O-Dark-Thirty

Wow. I don't have notes for 17 stages. Years ago I read an article titled "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth" and very much liked it. After that I gathered some of Joseph Campbell's books and read as much of them as I could absorb. He's prolific and my attention span is like the lifespan of a gnat. I don't recall much of it, but I ran across some notes I took. Here they are. Star Wars is a “hero’s journey” as defined by Campbell. I always thought of it as a space-based western, but westerns are really our USA hero myths (which is why they are so popular around the world, I suppose). In Star Wars, the story of space faring pilots and their daring escapades is based on the hero's journey, which is an ancient form of mythology. ~*~ Now let me shift gears and try to explain my personal definition of mythology in human culture. We start with history, inevitably written by the victors. If the losers write the story also, the better story usually survi...

The cake was yummy! Our youngest son, JV, turns nineteen today.   Happy Birthday, my beamish boy! He's away at college and we really miss his smiling face and the way he would walk around the house humming. Not only do I love him because I'm his Dad, but I really like him as a person. If I were a fellow student, I'd want him as my friend. Der junge Mann (family joke) has accomplished much in these few years. At an early age he put together a portfolio of drawings. He doesn't share them, but they showed a lot of innate skill. Darling, who is a good artist herself, once tried to teach my Darling Daughter, Youngest Son and I how to draw a tree. DD and I drew something resembling little bird tracks across the page, studiously focusing on the paper and how the tree looked. Trust me, neither of our drawings even resembled the tree (sorry, Honey, but it's true).   However, the lad not only drew a passable tree, he shaded it. Darling didn't even mention sha...

Leadership needs, well - leaders. W. Edwards Deming made that abundantly clear when I heard him speak decades ago. Years ago someone told me that leadership was "an influential relationship with followers."   That seems true, but deserves some thinking. Followers must be willing to do what you want them to do. I suppose you could have negative leaders, where the followers do precisely what you don’t want them to do. A clever negative leader would then propose plans for the opposite of what he really wanted to accomplish. So if he planned to fail, and did, would he really succeed? Let's not follow that train of thought… There are a lot of leaders. These are the ones that came to my mind immediately and not in any particular order. Jesus Christ . You can argue his divinity, perhaps try to argue his even existence, but you cannot argue the impact that Jesus of Nazareth had on the world. When I look at my list of leadership characteristics Jesus has them all (wit...