THOUSAND YEARS

“Eat a healthy diet, take good care of yourself and then you die.”

I don’t know who said it, but whenever someone has asked my age, I’ve always needed to stop and think what number I was. It wasn’t always that way.

As a kid, I remember correcting many the well meaning adult. “No, I’m 9 ½” or “Actually, I’m almost 12”. Birthdays mattered. But in looking back, it was clearly important to me I go on record, noting the progress since the day I’d last blown out my candles.

Recently I overheard two kids talking from the sidelines of a birthday party.

“How old is your mom?”

“I’m not really sure. She keeps using the same one over and over.”

“Maybe she’s recycling…”

“Naw, I just think she’s saving up the new ones for later.”

This week, the blog turns 2.

Whether it’s a B-Day or anniversary, I’m not entirely clear.

And, how does one mark the occasion?

I had toyed with the idea of doing a word count on the 104 posts preceding this one. Naw.

Or how about the hook being others who hold the same birth date? So I looked it up and found Alfred Hitchcock (cool), Fidel Castro (really?) and Danny Bonaduce (not so much).

Nope.

How about score-boarding readership stats since I started posting my weekly missives? No, too pompous. It’s not who I am. It’s not why I do this. My head kept turning….’so what ARE you going to do?‘.

Sitting out on the porch before sunrise this morning, my zen self was wandering around the weighty issues I’m wrestling with when it hit me like a Acme piano in a bad Road Runner cartoon. The garden spot I had planted last Spring had really come in. It was ‘beefy’. So quietly profound and sudden, the realization made me go back into the house and get the camera.

And for as much enjoyment I take there, I don’t own the space. In the beginning, the space was essentially little more more than concrete and brick…nothing too sexy about its composition. But with all that being true, I had nonetheless populated it with life. Sure, the pots and planters are mine, but it was the plants that brought my urban jungle to life. Blooms, ferns and hanging baskets scent the air. Bugs, birds and neighbors all enjoy the little slice of Eden.

But as beautiful as all of it is in this moment, it will all die when the frost returns to Chicagoland. And it isn’t just the plants…

Each day clicks off on the counter for all of us too. This is not a tragedy. It’s how Life works. The more I grow, the more firmly convinced I become that what really matters isn’t what we own, but what we do with each new day we’re given.

Writing is one of my genuine joys. Like tending to my plants each morning, this blogging experiment has become part of my ritual. I’m a little surprised how sharing some of the quiet riot in my Soul with you each week has taken on such a life of its own. But I’m grateful. In fact, the other day, I actually caught myself thinking, “What happens to the blog if I’m no longer here to write it?”.

Answer?

No worries, Mate. It doesn’t really matter. ‘Then’ doesn’t matter because right here, right now, I am here to write it. In this moment, it is mine to produce a quality offering as real as I can possibly reveal it to be. And then, share it.

If I have entertained or informed along the way, I am pleased.

If I have added to you there, then I’m over the moon!

But what really makes me feel like the kid with the golden ticket is having gotten to know so many of you through your work. I am a better man because of your courage to show the rest of us what makes you tick. And that, my fellow traveler, may be the best birthday present a guy like me could ever hope to receive.

I don’t know what our futures are. But we’re here. A staunch advocate of laughing hard and loving deep, let’s party like we don’t care and work each day like we do.

It’s been an honor. Thank you.

PASSAGES

 

Karen Blanche Black

(neé Ziegler; July 1, 1939 – August 8, 2013)

Called the face of the counterculture, the late Karen Black’s movie credits stack up to build a definitive portrait of an imaginative, rebellious, ‘freakish’ time in Hollywood history. She passed in Los Angeles after a battle with periampullary cancer, she was 74.

“To understand how Karen Black became a cult figure, you have to rewind the tape of time a little. She was, after all, the greatest cross-eyed movie star who ever lived. If that description seems baffling or uncharitable, it’s not meant to be. She would never have made it in today’s clinical, surgical Hollywood – wouldn’t have made it in the 1950s either – and her success says a great deal about the guts, verve and imagination of the period in which her career began.

Less glamorous than Faye Dunaway, less spooky than Shelley Duvall, at the turn of the 1970s Karen Black became the face of a new era. She played a prostitute in Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper’s landmark film of 1969, and was nominated for an Oscar a year later for her performance as Jack Nicholson’s girlfriend Rayette in Five Easy Pieces. It wasn’t just her looks that were different: over the next few years, she played murderers, waitresses, thieves – characters not previously cherished by Hollywood – and her credits for the first half of the Seventies stack up to build a portrait of those times. She starred in Jack Nicholson’s directorial debut, Drive, He Said; she worked with Coppola and Schlesinger and Redford; she was the best thing in Portnoy’s Complaint (just to throw Philip Roth into the mix); and she wrote all the songs for Connie White, her character in Robert Altman’s extraordinary Nashville.”

 By Gaby Wood – The Telegraph @ 3:07PM BST 09 Aug 2013

READ MORE ABOUT IT: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/10233540/Karen-Black-The-face-of-the-counterculture.html ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Black and

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/actress-karen-black-dead-at-74-20130809

 Sources: Picture – http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02639/Karen-black-for-we_2639992b.jpg

OMG. It’s been awhile since I’ve enjoyed a sci-fi flick as much as I did (and for so many layers of reasons).

Really well told and finely casted, the story is part Mad Max, Body Snatchers and ET.

Talk about a 3-for-1 Sale!

Rent it. Watch it after the sun goes down.

Pass the popcorn!

Before I go, I got you a thousand-years present.

If you haven’t caught this track, CLICK the pic and enjoy it deeply.

If I could play something for you, this would be it. Travel well.

PHOTO CREDITS and ATTRIBUTIONS: Banner Coastal Redwood Forest by Eric E Photography is used with permission.  Visit Eric and see his other work at: http://www.ericephoto.com or http://ericephoto.wordpress.com/

dan4kent’s 2^nd year annivery banner by dan4kent; Dans Den of Zen dan4kent 081013: photo by dan4kent ; Winning the Golden Ticket: http://sfcitizen.com/blog/2010/07/27/target-just-keeps-on-giving-to-san-franciscans-lucky-eva-e-finds-golden-ticket-in-colma/; people_dancing_booklet: http://www.westmidlandsdance.com/news/people-dancing-brochure; anniversary-presents2: http://www.debretts.com/etiquette/rites-of-passage/wedding-anniversaries/anniversary-presents.aspx; A-Thousand-Years-christina-perri-26451968-1920-1080.jpg-[wapbom.com]: http://wapbom.com/images/2ltYWdlczUuZmFucG9wLmNvbS9pbWFnZS9waG90b3MvMjY0MDAwMDAvQS1UaG91c2FuZC1ZZWFycy1jaHJpc3RpbmEtcGVycmktMjY0NTE5NjgtMTkyMC0xMDgwLmpwZw==/A-Thousand-Years-christina-perri-26451968-1920-1080.jpg-[wapbom.com].jpg

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