Your Stuff is Alive, So Feel Guilty: Toy Story 3

I went to see Toy Story 3 this week. Everyone had told me to go. It got something like a 99% approval rating on some site my partner checks to see if movies are worth seeing. And it was definitely cute. There were places I cheered, times I repeated lines in my partner's ear, and times when I felt close to inching forward on my seat. I am not someone who spends much effort trying to predict plotlines, but I found this one to be remarkably fresh in many ways, as were the previous two incarnations, truth be told.

That said, I take issue with some of the underlying Toy Mythos: toys are alive, they have vivid feelings including fear and insecurity, and it is up to their child to satisfy all their needs for love and affection by playing with them often and in an appropriate manner. However, toys are unable to express any of their needs and feelings to the child responsible for meeting them, and must sneak about in order to pursue any of their own ends.

I find this a formula guaranteed to engender worry and guilt in anyone who cares about their toys (like kids). Are your toys okay? Do they feel neglected? Are you ever allowed to get rid of old stuff without feeling like you are betraying your (possibly real) toys?

Toys are things. I have read that modern toys that come with their pre-determined story line are actually detrimental to kids and the development of their imagination and creativity. Toys are tools for learning, for thinking, and for imagining, all the things that are going on while a child is playing. As the child develops, new toys become the tools of the hour and it is appropriate to let go of the sorting by color and move on to the number and word puzzles when the time is right.

I think what I object to most is the popular acceptance of the idea that inanimate objects could be people, when as a society we are having a hard time recognizing the humanity in Muslims and Hispanic immigrants, among others. We treat them as the less-than-human "other", and yet how many of us will now hesitate to throw away broken old toys for fear of the terrible furnace that awaits them at the dump?

And now I am really getting het up, and so will have to do a second post about the racism, and other prejudice in the movie as well....

Reviewing Transition

I recently got an email restarting the Transition process and looking into Steering Committee type stuff in town, asking for all those still interested to reply. And I hesitated. I still have not replied.

I was excited about it several months ago, but I feel a little sour about it now. I wonder if perhaps our conflict of vision is what caused us all to walk away/take a break for these several months. I think I was one of the main conflict headers. I think that Transition is cool stuff, is necessary, is win-win, and I want to see it succeed. I wonder if my participation would hamstring it, because I would always be questioning some of the paradigm that seems to get a lot of people really fired up about it. I have seen a tendency for those excited about Transition to be folks who believe in the Peak Oil Apocalypse and the Enlightened Few versus the Ignorant Masses, and those are both Mytho-Realities that I actively question and choose not to live.

With my questioning, I do not want to sabotage the very fervor that would lead to Transition success. Or, as the voice of an old friend and activist whispers to me, perhaps they need my voice questioning those paradigms that keep them limited, so that Transition can be successful. My friend would tell me that my input is highly valuable and I would be an asset to the committee instead of a hindrance. I admit to having a little less confidence than that.

Relatedly, I find that my focus of what I want to work on is changing. My projects seem to be contracting into the personal: baby-making, alternate streams of income via drums, growing my healing practice, and acquiring land to raise our family on. On the one hand, I absolutely believe in the bigger picture and its relevance to all our lives. On the other hand, my kids and partner come first. I am conflicted about it a little, but then again, I can feel myself relaxing into my own advice to other friends who became parents before me: You are doing what you can right now, and that is enough. There is a reason most activists are the young and old. They have the time and energy to work on the bigger picture, while the parents are raising the next generation.

I'll have to keep pondering the Transition question. I think I will call a friend who is still involved and see what she thinks about my contributions and how they will play out in the politics of the thing.

Story is Powerful Enough to Transform

The power of story is amazing to me. I have been upset about the way the wedding turned out: that it wasn't what I had envisioned, that everything will now need to be rescheduled, feeling disappointed, and just having trouble getting over the magical snap-back of having put so much into its manifestation only to have it not work. 

But when I sat down to write the previous blog post, it came out different. Instead of angst, out came a story that made things okay. Instead of all the worries and complaints and emotional bruises that I had been nursing for a few days, I wrote a story about miracles. And that story, summed up by the title Doomed with a Chance of Miracles, changed my story about the wedding. It took some of those seeds of hope that I was afraid to sprout and sent them shooting up into beanstalks of story and truth. 

Slowly, the wedding is changing in my head. I hardly lament the original dream anymore, but spend more time beginning to ponder the implications of what we learned for our married life together. I know I was highly emotional, but now that emotion is beginning to flow into perspective like chiaroscuro, highlighting, dramatizing, and creating intriguing mystery to run throughout our lives together. 

