The Unclad Soul

The 2019 movie, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, is a stunning representation of deprived destiny and lost love. Centered around a wondrous coastal landscape in Brittiany in the late 1700s, the story centers on two young French women—Marianne, an artist and painter, and Heloise, recently cloistered in a convent and brought home to enter an arranged marriage. Her sister, who was supposed to marry the man, had killed herself by jumping off a cliff into the sea. Heloise is to take her place. Heloise, however, has no interest in the marriage and is angry that her mother has placed her in the arrangement. As was the custom then, a portrait was to be made of the bride-to-be and sent to the groom to approve of his future wife. But Heloise refused to sit for a portrait and had already chased off a painter frustrated by the experience. Enter Marianne. Brought in as simply a companion for Heloise until the marriage was finalized, her real purpose was to get to know Heloise and from snip...

“But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires: to melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night; to know the pain of too much tenderness.”  ~ Khalil Gibran, Poet/Mystic

I have a great need to experience the sacred.  I think we all do. We live in times that so often desecrate the human spirit.  War, drones, gun violence, road rage, political wrangling, insatiable greed, sexual abuse, child abandonment, and all sorts of inhuman acts against one another too often occur which all serve to deaden our souls. The recent news of the man who systematically kidnapped three young girls in his neighborhood, who just decided to own them as his property, held them captive for years, sexually used them for his own entertainment, was unimaginable in its heartlessness.  How do those women, whose youth and teenage years and sense of self were taken from them, how do they recover from that kind of fiendish, barbaric treatment?  We see this on the news and something dies inside us.  It is so easy then to want to harden ourselves against the cruelty of others.  But in the process we lose our connection with the sacred. Each m...

The Archipelago of Kisses We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don't grow on trees, like in the old days. So where does one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy, like being unleashed with a credit card in a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss. The sloppy kiss. The peck. The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we shouldn't be doing this kiss. The but your lips taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss. The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss. The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad sometimes kiss. The I know your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get older, kisses become scarce. You'll be driving home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road, with its purple thumb out. If you were younger, you'd pull over, slide open the mouth's red door just to see how it fits. Oh where does one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile. Rub two smiles, you...