(Warning – Spoilers ahead ^^ )

I like what they decided to do – how, instead of retelling the same story over again, they moved it forward and instead made this a second visit to ‘Underland’ for Alice.  I like how they worked in both the reclamation of memory and self into one device – which true, is nothing new, but still well done.  Over all, I would certainly recommend it to others who are considering going to see it.

That idea of reclamation – of restoring something that is lost – is something I’ve thought about before and which this movie brought to the forefront of my mind again.  One of the books I read growing up that shaped who I am was ‘The Neverending Story’.  If all you’ve seen is the movies, I *definitely* recommend you hunt up the book.  The first movie is almost the first half of the book – with some changes.  The rest of the book I don’t feel they every really did justice to.

There is a section, right at the end of the book, that came to mind – have a read:

‘Mr Coreander,’ Bastian asked, ‘ how do you know all that? I mean – have you ever been in Fantastica?’

‘Of course I have,’ said Mr Coreander.

‘But then,’ said Bastian, ‘ you must know Moon Child.’

‘Yes, I know the Childlike Empress,’ said Mr Coreander, ‘ though not by that name.  I called her something different.  But that doesn’t matter.’

‘Then you must know the book!’ Bastian cried.  ‘Then you have read the Neverending Story.’

Mr Coreander shook his head.

‘Every real story is a Neverending Story.’  He passed his eye over the many books that covered the walls of his shop from floor to ceiling, pointed the stem of his pipe at them, and went on:

‘There are many doors to Fantastica, my boy.  There are other such magic books.  A lot of people read them without noticing.  It all depends on who gets  his hands on such books.’

‘Then the Neverending Story is different for different people?’

‘That’s right,’ said Mr Coreander.  ‘And besides, it’s not just books.  There are other ways of getting to Fantastica and back.  You’ll find out.’

‘Do you think so?’ Bastian asked hopefully.  ‘But then I’d have to meet Moon Child again, and no one can meet her more than once.’

Mr Coreander leaned forward and lowered his voice.

‘Let an old Fantastica hand tell you something, my boy.  This is a secret that no one in Fantastica can know.  When you think it over, you’ll see why.  You can’t visit Moon Child a second time, that’s true.  But if you can give her a new name, you’ll see her again.  And however often you manage to do that, it will be the first and only time.’

The wonder of Fantastica is the ability to go there and then return, having enriched both by the exchange.  As Mr Coreander said, books are not the only ways that we have learned to visit – there are songs, movies, games, art – the list grows longer the longer we follow it.  But what is it about that exchange that makes it valuable?

I titled this post ‘Lectern of the Lost’.  There are a couple different ways you could take that.  It could be the Lectern from which the Lost are instructed – the point of origin of all that keeps them where they are and all that seeks to maintain things in just that manner.  I’m certain if you think about it you can find some of those points in the world around you – if not in the worlds laid out within you.  In truth, I don’t know that you could name or define each of those lecterns – as there are at least as many of them as there are individuals – though rest assured, there are shared lecterns.

The other option is that it could be the Lectern from which the Lost seek instruction so that there may be finding – of whatever may be needed and necessary – that has been Lost.  If that is the case, I truly believe that for every item that may ever arise there is an entry – and an entry – for Fantastica that will allow them the opportunity to find what they seek.  I believe we return again and again because there is more that we long to know and understand – and there is always more to be given if we ask for it.

I truly hope I never find a point at which I believe I have no need of such instruction.

I’ve been thinking about it, and I realize that New Year’s resolutions really don’t stand much of a chance with me.  Truth be told, they’re just to easy to set aside and ignore.  So instead, I’ve settled on some New Year’s wishes – with a side of planning and forethought to see what can be accomplished ^^

The first wish stems from a deal I made with myself last month.  We were having a special for employees at work, and there was a camera that happened to come up on clearance.  Now, I’ve been wanting a new camera for quite some time.  The one I have still works fairly well, though it has it’s quirks, but I really wanted something that could take a little better shots.  Well – this one can do that ^_^ It’s a 14 mpx with 5x optical – not bad, and a certain step up from my last.  Now, the deal I made with myself was this: if I bought it, I had to take pictures *and post* one of said pictures every day for a year.  The picture has to have been taken that day, so no recycling just because I “couldn’t find anything interesting” I’ll be posting those to my flickr account, so check there if you want to see what I wind up shooting. May set it up to post to FB too – not sure about that yet though.

