Characters and Plots

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"How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct."
Benjamin Disraeli

"Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects."
Will Rogers

"When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others."
Anais Nin

Youth has a great narrative drive and plot: Get bigger, get freer; find out about life, others and self. Everything's exciting: the "best" or the "worst" EVER!

Adolescence is a love story, a comedy, a drama, a farce. A collage of fears, first times, and aspirations. All seem tailor-made for a story arc, for songs, or movies; not to mention fodder for gossip.

Girl chases guy, or the other way around.

The world must be saved! (Again).

Grownups just don't understand. We'll never be like them!

Then they kiss, and the credits roll.

All this, mind you, takes place in the first thirty or so years.

Then, offstage, distracted by work and by children

-by the negotiations and nuances of marriage -

we tread the mill Monday through Friday,

Fall to Summer vacation, year after year.

Till we look up to realize with surprise that we are not the young stars anymore.

But we're still years (God willing) from the end!

Though the best roles seem to be passing us by, to younger actors.

Our cozy character work fits us like a glove.

Besides: it pays the bills.

A fixation on beauty is common to the young, engendering an involuntary aversion to the blemishes and badges of age.

But fortunately (skeptics will call it self-serving) we see at last the deeper beauties of maturity. The light from within illuminates the merely physical with lovely survior-ness.

The plot lines of maturity are not necessarily dark, it just takes greater skills to write them. Maturity in a writer is not a bad thing. As illusion is stripped away, we find the truffles of satisfaction where we may. Unexpectedly we cherish the homely hearth that once seemed a prison.

A L O H A! Cloudia

Strolling Along

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"Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to."

Oscar Wilde

"Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book."
Edward Gibbon

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
Mark Twain

The face of comfort.

Every teaching of spirituality is a heroic attempt to share the inexplicable in words.

Traditions and teachings can only point us in the right direction - but unless scripture awakens an answering resonance from within, it will remain only mental.

The mind contorts and con volutes to make itself grand. But wisdom looks on with the quiet pleasure of comprehension. . .

Light, color, bird song are all vibrations. A bed of flowers is a massed choir: harmonies and soloists respirating each in their own voice. . . Stop and listen!

Whales sport off Maui. In neighbor island uplands, fireplaces warm and scent the crispy nights. On the Big Island, lava is flowing into an indignant sea. Typical Hawaii February weather: high clouds, brief showers. . .

What will happen next?

None of us knows.

So keep your eyes half open, like kitty does (above) even as you lay your 20th Century burdens down.

Inventing a better future is fearsome work. So why do we whistle as we stroll through the wreckage?

A L O H A! Cloudia