Tag: internet

Global Village

My husband and I were married in late October 1994. We honeymooned in the Caribbean and one evening when we were out to dinner, we peered out of the romantic restaurant’s tiny, little block windows and we noticed a strange procession of people headed to the cemetery across the street. The people were carrying lighted candles, and then setting the candles upon the tombstones. These people were wearing terrifying, elaborate costumes with skull make-up. Now, please remember this was 1994. The internet was sparse, slow and sloppy. I had never heard of the Day of the Dead celebrations back then. I was more than a tad intimidated and eager to return back to the assumed safety of our resort.

Today, Day of the Dead is Google’s Doodle. Everyone is familiar with Dia de Muerto. The skull make-up, made particularly famous and prevalent by the artwork of the artist Diego Rivera, is now available on any house hold item you can think of, such as tea towels and salt and pepper shakers, all over the world.

The true meaning of The Day of the Dead (actually a 3,000 year old celebration, first celebrated by the Aztecs, that was evolved, during the Spanish colonization of Mexico, to coincide and blend with the Christian event called All Saints’ Day) is actually quite un-scary, evolved and spiritual. This is how the internet explains the event:

“In Mexican culture, death is viewed as a natural part of the human cycle. Mexicans view it not as a day of sadness but as a day of celebration because their loved ones awake and celebrate with them.”

Tonight my husband and I are going to a tiny, little romantic restaurant to celebrate our anniversary, in a town not far from us. There is a very popular Mexican restaurant down the street from this restaurant, and they have a big Day of the Dead party every year. People of every color, from every background, young and old, happily don elaborate skull make-up and pin roses in their hair and the people march around the town in joyous revelry.

Of course, I don’t fear this experience. It is something that I am now quite familiar with and I find it to be fun and interesting and festive. I’m am looking forward to viewing the artistry, and the pageantry of it all and I respect the meaning that it holds for a lot of people. Knowledge is power, I guess.

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Inner Internet

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. – Erica Jong

I have often repeated this quote to my family.  What happens when you spout quotes to the people you love, is that they often spout them back to you.  This one was recently boomeranged back to me via my husband.  At least I know that my family members are listening to me, I suppose.

I tend to get obsessive when I want a definitive answer to something that is bothering me.  I look up every website that might even just have a word that will help me with a problem or an issue.  It’s embarrassing to see even Google reminding me that I had just been at that same website two minutes ago or “you have visited this website many times.”  Why is it that I know that nothing will be different on the website that I just visited 2 minutes prior and many times before that, but I’m still hoping for a different glean of knowledge?

I believe that we are designed by the Divine to have the answers within us.  I’m a believer in prayer, but the older I get the more I realize that there is often a better plan for me and my situations than my limited vision sees.  My prayer is more and more often, “Help me to know that the answers are already within.  Help me go with the flow, knowing that everything is in accordance to Divine plan and help me to trust that knowledge.”

I watched a speaker recently who said that if we pray for patience, often we are going to get a long line at a bank.  Experience is our teacher.  God isn’t going to always swoop in and make things easy for us.  We parents know how hard it is to watch our children struggle to learn to walk, and then to read, and then to drive and then to drive off towards lives of their own.  We want to make it all easy for them, but we know it’s not for their best, so we sit on our hands, send our outpouring of love to them and know, in faith, that they are going to be okay.  We know that they have all of the tools to handle life, right inside of them, if they get quiet enough to listen to their own inner wisdom.

I think that we must have a built-in internet, full of knowledge and understanding right at the click of our hearts.  The good thing is that this “inner internet” doesn’t send us embarrassing reminders that we have been at this fork in the road 82 times already.  Our inner wisdom has the patience to know that we will “get it” eventually, because we already “have it”.  We just have to come to the acceptance of what we already know.