The second wish has to do with school.  If things go well this semester, I’m hoping to have my individualized major finalized and approved – more on that when it actually happens.  Last semester . . . well, I did better than I expected to do to be honest.  The semester was a rough one – not because of anything specific in my courses, all of which were wonderful, but more to do with personal matters.  I have one course I’m going to have to retake.  My second wish is to have straight A’s at the end of the semester.  I’ve already started trying to find ways to manage my time better – i.e. I spent a few hours setting up google calendars integrated with my email client at home with my class schedules as well as the important scholastic dates.  I have it set so I can add an event for every homework assignment as I get it – to make certain I know it is there, and when it has to be finished.  I know there’s more to it than that – and I know I’m still going to be fighting with myself – but it’s progress, and I’m claiming it as good ^_^

My third wish (as wishes are best in threes, no?) is . . . hmm.  The first two were easy – I had already thought about them and laid out a framework of where I was wanting to go and what I was wanting to do.  This one is a bit more spur of the moment.  The more I sit here thinking about it, the more my mind spirals back to some form of writing.  Don’t get me wrong – it’s something I long to do – but it’s also dangerous.  I don’t like to lie – in fact, it’s something that I usually have significant difficulty doing – and when I write . . . though it may come out in some form or fashion perhaps not as readily apparent, what is there is me – who and what I am, what I think and feel, what motivates and drives me forward.  Well then . . . perhaps my third wish is just that – that I write.

I think that’ll do me – this is already a lot longer than I had expected.  Good thing I added that cut at the beginning

Blessings my friends and fellows – may you find your wishes for the New Year and seek them out as well!

This is from a good friend of mine. She says she’s still not sure if it’s hers originally, but no other source has been found to attribute it to. I gladly leave it in her devoted watchcare

When you stop and look at it for a few minutes, there’s a lot being said here. A “series of connections” – yes, that would certainly be a good model for approaching life. Every moment of every day, we are brought in contact with various threads, each stretching from something – animate or inanimate – around us. As we act upon those threads, or they are acted upon around us, connections are made and strengthened by the actions that are taken and the events that take place. And as is the nature of interconnected things, when you pull hard enough on one set of strings, it can be felt across a large number of them. I think that’s why when you’ve been around people long enough, or had strong experiences, you can know when something happens in their lives. The connections that bind you begin to go taut, and though how much you know depends on just how well you know them, you know something is going on.

As an “experiment in perception” – most definitely. Everything we hold to, everything we ‘believe’, has been introduced into our lives as it is refined and defined by the manners in which we perceive it. It starts with the visceral experiences, each weighed and given rank and file by the heart – what we have passion for we remember, while much else falls to the wayside. Then the mind sorts, categorizes, and catalogs what has been taken in – it creates the order that some feel is the only necessity to hold the bastions of civilization in place. The last, perhaps the least explored – the body itself. The memories of movements that can be quicker than we can consciously process or respond to. The tugs toward something, the aversion to another – these are the brushes against the unknowables, and though it speaks to us in sense and thought, it is the body itself that allows us to learn the steps what let us move with them.

Life is but a series of connections and an experiment in perception. — emphasis my own. These two together – I do believe they cover everything

Did you ever try to turn yourself upside-down when you were a kid? No, I’m not talking about hanging from something. Maybe I should explain.

When I was younger, I always thought it would be neat if I could change my perception of gravity and make myself float. Sometime I would just lay still on my bed for periods of time with my eyes closed. Without actually moving, I would gently rock the perception of my weight back and forth. It would always start directly below me, and it was fairly easy to swing it up even with the horizontal. I’d just lay there, working it like a pendulum. I could never make a complete circle though. The closest I could ever come was 45 degrees above the horizontal – and maybe hold it there for a second or two.

I thought about this quote for a while before I decided how to approach it. The friend who first told me about it said it reminded her of me and the way I perceive the world. I had to consider it for a while, but I find that in many ways I can agree.

What does it mean to me to dream? Personally, I believe dreaming is a way of directly approaching/acknowledging things that we may otherwise not want to address, or realize that need to be addressed. Dreaming is also what allows us to make it from day to day – that gives us purpose beyond the motions that make up our lives.

To dream of falling? I can remember one dream were I was standing on the circular edge of one of the tall silver houses like the Jetsons lived in. There were two guys with the typical old-fashioned sci-fi gun with the big round knob on the end. I wind up going off the edge and falling towards the clouds below me – and then I wake.

There was another night when I had just been thrown out of a castle. I remembered I had been there previously in another dream, but not all of what had happened. This time, the monsters had had enough of dealing with me so they kicked me out. I was standing on the edge of a *tall* cliff face, looking down at a sea of pine trees. I remember thinking that since I was in a dream and pretty much done with it, I’d just jump and the fall would make me wake up. Yeah, didn’t work.

As to flying – I’ve never flown in a dream, but I could sure jump hella high. When I was on the way down, it was always as if I was floating. And there have been numerous dreams where I basically hovered from place to place, usually with my legs folded up underneath me

The first fall can happen when I don’t realize what I’m getting in to. When I suddenly realize that enough is enough – and I pull back. The second fall happens when I won’t listen – when I refuse to acknowledge what is obvious if I would allow myself to hear. The third fall … that one only happens when I throw myself off the edge, knowing full well I don’t know what I’m doing, or how things will work out. I may not have flown, but I’ve certainly been carried a long way.

