Weblog 157
February 08, 2009~ 12:15am
I was sent a link by my favorite fella to a New York Times review of the movie "Coraline"...Neil Gaimon's book has been made into a film. I loved reading the book-- just as I love reading all work by that talented fantasy writer-- and the review was beautifully written, but of all its pithy passages, this one stuck out:
Oh, how I agree with that statement! Children feel all things more intuitively, more fantastically- and probably more painfully than so many of us realize, especially those who choose to try and protect them from life's more painful truths.
Often what happens is that children fill in the blanks for themselves, frequently creating worlds even more terrifying and fantastic than the one they actually inhabit. Not only from vivid memories of my own childhood, but in watching and listening to little Bill and Kay, I see this played out time and again by listening to my grandchildren-- both of whom are startlingly bright.
Kay surprised me last week by asking if she'll become a hologram when she dies--(doubtless, much of what she's seen in Star Wars has become 'fact' to her.) On Friday evening while babysitting, I began to notice that any reference to the word 'old' brought on nervousness and anxiety, and prompted an immediate link to the idea of 'dying'.
If I referred to myself- or my creaking knees-- or my cat-- or anything while joking about how 'old' the thing was, Kay's eyes would grow big and anxious. "He NOT that old. He die a long, long time from right now"- but her eyes were BIG QUESTIONS. I began to see the connection she was making and tried to reassure her that being old wasn't actually the same thing as being at death's door. But the conversation elicited hugs from five year old Bill who was crammed behind me as I sat on the edge of the big easy chair, all of us watching the 50th Year Anniversary Edition of Disney's 'Sleeping Beauty'- with Bill suddenly sniffing my hair- (probably checking for decomposition.....lol) and telling me how he really, really loved me. He was interpreting Kay's signals-- long before I'd made the 'old equals death' connection.
Childhood is a huge Forest Savage filled with terrifically gnarled trees and wonderful but often frightening magic.
We don't see into childhood anxieties easily if we're distracted by the mundane everyday itself, but children inhabit them totally. They apprehend the idea of 'gone' probably better than we do because they are 'clingers' by nature... have to be, to survive. It springs from pure biology since we're born so small and helpless-- and we sometimes forget how dependency makes the thought of the absence of things and people we need, such a very frightening one.
Evil, and the ability of evil to harm and deny us those we need and love is all too present in the minds of little ones, woven into their fairytales and stories at such a vulnerable age there is no way for discernment between truth and allegory...the human capacity for imaginative entertainment...and......the thing behind the door......the witch and the wardrobe.... or how age means imminent death....period.
Childhood is the hours between the 'ball.........and midnight.'
It's a time of vast misconceptions and filling in the blanks, of sweeping exaggerations and crippling fears. It's a world of terrors and breathtaking beauty, and all we need do is see the world through their eyes in order to find the keys to interpretation-- then applying some sane reasoning with tremendous doses of love. Little by little, they will come to see shades where once there had only been child-entrapped crayola colors in a coloring book of their own making- its lines absolute and rigidly defined.
And the next time you find your own mind swirling in inexplicable anxiety, think back to the child you were: think about the one who managed his or her own answers, and more often than not, you'll find the end of the string leads right back to a time when we made the world up... from inside our heads: fairytales and phantoms, dragons and ogres..... age equals death. See? Some of the holograms are still there. Comfort that child.
February 11, 2009~ 5:15am
Well, I really went and did this time....I destroyed my computer's operating system. LOL!!! In my over-zealous attempt to clear all 'junk', I deleted my MSBios file and Windows.ini, shut down the beast....and the beast slept forever.
Not quite, but it's a rebuilt animal...all personal files...every ONE gone. I have only my memory to remember passwords, etc. I have only what has already been saved in various places on the web to try and copy and recreate.
This phoenix is going to rise very, very slowly from these ashes. Once again, temper, and 'haste-makes-waste' have proven to be my Achilles heel. That, and a crazy recklessness with all things electronic. One thing I will say though, it stresses just how real impermanence is in life. Whenever we think we've built a castle that'll stand for years, that's just when the hurricane comes along and reduces it to rubble.
Onward and upward. Baby steps, here. Wish me luck.
February 12, 2009~ 7:15pm
I'm still here, pumping along on chubby legs, trying to get into a rhythym with this restoration thing. It's coming along like a slow coal train: over-loaded and about 100 cars long. LOL!!
(You never know how much stuff you've accumulated until you have to recopy it. Man! Wordy... and a head full of images. Unbelievable.)
My best friend from California wants me to address the 'octuplet' debacle in my other blog, the volatile sister of this one. She's thrown down the gauntlet and whetted my appetite for sounding off- that happened on Monday, just hours before the total destruction of my operating system.
And it's just as well....honestly. Whatever head of steam I had concerning that new item has fizzled out. How can you address such a thing, anyway? (Netto, this is for you.) Three thoughts-- wasteful, histrionic-- and out of control with no one (who should have) to stop her. It's just another traveling circus act making its way gaudily across the net and into magazines and television, her 15 minutes of fame secured and eight little lives to pay the price of one person's neurosis.
There. Done. No names. No pictures.... no adding to that monumental freak show. Parenting is more than poppin' them out.... and eight at once? Impossible.
