Friday, March 20, 2009

Live and let live

It's been a week of pain, disappointment, misunderstanding, misrepresentation, belittling, shame and tears. But today the sun has shone. Not merely over us on this cool spring morning, but through me where shadows and hauntings have lain. Where my dreams have been filled with taunting and my mind addled with sadness.

I've prayed, wept, knelt, laid down, found distractions but perhaps best of all, I've run to the safest arms I've ever known.

It's in the invisible I've have been kept from falling over the edge and instead been lifted to see the sun shine, just that little bit brighter today.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Dear Frankie

I'm not sure what year this film came out but it was before Gerard Butler became famous for his, 'This is Sparta' role, and devoted deceased husband in 'P.S. I love you', but it's a film that has caught my breath in my mouth and thoughts.

I found the DVD in the local library after a roommate watched and recommended it and remembered seeing the trailer for it eons ago in London. Sometimes there is a reason why things come around later and watching this film tonight as I just did I see why.

It deals with an absentee father, a mother (Emily Mortimer) grappling with being both roles to her son and fearfully overcoming the deep-rooted mistrust in others. It tackles being different, both in deafness and the new outsider. It peels back the secrets we all keep hidden and our desperate attempts to be brave. And it offers love as the tender, humanising hope we all harbour. But perhaps more touchingly; it reminds, how incredibly intelligent children are and what their little eyes take in and understand.

I can't really add more to it then that. There are awkward silences where you find yourself falling into the screen and the moment the camera captured. Or willing and wishing for a tidier ending than the one given; but at the same time loving the clever twists that it leaves.

It is a beautiful, simple film, set in Glasgow with all the overcast and sometimes sunny skies that makes the U.K, the U.K. It has dialect, folk song and people muddling along this grand long journey called, life.

An honest treasure to find that for some reason switched a light on in me.