When I learn new things, I have a habit of taking that information and holding it across the faces of all the little flickering lights that make up the things I may already know. It means that cross-field application of concepts is slowly becoming a natural way of progressing for me ^_^ The quote this evening sparked me off on another such thoughtscape.

In Environmental Science, there is a thread I hear resounding through every page we read, every lecture we have, every experiment we do: sustainability. If we cannot find a way to progress that allows us to coexist with our surroundings instead of consistently depleting and destroying them, we will – in the end – destroy ourselves. The goal is to establish a level of interaction that will not draw, as my instructor says, from the principle of the environmental resources we have, but from the naturally accruing interest that arises when it is well managed.

Take those basic principles and pull them across. Now, work from, “… motivation doesn’t last … we recommend it daily.” Perhaps, what we’re doing here is working with a renewable resource that has been harvested beyond sustainability. We need to take the time to invest in those things that bring us motivation – to plant, to weed, to water, to nurture.

Which of course makes it all begin to bleed over. I’m sure you can probably think of a few other places these same principles could be applied. And so there’s my next question: how do you go about establishing a sustainable, renewable life? I think that’s going to be something playing around in the back of my head from here on out ^^

There are days when you work hard, you accomplish much, and you feel satisfied.
There are days where plans fall through, things go wrong, and you feel like a wreck.
Then .. there are *those* days

Don’t worry, the only thing it’s not safe for is your sanity ^_~

If you read regularly, you may have noticed some skips and starts over the last couple of weeks. Well, I’ve had a full class load in addition to 30+ hours a week at work. Now, I know that’s not really all that much, and that lots of other people have dealt with the same thing and get along just fine. All in all, I’m doing alright – but by the end of the week I start to feel like I’ve been running double-days. School, then home to change clothes, then off to work. By the time I get home, I really just want to zone for a while. Not the best response mind, but the one that most readily presents itself

I’ve also been doing a bit of thinking. It’s ranged all the way from what I’m planning to do with my life to what I find attractive in a guy. The foundation stones haven’t changed any, but it’s sorta like someone took their thumb and smudged everything else a little. Strange as it may sound, I’m not really perceiving or seeing this as a bad thing.

I’ve been thinking about my faith – how it is grounded in what I know, in what is known, and how it has been built up with the experiences I have had and the things I have learned in the course of my life. It is in my faith that I find the lyrics for the song that has whispered through my life the entirety of the time I have been alive.

And now, I’m learning a bit more about hope. Personally, I see it as the way in which we deal with the future – with the unknowable, that which has yet to be revealed. And I see it as something sensual – learning the movements that flow from acknowledging the gentle pressures and tuggings that lack apparent founding. Hope for me is learning the dance that allows me to live every moment of my life exactly as I want to, exactly as I should, so that I am the most completely me.

Now, seeing as how to I’m going to school and all, that one might seem a little counter-intuitive What I take away from it is how, even as we immerse ourselves in our classes, there are other things just as – if perhaps not even more – important than what we get out of our books. And those lessons are ones we can learn in a variety of schools. I think there are a lot of people out there who have degrees, but the mark of their accomplishment isn’t some piece of paper they can hang on the wall.

I’m one of those people who, when I play a video game, is more than happy to hunt down every one of the little shiny bits that the developers may have hidden throughout the adventures. I like to do it, just to say that I have, but also because there are often little awards/rewards that you can earn or unlock by taking the time to find everything. Many times you wind up with at least a subscreen, perhaps a shelf in a base, maybe even a whole room – all just for a place that displays all the things you’ve earned or found.

I wish sometimes that people had little shelves like that, or maybe a book – or a charm bracelet. Some of the ornaments would be shiny, well polished and worn. Others may be tarnished, twisted, or mangled. I bet you there are more charms on there than the person ever even remembers getting. But if we could point it out, say, “What’s the spindle one for?” – then .. then we would hear some stories, and we would learn some things that we had never heard before.

There is a dream I had, I don’t remember how long ago, but there are details of it I do remember. I remember that the people there were fighting to hold on, because something awful had happened. I remember that there were some truly grizzly “displays” in some of the bombed out husks of buildings – storefronts laden with unsavory wares.

What I remember most is a dance.

There were two individuals, or at least it seemed that way. There were times when I was spinning along as one/both of them, others where I was watching, and yet others where it was as if I was looking over sketches someone had made of the figures.

The smaller figure was covered in a solid orange latex suit – think like superhero tight. The larger was covered in a solid blue suit. As they/we danced and spun, it was one set of movements, one set of motions. In fact, as you watched, the two seemed to be melting, one into the other. Always there was the head of the larger of the two resting on the shoulder of the smaller, comforting and carrying. When the dance ended, the weight had not passed, but there was only one person left standing.

Fear is that little man in me – ready to run and hide at every opportunity. But when I choose instead to stand, Courage is there with me – cradling and carrying. And we dance, we move together, until there is but one individual left standing.

Though my bones may tremble and shake, by my choice they support me, and there-in I find strength and comfort that allows me to carry on and through each day.