'Surrender to an Age of Bravery and Honor'

Medieval Times!  Where you can experience a Medieval joust and dinner.  We went for the first time last night.  I went with an open mind ~ half expecting to be disappointed and half expecting to be wowed. 

I was wowed. Maybe not for the reasons you’d expect though. 

I wasn’t excited by the spectacle.  What really was so cool about the performance was the sheer athleticism and skill of the knights and the horses and the falcon.  The knight actually did what knights did all those years ago.  They were expert horsemen and they hooked tiny rings on the ends of their lances.  The swordfighting was choreographed, but it was vigorous and sparks flew from the metal swords.  So cool.  The jousting was real.  I’m sure there are lots of protections in place, but the lances shattered as the knights aimed for each other’s shields.  

And the animals. Oh my gosh.  The horses were amazing.  So well trained yet full of get up and go.  You could really tell the knights who had been at this for a while and those just starting out by the way they set in the saddle.  The falcon swooped over the crowd and took the lure.  She was amazing.  Every year people get gored by buffalo and stomped on by moose in Yellowstone Park. They think of these creatures as what you see on the screen.  But these are living breathing creatures with minds of their own.  It’s not like driving a car.  It’s more like training a dog.  They may or may not do what you want them to, and if you’re not careful, you will get injured. Horses are like very large and powerful toddlers who get very scared and uncontrollable very quickly.

I also think modern movies and cartoons have taken away the awe of physical feats.  We see these amazing things in cartoons or in computer animation and we think they’re real, and so when we see real people doing real things, we think they’re boring. Yet we know we couldn’t perform them.  We’re not as grounded.  Our imaginations have been fed so much that we lose touch with everyday miracles.

So it wasn’t the campy Medieval pageantry that moved me, though that was fun.  I liked the food, though some didn’t.  “Baby dragon, but it tastes like chicken,” our server Bryn told us.  He was great ~ the perfect blend of Southern and British accents.  No, it was the amazing physicality of it all.

My daughter, who’s sometimes too cool for school, said she wasn’t going to cheer, but she was swept away with it all, especially when she got a carnation thrown to her from our knight.  She loved it, as did my son.  But she said ~ and I agree with her ~ “If this had been real, it would be gruesome.”  Makes you think sometimes that we really aren’t so civilized, you know?

But our fabulous black and white knight won (just as the script told him to).  Here’s the character’s story:

Don Iofre Santa Creu is the defender of the ancient shrine at Santiago de Compostela. Adorned in Black & White, he is mightiest in skill among an order of warrior priests whose arrival upon the field brings despair to the impure of heart. In prayer, humble. In service, loyal. In battle, invincible!

The actor playing the black and white knight was so great, so athletic, so in character.  Fabulous. He was of Asian descent with long flowing black hair. Our charming and dynamic champion!!

 

'In Lonely Rooms'

I took this a few days ago ~ a young mouse killed by a cat no doubt.  It blends in with the surrounding grass and makes one think of one’s eternity.

It’s been a rough couple of months. My mom is 91 and having some health issues.  She almost died mid-April with a UTI that turned to toxic shock.  All her systems were shutting down, and her BP was 50 something.  Since then, my husband came down with that flu that’s been going around and has been as sick as he’s been in his life.  He slept literally for a week. He’s just now finally almost back to normal but still a little weak with a bit of a cough.  My son tripped and bent his fingers backwards and broke his middle finger. His hand swelled up and turned all blue and gray. Then this last weekend I took Mom down to specialists in Colorado and she almost had to have surgery.  Luckily, she didn’t and that’s good.

I’ve presented at two fabulous conferences this spring ~ AWP and the Wind River Outdoor Writers Conference.  I also gave a reading at the Albany County Library.  It was all so wonderful, but stressful too. 

I feel like I’m growing, but it’s hard to put my finger on exactly how.  I’m not getting much writing done, which feels horrible and makes me a little crazy, but I feel like I’m stretching in other ways.  The kids are growing too.  Their schoolwork this year was outstanding, and their math and reading has really taken off. 

But it’s all given me a sense of uneasiness. I’m reminded of the impermanence of life and how death is inevitable and ever-present.  I’m not in my comfortable mindless groove, but yet I’m not in my comfortable mindless groove, if you know what I mean.