I have learned from one of my housemates that stories have a life of their own. I am often annoyed at how events and facts warp inside his gravitational field, becoming new things that say sometimes nice (and sometimes highly unflattering) things about those of us in his life. Corrections for factuality are never welcomed, because the story has been woven around the truth he wants to think. 

In this case, though, I think the story came first, and wrapped within it like a present was the truth I needed. Now, instead of the false bravado of jokes, I can have an easy peace with the story of our wedding day. It feels...warm. And now we can move on to the next step of figuring out what on earth to do about rescheduling.

Mytho-Reality

I have begun using the term Mytho-Reality, and I am enjoying working with it. Mytho-Reality is the intersection of what we know to be true with what we believe to be true. It is what we create when we look at known facts and string them together into a story. We create mytho-realities all the time. They provide the foundations of our paradigms and tell the story of why the world is the way it is and why we have the place and function in the world that we do. We constantly build on and add to our mytho-realities, incorporating new facts/situations into old stories as confirmations. Occasionally we encounter a new situation that has a fact that does not fit into any of our established story-lines, and so we have to choose whether to ignore it or alter the mytho-reality. 


And really, that is the beauty of mytho-realities. They can be CHANGED. They are stories, and stories are alive, constantly shifting and changing. We can Change Our Story and so make profound changes in our lives. Often we do not want to change our stories, we like them the way they are, thank you very much, but there are times in everyone's life when our stories no longer serve us, they become inadequate, we reach a crisis point, etc. and changing suddenly becomes less painful than staying where we are now.


This is the level that I work on. This is the level that I see most clearly in Reality. I see Mytho-Reality much more accurately than I see 5-senses World, honestly. It is why I am Pagan Clergy. It is why I am an energy healer. It is why I am a writer,and a philosopher, and why I create so much of what I create. I can identify problems in mytho-reality, and I can offer some plot changes to help fix them. Often, all that people need is to have their mytho-reality mirrored back to them so that they can see it clearly and make their own choices about how to change it, and that is how I clergy. In my healing work, I am more specific and offer edits or encourage energetic processes that will self-generate edits.     


It is good. I am good at what I do. I am more comfortable in the Dreamscape, in the Shamanic Realm, than I am in 5-senses World. The challenge, then, is how to marry the two, and I am still writing that story as I become stronger in both. 

Describing Energy Work

I have trouble describing my energy work. More specifically, I have trouble describing it without sounding like I practice quackery. Trying to describe the energetic dynamics, what moves what, how, and why, is jabberwoky-ish because it comes from Dreamscape: the land of symbols, imagination, and thought.


We all have an energetic field around our bodies; we are electro-magnetic beings, among other things. This field is called an aura, an energy body, and auric field, etc. I can use my energy body to move other people's energy bodies in helpful and effective ways. To make other people feel like I am doing something and to keep my feet from getting tired of standing still, I move around and wave my hands as if they are directing the energy, though really I can just stand there and do just as much (with energetic body parts that are much more deft than my hands, but going into that detail really gets into the quackery). 


What I am seeing/sensing is quite different from what is happening in 5 senses-world. I sense colors, textures, imbalances, unhealth, health, the chakra system (which is like the organs of the energy body), other beings present in the room, the fabric-like textures of probabilities and possibilities of life-paths, images of metaphors to explain any and all kinds of on-going dynamics and processes, how to help, move, redirect, rebalance, adjust and attune all of this, and more.  


Basically, because energy follows thought and the energetic world is part of what I call Dreamscape, if I can imagine looking for it, I can find it, and if I can imagine a question about it, I can find an answer, and all of it comes through in exquisite detail. 


Afterward, I talk with clients about what information has come through. I do not/ cannot go against their will, and so moving energetic realities that they chose to put in place is not something I can do, but something for them to do. For example, if someone felt really unsafe, they may have put leaden shields around themselves to deaden all energy that comes their way. I cannot remove the lead. I can attempt to transform it, put the energetic forms of that transformation in place, and then explain all the imagery and why one way serves the client better than other and how to perform the transformation themselves, being careful to include that it is THEIR CHOICE. Pagans are quite receptive to it. Others, I have to go slower and start with the energetic basics of Ground, Center, Shield. But everyone starts where they start, whatever. 


It is really something experienced better than described, and the more specific someone is about what they would like help and support for, the more effective I am. I can do general tune-ups, but specificity adds a lot. 


I need to be able to blurb it in order to sell it, and in order for the massage therapist friend who is supporting me so generously to describe it to her clients, but I am still at a loss. Because so much happens in the Dreamscape, it comes across as rather nonsensical in 5-senses World. (Literally.)