How do U solve a problem like Maria?!?

There are many things about me that seem to confuse people, cope... but it does make me an "interesting" character to get to know and if there is one thing that is true, it's that I am true to what I am, no matter what... :)

One of the things that a friend used to tease me about is the fact that I have quite the video collection. Some are excellent movies that either are or are likely to become classics and a few that should though they likely won't.

One of the reasons I collect my films is that they are fun way of provoking either an emotional state for myself or they have a memory attached to them. One such collection of films are the following:

• "The Wizard of Oz"
  The devine Judy Garland, can you believe they really wanted Shirley Temple for the role of Dorothy? Cute, but no...


• "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang"
  Other than just being fun, it was also my first introduction to Benny Hill, he played the Toy-Maker.


• Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments"


• "Ben Hur"
  Actually had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Heston back in the 80's, nice enough, shame he turned into such a dick later... Oh well.


• "The Sound of Music"
  it won the Oscar for best film the year I was born...

The one thing that these films all have in common is that when they would be on TV when I saw a kid, my mother and I would ALWAYS watch them together so they carry some of my best memories as a kid.

Lately, I have had the song "Maria" running through my head and after a conversation I had yesterday after work,it really started to hit home...


I had a conversation with a friend about religion in general but specifically about the mistranslation of scripture and ideas from the sources into the modern day.

Now as happens in many of these conversations, his perception was that his scripture, in its original tongue, was closer to the original than any other. It's not one of those discussions I particularly love since you can either turn it into a fight or ask the obvious question of how one proves such a claim, almost always a dangerous proposition at best.

It has started to become painfully obvious to me that trying to teach be re-aligning a current system with a universal underlying philosophy is going to be an extremely difficult way to go about it. We get so caught up in our paradigms and how we relate to them.

I am going to have to start creating at least a basic structure for explaining things that can be used to explain concepts that are in all the assorted scripture but not taught or directly understood.

For example, one of the questions that I get asked a lot is why God would go to all the trouble and allow all the pain that comes in creation? I tend to agree with Neale Donald Walsch when he describes it as God knew himself (pardon the gender there) to be the totality of all that is, was or ever would be but that knowing something is totally different from experiencing it. Creation is God experiencing being that totality.

I usually ad the analogy to prove the point of this of when we were children, our mothers told us the stove was hot and this would burn us, so we knew it, but after the first time we actually touched it, it went from a piece of datum to an experience.

This in many ways is one of the easier questions.

There are so many of these questions that I tend to answer in differing ways based on what my intuition tells me will speak to the current recipient, but that's not likely to work in larger groups or when trying to write something for mass publication.

So I would ask the same questions the nuns ask in the song:

• How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?


• How do you keep a wave upon the sand?


• How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?