When your heart is black and broken…

...even the thought of “Happy Feet” can’t cheer you up! In case you are wondering what that is, it’s the trailer right before March of the Penguins starts! http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/happyfeet/trailer1/

So it’s after midnight and I can’t sleep. AGAIN! Brain won’t shut up, going round and round. And round. And round. Trying to sort out thoughts that keep pressing in and won’t be ignored, Job, Meaning of life, Love, half a life gone missing, what am I doing where I am and how did I get here, you know, the usual existentialist crap that gets one nowhere – and indeed I am getting nowhere!

So…I was watching the March of the Penguins…I had forgotten how amazing and beautiful such an inhospitable place as the Antarctic seems. Unpredictable, at times staggeringly breathtakingly inspiringly beautiful, but arbitrarily plunged into complete tempest and blackness for big parts of a year too! Not unlike life then!

The metaphor doesn’t seem exactly lost on the producers either!

“In some ways this is a story of survival, of life over death…but it’s more than that really. This is a story about love.”

So now instead I am thinking about life and penguins (but mostly penguins) and writing this. There is nowhere near enough wine involved, but tonight is not a night for drinking myself into sleepfulness again.

What beautiful footage of the courtship of those penguins, and their gentleness and tenderness. And the courtship - we don’t know what they are looking for, we just know they are looking – sums it up pretty well I thought!!

Because that’s it isn’t it? The thing that drives everything along is just that – looking for that passionate “courtship”, that mysterious connection, that all consuming passion that leads you to really know someone and be completely known. Isn’t that what life is actually about? Isn’t life without that just settling for second best?

“And for those who began their march too late, or have fallen behind because of weakness or hunger, hope of survival is now remote. The lone penguin has no chance against the winter’s cold. He will simply fade away, absorbed by the great whiteness all around him”.

Roll on winter.