and where they came from.

4. With Freedom, we are required to adorn our characters with diplomacy, humility, and integrity, for without these siblings, freedom would be boastful, hardly recognizble and scorned.


And this last thing is what I have most learned my darlings, long before I ever saw this movie, but was so readily reminded of after seeing this. Always remember, it isn't being brave, if you aren't scared. Figure out what you need. And learn how to ask for it. Never forget those things.

As always, my darlings, I sign off with much affection and I hope you are able to enjoy sweet summer and all of her fickle lazy moods. I know I am and my skin is my witness.

sincerely, and

 Red as a Lobster,

Read Riding Hood.