On anger.

I heard a lecture yesterday by a Native American historian. His subject was the colonization of indigenous peoples' land, and the potential decolonization of them. As he ended, he talked about solitude, anger, and patience, using the example of a person waiting at a light in a car, and the impatience that simmers in the waiting.

He contrasted this--I think this is fair to say--with a native attitude of patience and waiting in the moment, without irritation or hurry. He showed a slide, his final slide, of a sunrise, and said that he always ended this way, with an image of the sunrise, because each day, a person could wake to that light, make promises to the day, and that these would be in the form of prayer.

I have been thinking about this ever since. Thinking of how, say, when I am alone, driving, I often give voice to impatient, harsh words, addressed to the drivers around me, or even to myself. Tonight, for instance. I was in the turning lane, turning south. A car in the next lane hastily pulled in front of me, cut across my lane, hurtled across the path of my moving car, to turn left before me. It was a dangerous thing to have done--perhaps not done deliberately, but mindlessly. I followed, turning, soft curses on my tongue. I thought again: quick to wrath.

In my dealings with people present around me, I am not usually quick to wrath. Or if I am, when my temper rises, I almost always apologize, and quickly. I don't like living with lingering anger and its consequences as my companions.

But in my passages from here to there, when I am alone, the angry source of these words are my medium.

I want to not live in haste, in temper, in quick anger.

I like the idea of beginning the day the way the lecturer described, with a promise to the day that is a prayer. I want to wake and have that prayer be my first thought, and be reminded of it during the day.

I wonder how long I would need to practice that kind of steadiness, compassion, patience to have it become my nature. If it ever could.

Also, I wonder if I will ever manage to wake up at sunrise, and that's the truth.

Hurry is an antagonist of this. Not enough sleep, too much worry, too many things to do. But it's also, clearly, a habit, a reaction and not a response.

We draw upon the languages we're given, but also the languages we cultivate. I want to cultivate new languages. This is only one of them, but it seems like a good place to start.

What is praying?

I am asking myself. I feel I have never been particularly good at it, at least not in the form that I think of as prayer.

I was talking about it this week with one of my sons, then another. A friend of the family, my son's friend particularly, is in the hospital, in a coma. We are all thinking of him and waiting for news, hoping that the news will be good.

Does it comfort you to think that maybe just keeping him in your heart and your thoughts is a kind of prayer?  I asked my son.

Does it comfort me to think this?

I am trying to keep an image of David, our friend, in my thoughts. An image of him happy. A lively image.

Is this prayer? Is it important that it be prayer?

I remember when I was in Vermont at the artists' colony. The founders of the colony practiced Buddhism. At the time, I felt skeptical of this, and thought of it as an appropriation of a religious tradition from an entire other culture.

One of my new friends at the colony, a poet, said, The idea is that the person meditating thinks of the suffering of the world and holds it in her kind Buddhist heart.

Appropriation or not, how could this be wrong?

In the spiritual tradition of my people, there is a scripture that calls upon the believer to cry to the Lord when ye are in your fields and over all your household, morning and mid-day and evening. Other places, too--the volume and breadth of the locations of this cry to God seemed to me, always, to suggest that a person could keep a prayer--a cry, a thought, a gesture--always with her. Often, at least.

I am remembering the times he was in my house, when he ate something I made, when he and my son were talking.

I am thinking about my sons and my daughters.

I am hoping soon to hear that David is awake and alive. I am hoping. In my heart, he is awake and alive.

The best movies of 2010 so far.

I have been working on remembering the movies I saw in 2010. Luckily, I keep a kind of a running list. I've seen a lot of movies, as it turns out. Why do I feel there haven't been so many good ones?

Even so, I was able to fill out the following categories for movies that were

Craptastic: Step Up 3D. I am in love with the entire Step Up franchise, although, for me personally, nothing will ever beat the joy of going up to the ticket booth and saying, "I'd like two tickets for Step Up 2 colon The Streets, please." Those, my friends, were happier days. Still, this one was especially wonderful, in that no one felt obligated, really, to create a character or whatever. Characters are for actors who can't dance. Seriously, if there were more than, like, a dozen lines of dialogue, it was totally time for a dance. And this time, the dancers reached out to grab you by the throat or smack you upside the head, i.e., because there was 3D. Good times!

