I was up till 1:00 this morning and woke up at nine. I stayed up to watch Butterfly Effect: Revelations but had to endure ten previews before I could watch the main feature. Isn't this too aggressive marketing? The DVD from Netflix was apparently part of a collection of night terror movies, lots of gore and mindless stories with no redeeming value other than titillation.
I didn't set the alarm. I thought I'd wake up early as I did yesterday and Friday without benefit of an external timekeeper. I slept deeply though fitfully: the blankets were bunched up at the foot of the bed under the comforter when I woke up. I felt more rested though than any other day this past week. I have been adjusting my wake-up time to be at my desk to work on software by nine. My body wants its full eight hours. Finding the most productive way to spend my days is an ongoing project. Did I think it was all fixed last Friday?
The sun this morning shares its field of blue sky with curvaceous clouds. The painterly clouds bring to mind the clouds on the pale blue wall at my hometown Aglipay church. They ringed the imagen of the patron saint, Nuestra Señora de la Paz y Buen Viaje that stood at the main altar. The statue gave her name to our town, La Paz. She had also given its name to several other major Spanish settlements like the capital city of Bolivia and of Baja California in Mexico. The Spaniards too must have dreamed of peace while wielding swords and muskets to gain possession of those distant lands.
Peasants from poor Extremadura sought a better life for themselves and their families. The Basque sailors lusted for more seas to conquer. When I was old enough to study Philippine history (from mostly Spanish Augustinian and Dominican friars in their "universidades reales"), I imagined the senseless cruelty of the occupying Europeans against the hapless natives, my people, but visiting Spain in 2003 I realized those conquistadores and the many others who followed in their wake as administrators, parish priests, and hacienderos were as humblingly human as we are today.
Last night driving home from Bally I heard about the Rwandan-Canadian singer, Corneille on the Tavis Smiley Show. The 32-year-old singer was born in Germany where his Rwandan parents were going to school. They went back to Rwanda where his parents were killed in the genocide of 1994. Corneille then Cornelius Nyungura fled to Germany and in 1997 moved to Montreal to pursue studies in communications at Concordia College.
Corneille was telling Smiley that for years he was telling people he had forgiven his parents' killers. Since he married his Portuguese-Canadian wife, he has been feeling along with love what he really felt. It was in this spirit that he wrote his song, "I'll Never Call You Home Again."
I don't think we feel the same about everything all the time. I watch my feelings change from moment to moment. Like my effort to shape how I can live each day with intrinsic delight in the basics of simply being conscious, aware and alive, thoughts and feelings stream continuously through our minds.However we can take the predominant feeling about a major topic and say, This is how I feel about this.
We might say that Corneille is "confronting" how he really feels about what must have been very painful events when he was 17. I think those late teen years are intense and filled with ideas about ourselves and about our worlds that stay with us all our lives. They certainly were gravid times for me. That was when I began to question religious beliefs as the defective bulwark of my family's religious faith began to crack and finally fall apart under my feet.
If Corneille had to find more authentic feelings about his earlier life now that he is living happier times enjoying not only marital joy but commercial success as a singer, I may have to find my own authentic past to use as foundation for the creativity I want to discover in myself.
Men and women from all climes and times are imbued with the same emotions I feel so vividly today. The world outside (at least on our tiny planet, Earth) may have changed its appearance wherever humans have settled and made their homes but inside we harbor the same demons and angels. History if for nothing else shows us how little we have changed. With all the modern conveniences and extravagancies we enjoy we forget how naked we really are.
Humans from all times and places seem imbued with emotions and motivations not unlike those I find in myself and others I know today.
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