When In Rome

Good afternoon my dears, I am watching When In Rome for the upteenth time and let me tell you.... if you want to see how I am in real life, watch this movie. Seriously. ... This is me. *sigh* That is all I have to say, google When In Rome. I hope you all have had a lovely afternoon, a beautiful weekend; and I wish you all the happiness the world has to offer you.

Hope Springs..... Eternal

Good Early Morning my loves, it is the "madrugada" as they say in Spanish. I am awake and just thinking, about cycles that we go through and cycles of the year, cycles of emotions, cycles, cycles, cycles.. Around and around in my head.  

I had begun to watch this movie Hope Springs with Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, and Steve Carrel with my grandparents a few weeks ago. It is about a married couple that have been married for thirty plus years, and the wife realizes she needs more from their relationship, she wants intimacy again, something they lost somewhere along the road. Meryl plays the wife, Kay, Jones is the cantankerous husband, and Carrel is the therapist.  I didn't get to finish watching it with my grandparents,  but I knew I had to see how it ended, so I purchased it, and having now laughed and cried to Hope Springs in the madrugada. 

I am always thinking about the same topics it seems, just from different new angles, re-evaluating how I understand something. Sometimes that gets me in trouble, because I drift away from the true foundation understandings of certain things that really don't require any further verification or definition. I am getting better at not doing that: a lot of that I now know is stemming from trust issues.... I have a hard time trusting.. Pretty much anything and everything, and unfortunately everyone. In some ways, it is a good safety mechanism to protect myself [probably the very reason the issue manifested within me: self preservation]... But, in other ways, not being able to trust cripples me, horribly.   

  I have learned that when you finally find people that love you, and you love them back, you Must trust them: you must commit that to them; because, I guarantee there will be times you go through different experiences and you may not understand exactly the choices your loved ones are making, but you Must trust them to know that while you may not "understand" completely, you do know they love you, and you love each other, and you know they would never do anything to hurt you. 

 

I am going to leave you with the therapists closing monologue that talks about marriage, but just makes me think about how what he says just applies to life in general; and how when you set out to do something because it's the right thing and you have love driving you on.. You have only wonderful things to look forward to. I think about how for so long I was tied down to the life I had, and it wasn't till I moved to Texas and decided to marry and commit to the life I wanted for myself that  I really started living a life I can be proud of. Before, the relationship between me and my life was like one of the couples that never should have gotten married, I did things based on emotional decisions and none of them worked out.  The last thing Steve Carrel says is so true, and I am going to remind myself of it whenever I feel like giving up. 

 "I have patients who never should have gotten married..and you are not those people.. Even great marriages have terrible years. So bad that you're tempted to just give up. But don't. Hold on. There will come a time when you will look back at this moment as the prelude to something fuller and richer than you've ever dreamed."

That being said, I hope you are able to sleep well my dears and live the life you want. I hope so many good things to those that seek the better life. Hold on. There are always just bumps in the road, none of them have been in vain. Good morning my darlings and to all a beautiful day. 

Snow White and the Huntsman

Good evening my dears, it is getting late for me, and I am delighted to be able to bring a pretty recent film into the blogger "limelight."



I had the good fortune of purchasing the latest version of  the classic fairy tale of Snow White: the princess who's spirit is connected with nature and brings peace to the land by ridding a kingdom of an evil queen.  This version is titled "Snow White and the Huntsman." Starring Kirsten Stewart and Charlize Theron, it definitely isn't camera shy of any close ups. Aside from familiar faces, the story line is more of an epically sculpted landscape than the more previous fluffy adaptions.  I thoroughly enjoyed the extended cut that lasts two hours and fifteen minutes of graphic battle scenes and impressive digital effects. I had been wavering as to whether I really wanted to spend the money to buy this, but I was excuisitely surprised and pleased to have made the purchase.

This version provides a background glimpse into the evil queen's beginnings and as the story matures, so does our understanding of what molded her into such wickedness. But just as we come to understand the queens horrific past, we also are able to see the parallel childhood of the princess and how both girls dealt with tragedy in opposite manners. There is a line that the now grown princess confides, "I used to hate her (the evil queen, Ravenna) but now I only feel sadness...."

When Snow White is awakened by the kiss of her true love, she speaks to rally the people to aide her against the queen and she says, "I have seen what she (the evil queen) sees... I can kill her..." She understands why she is evil, she does not judge her, but she cannot stand by and watch her destroy innocent peoples lives.

Have you ever had to survive something? Have you ever faced captivity and faced evil?

There are two types of people. People that cannot stand up to evil and cower to it. And then there are people that look into the face of evil, and refuse to look away until they see into the heart of evil, and they do not turn away; they recognize it as something that dwells in all of us, and they stand up to it and rise above it.

There are flowers that wilt in frost and winter, and then there are flowers that bloom and remain strong despite what the world has surrounded them with.

I am going to say, sometimes surviving is merely holding onto an unexplainable faith that there is something good- something worth holding out for- waiting for us in the near future.  And when we find that hope, that bright light..... we would rather die that day fighting for that light and hope than live another day of "this death," as Snow White calls it when rallying everyone to her.

In summation, I am wishing for you all that if you have not yet found that light, to hold on to faith: I Know you will find it if you never stop hoping and looking for it.

And to those of you that Have found that light.. you have found that hope. .... I implore you to have the courage and strength to fight to hold onto it. If you work at never losing it and fighting for it, you are truly alive, anything else is only a shadow of what your life has to offer you.

I would never ask of you my dear readers anything I do not demand of myself as well. Life is difficult and we are all unique individuals with similar and different pasts, but we are all the same at our cores. We all contain good and evil in us, and it is up to us to decide which we will give into, which we will survive from and which we will hold onto and never let go. Be honest and courageous. I was not born a fighter, but I have trained myself to fight for what I love, anything else is not living, anything else would only fill me with regret and useless wishing.

Always with ernest hope,

Read Riding Hood