As I’m cleaning and cooking, I’m watching Steven Spielberg’s “Taken,” which I taped, since it runs for 20 hours. I was prepared not to like it, but as I get into the 4th segment, I find it fascinating the way he wove together the histories and myths of “the truth is out there.” The “cigarette man” from the X-Files, in his younger days, might be one of the central figures. His duplicity, immorality, total lack of conscience, and even pure evil, develop as the story line develops. What I found interesting was something that the child-voiced narrator says in relation to him — something about why people become that way — likening it to what we see often happening on the playground. “If you’re the one doing the pushing, you’re not going to be the one being pushed.”
(Addendum: Oops. He wasn’t the “cigarette man” because he died. Oh well. That’s what I get for jumping the gun.)

Welcome brand new baby boy Ruairi Michael O

Being relentless is one of my best qualities and one of my worst. It’s the one that allowed me whatever successes I had advocating for the arts and humanities in education — which are always the first to be cut out of the school budget and which many classroom teachers don’t understand how to integrate into what they already are teaching.
It’s also a quality that makes people and bloggers tell me “enough already.”
So my mantra for the coming year is going to be from my favorite translation of Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching, #8.
The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.
In dwelling, be close to the land.
In meditation, go deep into the heart.
In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.
In speech, be true.
In ruling, be just.
In business, be competent.
In action, watch the timing.
No fight. No blame.
Not relentless like crashing waves, or incessant hail stones. Rather, relentless like the steady, even flow of clear, cleansing water. Here’s hoping.