But I also feel incipient, like things might change and things might be hard but they also might be good, you know?  I think we’re always on the verge of something and maybe I’m just more aware of it at the moment.  But change and rebirth is hard, is painful.  Things die, things are reborn.  It helps me to think of myself as unimportant at these times ~ insignificant, as the Romantic poets pointed out.  Like Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey:

                               These beauteous forms,

      Through a long absence, have not been to me

      As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

      But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

      Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

      In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

      Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

      And passing even into my purer mind,

      With tranquil restoration: ~ feelings too

      Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

      As have no slight or trivial influence

      On that best portion of a good man's life,

      His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

      Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

      To them I may have owed another gift,

      Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

      In which the burthen of the mystery,

      In which the heavy and the weary weight

      Of all this unintelligible world,

      Is lightened: ~ that serene and blessed mood,

      In which the affections gently lead us on, ~

      Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

      And even the motion of our human blood

      Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

      In body, and become a living soul:

      While with an eye made quiet by the power

      Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

      We see into the life of things.

I don’t know what I’m saying here exactly, except that I love life and beauty and that my memories, like Wordworth’s, sustain me. And awareness of death is ever more present.

Come to the Circus!

My two seven-year-olds have been wanting to go to the circus for forever. We always seem to miss it when it comes to town.  Well, last night we made it, and the kids were thrilled!

It was the Jordan World Circus, and it’s amazing.  It was held inside our local ice arena. We walk in the door, and the three women taking tickets are dazzling in their costumes and makeup and they speak with a thick Russian Accent.  My kids’ eyes widen, and my daughter says, “Do you speak Spanish?” “No, no,” the woman taking our tickets says. 

We walk through the door into the arena area with its three rings, and instead of the usual dusty or wet nonsmell, there’s the fecund smell of animals and of cotton candy and nachos.  We were right on time, but it looks like we’re early because all the performers and hands are focused and rushing here and there setting things up and taking things down.  As it turns out, it’s this way throughout the performance.  Everything is in transition, in a flurry of being torn down or being constructed off in the shadows to the side of the spotlight.  We didn’t arrive early ~ we arrived in the midst. Everyone not in costume is wearing black, but not just black pants and t-shirt.  No, the black they wear is a costume too and reminds me of old-world Europe with the flare of South America.  Everyone also walks with purpose and pride ~ they know their jobs and do them well.

We buy some cotton candy and some popcorn and find our seats.  The first act to come out are the tigers.  They have something like eight tigers, three of them white tigers.  They are pulled out by stage hands in a long train of cages, two animals per cage.  A circular arena with pedestals has been erected, and the animals are let two by two into the arena.  The tamer is the only one who comes in with them, though there is someone along the side to poke the reluctant white tiger with a long stick.  The tigers do cool things like walk backwards twice across the ring, roll over in unison, and jump through a flaming hoop.  They don’t seem dangerous, bored more than anything, except for a time or two where one or another seems irritated.  As I sit there, I wonder two things:  1)  How dangerous is it really? They look well-fed. 2) I’m sitting yards away from eight tigers.  What if they decide they don’t wnat to take it any more?  We’re nothing more than mice to them. (Ever seen a cat play with a mouse?)

Next was an amazing bicyclist doing tricks.  He was gravity-defying and did a double flip and landed on his wheels.  There were skate tricks and in-the-air hoop dancers and juggling and hula hoops and contortionist and a guy balancing on a chair.  There were beautiful majestic elephants standing on each other’s backs and spinning in circles and a woman riding on one’s back and trunk.  There were two hilarious father-and-son clowns who each tried to get the crowd on his side. From the website, I see the performers are from all over the world ~ Russia, Hungary, Columbia, Costa Rica, and the United States.  The circus itself is out of Las Vegas.

I particularly loved the women.  They were what women should be.  They looked like superheroes.  They were oh-so-strong and curvaceous and so physically brave and proud that you wanted to stand and cheer just looking at them.

I’ll give the circus this: they are masters of separating you from your cash.  Which is the point, for them, after all ~ they have to make a living.  It isn’t cheap to feed elephants and tigers, I’m sure.  The community hands out free tickets for kids, but that’s how they suck you in.  Adult tickets are $18, most food or drink is $5, the elephant or pony rides are $5, and it quickly adds up to a bundle.  However, you don’t mind a bit, except when you run out of money and the kids are begging for more.

The kids loved it.  They sat wide-eyed and kept saying, “That is amazing!” I was so happy to hear that.  In this age of movie effects and unreal reality shows, we get desensitized to how dangerous these things really are, and how impossible they are.  I really felt the danger.  And the wonder, which is what a circus is all about, after all.  My favorite was the elephants.  Just standing there looking at them.  Their eyes are wells of time ~ you can just lose yourself in them.  One of them had this beautiful fuzz of black hair all over, and their bodies are miracles of Mother Nature’s engineering. 

We’re looking to see when Barnum & Bailey comes to Denver.