***
(Return To Weekly Archives)
I was sent a link by my favorite fella to a New York Times review of the movie "Coraline"...Neil Gaimon's book has been made into a film. I loved reading the book-- just as I love reading all work by that talented fantasy writer-- and the review was beautifully written, but of all its pithy passages, this one stuck out:
"Mr. Selick (film director) is interested in childhood not as a condition of sentimentalized, passive innocence but rather as an active, seething state of receptivity in which consciousness itself is a site of wondrous, at times unbearable drama."
Oh, how I agree with that statement! Children feel all things more intuitively, more fantastically- and probably more painfully than so many of us realize, especially those who choose to try and protect them from life's more painful truths.
Often what happens is that children fill in the blanks for themselves, frequently creating worlds even more terrifying and fantastic than the one they actually inhabit. Not only from vivid memories of my own childhood, but in watching and listening to little Bill and Kay, I see this played out time and again by listening to my grandchildren-- both of whom are startlingly bright.
Kay surprised me last week by asking if she'll become a hologram when she dies--(doubtless, much of what she's seen in Star Wars has become 'fact' to her.) On Friday evening while babysitting, I began to notice that any reference to the word 'old' brought on nervousness and anxiety, and prompted an immediate link to the idea of 'dying'.
If I referred to myself- or my creaking knees-- or my cat-- or anything while joking about how 'old' the thing was, Kay's eyes would grow big and anxious. "He NOT that old. He die a long, long time from right now"- but her eyes were BIG QUESTIONS. I began to see the connection she was making and tried to reassure her that being old wasn't actually the same thing as being at death's door. But the conversation elicited hugs from five year old Bill who was crammed behind me as I sat on the edge of the big easy chair, all of us watching the 50th Year Anniversary Edition of Disney's 'Sleeping Beauty'- with Bill suddenly sniffing my hair- (probably checking for decomposition.....lol) and telling me how he really, really loved me. He was interpreting Kay's signals-- long before I'd made the 'old equals death' connection.
Childhood is a huge Forest Savage filled with terrifically gnarled trees and wonderful but often frightening magic.
We don't see into childhood anxieties easily if we're distracted by the mundane everyday itself, but children inhabit them totally. They apprehend the idea of 'gone' probably better than we do because they are 'clingers' by nature... have to be, to survive. It springs from pure biology since we're born so small and helpless-- and we sometimes forget how dependency makes the thought of the absence of things and people we need, such a very frightening one.
Evil, and the ability of evil to harm and deny us those we need and love is all too present in the minds of little ones, woven into their fairytales and stories at such a vulnerable age there is no way for discernment between truth and allegory...the human capacity for imaginative entertainment...and......the thing behind the door......the witch and the wardrobe.... or how age means imminent death....period.
Childhood is the hours between the 'ball.........and midnight.'
It's a time of vast misconceptions and filling in the blanks, of sweeping exaggerations and crippling fears. It's a world of terrors and breathtaking beauty, and all we need do is see the world through their eyes in order to find the keys to interpretation-- then applying some sane reasoning with tremendous doses of love. Little by little, they will come to see shades where once there had only been child-entrapped crayola colors in a coloring book of their own making- its lines absolute and rigidly defined.
And the next time you find your own mind swirling in inexplicable anxiety, think back to the child you were: think about the one who managed his or her own answers, and more often than not, you'll find the end of the string leads right back to a time when we made the world up... from inside our heads: fairytales and phantoms, dragons and ogres..... age equals death. See? Some of the holograms are still there. Comfort that child.
February 11, 2009~ 5:15am
Well, I really went and did this time....I destroyed my computer's operating system. LOL!!! In my over-zealous attempt to clear all 'junk', I deleted my MSBios file and Windows.ini, shut down the beast....and the beast slept forever.
Not quite, but it's a rebuilt animal...all personal files...every ONE gone. I have only my memory to remember passwords, etc. I have only what has already been saved in various places on the web to try and copy and recreate.
This phoenix is going to rise very, very slowly from these ashes. Once again, temper, and 'haste-makes-waste' have proven to be my Achilles heel. That, and a crazy recklessness with all things electronic. One thing I will say though, it stresses just how real impermanence is in life. Whenever we think we've built a castle that'll stand for years, that's just when the hurricane comes along and reduces it to rubble.
Onward and upward. Baby steps, here. Wish me luck.
February 12, 2009~ 7:15pm
I'm still here, pumping along on chubby legs, trying to get into a rhythym with this restoration thing. It's coming along like a slow coal train: over-loaded and about 100 cars long. LOL!!
(You never know how much stuff you've accumulated until you have to recopy it. Man! Wordy... and a head full of images. Unbelievable.)
My best friend from California wants me to address the 'octuplet' debacle in my other blog, the volatile sister of this one. She's thrown down the gauntlet and whetted my appetite for sounding off- that happened on Monday, just hours before the total destruction of my operating system.
And it's just as well....honestly. Whatever head of steam I had concerning that new item has fizzled out. How can you address such a thing, anyway? (Netto, this is for you.) Three thoughts-- wasteful, histrionic-- and out of control with no one (who should have) to stop her. It's just another traveling circus act making its way gaudily across the net and into magazines and television, her 15 minutes of fame secured and eight little lives to pay the price of one person's neurosis.
There. Done. No names. No pictures.... no adding to that monumental freak show. Parenting is more than poppin' them out.... and eight at once? Impossible.
(Return To Weekly Archives)
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