Animated. I could also include in this category Howl, but the animations were not the most wonderful part of that movie. This year, I loved How to Train Your Dragon, Despicable Me, and Toy Story 3. All of these were quite wonderful, and even though I think Toy Story 3 wins on points, I loved Despicable Me more. It just cracked me up.

Starring Michael Cera. We saw both Youth in Revolt and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World this year. You know what? I have had the same conversation with several people in which the question is posed to me: are we sick of Michael Cera yet? For me, the evidence is in: No. I found Youth in Revolt to be charming, and the bad boy Michael Cera was hilarious. But Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was as funny as hell, so amazingly inventive, with MC sending up his own MC persona so beautifully that it kind of seemed like we were at a whole new MetaMichael level. Bring it on, I say.

Featuring mind-blowing visuals, both good and bad. Let's start with the bad: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Blah. That is all. Good: Inception. Whatever else you might say about it, it looked cool as all get out, including some truly inspired stuff when the sleepers in the van were falling in slow motion and it looked like they were doing a super-soporific underwater ballet. Magical. Killer. Also, Joseph Gordon Leavitt is kind of a mind-blowing visual all on his own.

Policiers. In this category, the items to beat are the three films in the Red Riding trilogy, and for my money, none of the following beat RR, even though they were all pretty good: Police, Adjective, The Girl with (tattoo, etc.) movies, and The Secret in Their Eyes. The Police, Adjective movie is Romanian, and is one of those movies that you're not sure is actually a movie, because it is so still and therefore so much like the kind of tedious parts of life. It rewards you if you stick with it, I swear. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo/Who Played With Fire was just like the books: lurid, violent, dark, gripping. I suppose there were police in these movies. But they're full of mysteries that need to be solved, so they belong in this category (she argues). The last, The Secret in Their Eyes, features the soulful Ricardo Darin, also of The Aura. He is splendid and so is everyone else, and its setting in post-Peronist (and ff) Argentina is of great interest, the more so because it's not hammered upon. But the Red Riding movies: now those get under your skin and don't fade. Seeing the three films over the course of less than a week added up to an extremely rewarding movie-going experience. Violent, violent, violent. Dark, very dark.

Thrillers of the non-police variety. (artificial category distinction) Both The Ghost Writer and Animal Kingdom were very good. Of the two, I liked Animal Kingdom better, though The Ghost Writer was an extremely suave and polished accomplishment. I liked the rawness of Animal Kingdom, and seeing Guy Pearce, even for a few minutes, is a real treasure.

Documentary. Huh, apparently, I saw only one: The Beaches of Agnes, Agnes Varda's retrospective on her own career. Lovely in all the ways that she is lovely. Sharp, witty, beautiful. A must-see.

Notable for a great performance. The Maid which was, I believe, Chilean, featuring a muscular and startling performance by Catalina Saavedra; Shutter Island, with Leonardo DiCaprio giving a great performance, I thought, though plenty of people didn't like the film (I did); The Yellow Handkerchief, indie and possibly full of indie cheese, but with the always-excellent Maria Bello and the seldom-seen William Hurt--why? why so seldom, William Hurt?; Ben Stiller showing us why God made him that way in Greenberg, also with Greta Gerwig, not too shabby; Jonah Hill creeping us out and also making us a little sad in Cyrus; and Russell Brand not ever to be forgotten as a fully persuasive narcissist, reprising his role as Aldous Snow, both hilariously and chillingly, in Get Him to the Greek. Also, and most recently: James Franco in Howl. Beautiful and moving.

Comic. I saw a lot of movies that were nominally comedies, but they are not coming to mind at the moment. On the other hand: I laughed at The Other Guys (I have been admonished for this, but I did--I laughed), Scott Pilgrim (both Kieran Culkin and Jason Schwartzman were beyond hilarious, and that's not all--the funny keeps on going in that movie), and Get him to the Greek (the afore-mentioned R. Brand, in a towering performance). Why weren't there more funny movies? Did anyone see something that I missed? Surely the apocalypse must be nigh.

Freaking odd. I like to see the odd French movie now and then. This year, Wild Grass was that movie, but whoa, weird. And with one of those stupid non-ending endings. It wasn't ambiguous, it was just . . . not an ending. I object. Also, j'accuse.

