Tag: X-Men

Nothing gold can stay

“Nature’s first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold.”

Robert Frost might have had a magnolia tree in his front yard. I’ve never seen anything like it. Over the past week, it’s been in different phases of bloom and I just go out and stand underneath it in complete awe. It will only last a week or two, but man, what a week.

“Her early leaf’s a flower; / But only for an hour.”

Spring is a time for rebirth, for taking root and for growth. But within that, there is also the notion that it doesn’t last, like the magnolia tree in bloom, so appreciate it while it’s here. Be present. Feel the growth. Take the moment.

W.S. Merwin in Hawaii at the Merwin Conservancy. Image from Stefan Schaefer.

W.S. Merwin, one of the brightest shining, most brilliant, and most venerable American poets died recently. I met him briefly in Washington, DC, after hearing him read. I’d made it a point to catch him after work when I worked in the city. He was one of the voices; one of the lives worth emulating, or using as a model to find your own.

In a great New Yorker article, Casey Cep writes about Merwin’s writing and his effort to preserve Hawaiian landscape, “The palm forest, like Merwin’s poetry, has become a kind of prophetic stance against contemporary life: bearing witness to individual, almost foolish acts of creativity while devastation abounds.” We do what we can in the time that we have.

Sometimes I can connect the dots, sometimes I lose the picture. My reading list of late has included large parts of Luke’s Gospel, Henri Nouwen’s “Return of the Prodigal Son,” and legendary and/or mind-bending graphic novels, including Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s “Daredevil” run, Donny Cates’ “God Country,” and Jonathan Hickman’s “Fantastic Four.” I’ve never read Hickman, who is known for his epic story arcs for Marvel Comics. Marvel announced this past week that he is set to take over the X-Men this summer.

I’ve been thinking about the Faust/Faustus storyline a lot lately, where to gain unlimited knowledge, the seeker sells their soul to the devil. It has to deal with hubris, excessive pride, and pushing beyond the limits of where we should go. And Hickman plays that exact storyline out with Reed Richards in his Fantastic Four story. But when faced with the decision either come up with the answer to everything, to save the universe and feed his ego flashing his brilliance, or to be human, be with his family, Richards thinks back to the words of his father.

“All of my hopes and desires rest in you becoming what I am not. When you grow up, I expect more. Son, I expect better. I want you to be a better friend than I was. Be a better husband. Be a better father. Be a better man.”

Father-son, father-daughter messages hit me straight in the heart. And it makes me reflect on the prodigal son story, and how the father wants his sons to know his love, no matter what they’ve done. And that’s big.

For Lent this year, Fr. Bill Ortt at Christ Church Easton, has given out prayer stones during worship services. There are 11 different words and you choose without looking: love, peace, believe, remember, listen, forgive, hope, pray, heal, follow, grace. The idea is to use your word as a mantra during Lent. And to look up Scripture for your word that you connect with, and pray, reflect, and meditate on it for the season.

My stone is love. It’s not the one I expected or the one I would have picked. But it’s the one I needed. It’s what I need to remember and to focus on. I picked two verses.

John 13.34-35

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’

And

Corinthians 13:4-8

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. 

Those are big for me. Because it is easy for me to look past, to get too busy, to be in my head or deep in thought too often.

Finishing up Robert Frost’s poem:

Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief, / So dawn goes down to day. /  Nothing gold can stay.

Nothing gold can stay. And that’s true for spring. It’s true for knowledge and accomplishments. It’s true for the world. It’s true for almost everything we see around us.

But not for God. And not for love. “Love never ends.”

It started with Stan Lee

“Stan Lee and Dr. Seuss and Ray Bradbury. That’s where it begins and ends with me.” That’s how Josh Brolin, who plays both Thanos and Cable in the current Marvel movies, began his remembrance of Marvel legend, founder, and storyteller extraordinaire, Stan Lee. Lee died yesterday at the age of 95.

I heard the news from my cousin, who works at the Miami Herald newspaper, which is fitting, because he is the same cousin that introduced me to comic books; the same cousin who I would spend hours with at Alternate Worlds Comic Book Store in Cockeysville, pouring over Stan Lee’s creations. The comics I collected and couldn’t stop reading were Daredevil, the Avengers, the X-Men, Black Panther–all first created by Lee and artist Jack Kirby, and all current Marvel movie blockbusters.

My teenage daughters don’t read. And I’m not overly worried because I didn’t read growing up. Except for Marvel comic books, something that started when I was 10 and went obsessively on through middle school and into high school (though it wasn’t something you wanted people to know back then). And then graphic novels found their way back onto my reading list in my 40s, again the same Marvel titles being the mainstay.

Stan Lee lived every writer’s dream: to see his characters become household names, loved across generations, spur imaginations, and touch people’s lives. And the coolest thing is that it wasn’t about him, it was and is about the stories and the characters–he passed them on to subsequent writers who try to build on and expand his vision. Here is what those who continue Lee’s stories (three of Marvel’s top writers and an actor) had to say on Lee’s passing:

Stan Lee made the word, “Excelsior!” his sign off and tagline. It’s generally translated to mean, “ever upward,” “higher,” or striving.  Chances are, if you hear it in today’s culture, it’s because of him.

Marvel does a nice job of giving the skeleton/chronology of Stan Lee’s career as a storyteller. It’s heartening to realize that Lee almost quit writing comics after 20 years and didn’t really breakthrough until he was 39.

When someone dies at 95 years old, having lived a life people dream about, it’s not tragic; it gives us a moment to remember and appreciate what they brought to our lives. For me, my love of stories, and my desire to read them, to consume them, look for them, think about the shape of them, the imagery of them, to get to know characters–started with Stan Lee. I remember paying $5 for Black Panther #4 in its clear, plastic bag and feeling like I had a small piece of a legacy in my hands. I would walk out of the store with hours of stoke and fuel for my imagination. And I smile now, when I pass on something to my nephew, who sits transfixed, shuts out the world around him, and dives into the Marvel universe.

And these same stories, Stan Lee’s creations, having hit the big screen in ways we didn’t know could happen back then–cinematic storytelling has caught up to what was being done on the page–I now share with my daughters, who have seen all the movies, and suggested Marvel marathons without prompting–always looking for Lee’s comedic cameo in each film.

When I picked 13-year-old Ava up from school yesterday, I told her that an older famous person who she knows died. The first guess out of her mouth was, “Stan Lee??”

And last night we watched “The Avengers.” Tonight we’ll pick another. The stories keep going. But it started with Stan Lee. “Excelsior!” is how he lived.