Every once and awhile, there comes a film, so perfect in it's gripping and emotional intimacy that you are left clinging to the end of the film and beyond. Rust and Bone (De rouille et d'os) by Jacques Audiard is one of those movies. It is really a basic love story with two seemingly banal characters, but the acting by Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts is so outstanding with a direction and cinematography that has you breathless till the end. A masterpiece in the power of human transformation.

morning

Oh do I push you too hard at times my darling?
You linger beautifully at the mirror,
brush in hand over your silken hair.
The future flashes in coils, a spring tense as the dominos of what ifs they pass through.
I want the best for you
and it falls apart in my anxious mess of failures.
Oh linger in your vibrant youth
as you are life living.
Defiant!
To hell with rules, time and conformity
as there is that silken hair of yours to brush, threads of self-reflection and beauty.
Let it shine my love!

Carmen de Lavallade

YES!

These times have been topsy turvy. Sand in houses, water in our urban veins, children climbing horizontal trees. We wait in lines that stretch along highways and light dinners in hushed darkness. It's cold out and the wind carries held in sighs from the ballots.

And then looking down at my phone an image from a dear friend appears in my inbox. Ombre blues, fingered leaves reaching in, framed by a touch of roof at the bottom. She states, curiously, "an upside down rainbow, after Sandy".

According to the Mayan calendar, Dec. 21, 2012 marks a time of transition from one world age to another. A lifting of the veil, a revelation. The end of an era so to speak, where we are now faced collectively, with a choice to see the world in a new way. A world with global warming, super storms, and rising seas. Our children will not be following in our footsteps. Their journey will be another. And if this new life, how ever uncertain and frightening, be exactly where our humanity needs to be? That it could just very well be magical, like upside down rainbows?


photo by Judy Wong

beautifully stated

Reportage

by Todd Colby

Outside my door there are things on the news. Neighbors
stagger on their walks home. A pajama-clad boy
in rain boots leaps onto a filthy tire and bounces there.
Makes you wonder. Makes you thick with grief for all
we stand to lose, stand up. Slow mucky
is the motion of sludge in a living room
buckets of sand removed in time for the wallop
of another mess, the weather. All that I could
remember, is not. I could show you me mocking the wind
arms stretched wide in the hazy damp breeze,
the salt from the ocean in the river swirling
behind me as the storm gathered.
Light agitation of the heart muscle
pumping blood with that same water in it. All
the mists, croaked in relief, storm water
come creeping into us, in our places we call
home, twisted. We, and I do mean us, this
pall comes into focus, a headache of light
when the light reveals the spanking of the day
with little to show but these dwellings:
hoses extending out from cellars burping
black water into the street, family photos
on the porch, curled and drying, artifacts
strewn on the cracked sidewalk, a damp bloated
dresser, moldy blue jeans, a pile of yellow
books fluttering in the wind as each page dries.

In the tangled remains of wind and torrid waters, the earth trembling and you on top of me, my fortune under your warmth while they suck on cold fingers. Why is it that I feel guilt in my pleasure riding free on two wheels as they below me inch away in grinding metal? And if I was the one warming my hands next to faith, my house a deck of fallen cards? Would I be rejoicing at the rays of light streaming from behind the clouds? Oh I hope so, may I remember all the gifts that have been given.

two worlds