Dramatic. Ben Affleck gets my vote for Boy Makes Good because of Gone Baby Gone and now this, The Town. It isn't quite what GBG was, but it was very good. Sharply directed and well-performed. The chase scenes, for instance, made sense visually, and also were integral to the plot: no tearing around town for the sake of a tear around town. Jeremy Renner proves that he's the real deal in this movie. The REAL DEAL, the people. I would add Winter's Bone to this category. Sharp and unhappy and dark. Very good.

Underwhelming. Some critic, trying to be provocative, said that the Coen brothers (of their Blood Simple era) ought to see the Australian The Square as giving them a run for their money. Not even. Not remotely. Also, and it doesn't make me happy to say this, Drew Barrymore's latest (Going the Distance) was kind of wan. Maybe it's her or maybe it's that Justin whatsisname, her once-boyfriend? Not super compelling. Not really worth our Drew, whom I love and only wish that she be paired with an excellent leading man so that she can make the romantic comedies that are a part of God's great plan for our happiness. PLEASE.

Long. Justin Long.

Too dark. I love a dark comedy, I really do. But I do not love a movie that kind of makes me feel a little sick inside because I laughed. Into this category falls Terribly Happy. Tis sharp, tis passing sharp, and well written and well acted. But a significant part of the plot falls upon whether a wife is being beaten by her husband, and whether their little daughter will be better off with the dad when the mom is gone. Material for a comedy? I say: NO.

Just plain good. This year I admired Please Give from Nicole Holofcener, featuring the always amazing Catherine Keener; the Red Riding movies; Scott Pilgrim vs. The World; The Kids Are All Right--it only looks formulaic; Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Bill Murray impeccable in Get Low; and what has, so far, been maybe the movie event of the year, the absorbing, intelligent, not-at-all-like-anything-else The Social Network. Really, really, really good.

I am hoping that there will be a pile of movies that make me laugh before Christmas, because, the people, I love/need to laugh. A lot. Let us all pray for that.

The universe is sending me messages.

During the month of November, I kept a long list of stuff I'm grateful for (examples:  my poetry group, my health, Bruiser, the internet, the color yellow, my marriage, our grandchildren, chances to travel, weekly phone calls with Amelia, music, my cell phone, little rituals, daily walk, my crazy yard . . .).  

One thing for which I am very grateful is NPR, and recently I heard two amazing programs that completely got to me, though in different ways.  

One was a program called "Heretics" on This American Life.  (Here's the link for the program.)

The description: 

 "Reporter Russell Cobb takes us through the remarkable and meteoric rise of Carlton Pearson, Russell Cobb takes us through the remarkable and meteoric rise of Carlton Pearson from a young man to a Pentecostal Bishop: from the moment he first cast the devil out of his 17-year old boyfriend, to the days when he had a close, personal relationship with Oral Roberts, and had appearances on TV and at the White House.  Just as Reverend Pearson's career peaked, with more than 5000 members of his congregation coming every week, he started to think about hell, wondering if a loving God would really condemn most of the human race to burn and writhe in the fire of hell for eternity."

The other program was an interview I heard yesterday on Fresh Air, with Frank Schaeffer, son of Francis and Edith Schaeffer, who were "who were instrumental in linking the evangelical community with the anti-abortion movement."  What makes him so interesting is his (can you see this coming?) crisis of faith:  "after coming of age as an evangelist and helping to organize religious fundamentalists politically, Schaeffer had a crisis of faith: Though he is pro-life, he decided that abortion should remain legal." This was an amazing and fascinating interview with a very thoughtful and extremely articulate person of faith. You can hear it here.  

Finally, while I was working on a poem today, I found this, from Yeats:

I shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen of the soul a passing bell. 

The last knowledge has often come most quickly to turbulent men, and for a season brought new turbulence.  When life puts away her conjuring tricks one by one, those that deceive us longest may well be the wine-cup and the sensual kiss, for our Chambers of Commerce and of Commons have not the divine architecture of the body, nor has their frenzy been ripened by the sun.  The poet, because he may not stand within the sacred house but lives amid the whirlwinds that beset its threshold, may find his pardon.