week 3, part 3

February 2, 2007

Groundhogs Day!!! There is a great movie made about this holiday, but most people don't know more about it than just the little rodent. February 2nd is also the purification of the virgin day in the Catholic Church, the Aztec New Year, James' Joyce's Birthday, and today, 20 years ago, in Grand Junction, Colorado @ approximately 7 am Cassie Clampett was born!! Who knew?

• Bill Murray had to do it over and over again until he got it right
• He eventually found the extraordinary in the ordinary

It is important to do this in everyday life as well. You don't have to look too hard to find the extraordinary in Bozeman, just look at it's name and you will find Oz!

On June 16th, 1904 James Joyce fell in love. He wrote Ulysses on this day to immortalize it, it is now called 'Bloomsday.' The story is about an ordinary day, where extraordinary things happen, like falling in love! Isn't that romantic?

There is even a movie about this, starring Ewan McGregor and Susan Lynch called Nora

Nativity: a way of making a day important, sacramentalizing something

everyone is not only extraordinary, we all fell from divine bliss, we fell from heaven to earth

'The Man Who Fell to Earth' starring: Mr. David Bowie!!!!

plays a man who is came to earth to get water for his dying planet, and is so distracted by television that he forgets his mission

Jed Clampett

In Ancient Greece everyday was a holiday or 'holy day,' they had something to celebrate everyday!

But us, on the other hand live the same day over and over again, and are all boring! We need to look at the world in a very different way to see how it is a gift.

Like Jim Hardy in Holiday Inn, who wanted to be lazy everyday, and open an Inn just on the holidays, we forget that each day is a gift.

'In Memory of WB Yeats' by WH Auden

Friedrich Nietzsche's 'The Eternal Recurrence'

"This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you-all in the same succession and sequence-even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a grain of dust."
~Nietzsche

Deja vu: Keanu Reeves, Beyonce, Bill Murray and Denzel Washington are all feeling it, are you?

The Myth of ER

Mysteries of Eleusis

It's a Small World

Iambe: told dirty jokes to make Demeter laugh, is part of the holy procession

during this ritual the high priest:

1. said something: 'rain conceive'
2. showed something: showed a stalk of grain, that symbolized growth and was very important to these people
3. did something that transformed them: performed a promenon drama, probably the story of Demeter

These experiences heightened their senses of:

• hearing
• sight
• speaking

John 12:24 "I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds"

Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, it one of my favorite of all time! What are the odds that Dr. Sexson would chose that sonnet, out of all of them to talk about? And I may be alone, but if a guy came up to mquotingng this, and asked for a date, I think he may get one!

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

This is an excellent example not only of hightened speech, but also an example of Shakespeare at his finest! This shows that it does matter how we talk.

Although Dr. Sexson thinks that marriage isn't about love, I would have to disagree with him! Everything is about love, and I think that it definitely exists. Although arranged marriages seem to last longer statistically, I think that not everything is about statistics.