A Byrd's Eye View

Joe Vs. The Volcano

I finally roped one of my family members into watching one of my old favorites, “Joe Vs. the Volcano.” If you haven’t seen it in awhile, do yourself a favor and take a look. It’s a lovely “fairy tale” about the awakening of Joe Banks, a guy suffering from “terminal brain fog” who faces his mortality and becomes a hero. There are plenty of sleepy moments, but the overall message is worth wading through the rest.

My favorite moment in the movie (and I don’t give anything away here) is when Patricia Graynamore, played by Meg Ryan, tells Joe, “My father says almost the whole world's asleep. Everybody you know, everybody you see, everybody you talk to. He says only a few people are awake. And they live in a state of constant, total amazement.”

I saw the movie for the first time in 1990, and that line has stuck with me ever since. “Living in a state of constant, total amazement” is, to me, what being awakened and enlightened is all about.

I only got through half the film with my daughter before we decided to go to sleep and save the rest for tonight. As I turned off the VCR, I asked her what the film is trying to tell us. “It’s the same as when I always say we should live life the way it’s meant to be lived,” said my eight-year old Buddha Girl. “We should have fun and appreciate life.”

In his review of the movie, Roger Ebert wrote, “At night, in those corners of our minds we deny by day, magical things can happen in the moon shadows. And if they can’t, they should, and we should always, in any event, act as if they can.”

The truth is, the magic isn’t just in the shadows of the moon. There’s magic in the glaring light of day, in the trees, in the warmth from my laptop computer, in your heartbeat, in the annoying sound of the leafblower outside my window, in every little thing that makes up life. When we’re awake, we know it’s all magic –and yet it’s also all ordinary. When we’re not quite awake, we can still act as if the magic is there. Perhaps that, in fact, is what faith is all about.

Posted by at June 21, 2005 01:34 PM