The Spirit to Endure

I’ve never written a 

blog entry about a movie before, but recently I experienced a film worth reflecting on (and no, I will not tell you
how it ends). 

            The Beasts of the Southern Wild digs into the viewer, touching each of us in a primal and discomforting way. Its opening scenes carry us along the delta and bayou terrain of Louisiana 

to a fictitious town called The Bathtub. The world of The Bathtub is paradoxically both grimy and magical, and through the machinations of child’s mind it takes on mythological proportions.

            I didn’t know, until the next day, when I did some online searching, that the brilliant director of the film, Benh Zeitlin, is only 19 years old. Here’s what film critic Roger Ebert had to say about Zeitlin’s film: “Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you’ve never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius. This is such a movie and one of the year’s best.”

            Central to the story line is the relationship between a little girl and her father. Both characters are played by people who never acted a day in their lives. Dwight Henry, who plays the father, is a baker, and Quvenzhané Wallis, a six year old with a spirit and power of self-expression seldom seen in people of any age. Go to YouTube to see their interviews after you’ve seen the movie. The complex nature of their relationship is nuanced and changing to the last moment.

            Aside from the story, the filming, and the grit, Beasts of the Southern Wild focuses attention on the Louisiana delta, showing us the vulnerability of humans and wildlife in the region. In showing us the aftermath of just one storm, I felt as if Zeitlin was shaking every one of us by the shoulders begging us to wake up and do something about the crucial care Louisiana needs. With the destruction of one levee, with the impact of one storm, ocean water can mix with fresh and kill off all manner of plants and animals.

            Even from the beginning of the film, there is a sense of the people of The Bathtub living in the aftermath of a calamity, like sci fi flicks set in post atomic Earth. And there is no pretention that things will get better. Yet all the while the people of the Bathtub keep singing and playing the blessed spirited music that Louisiana gives the world.

            It’s a mystery how such infectiously happy music comes from a place so challenged by poverty, natural disaster, and all the requisite evils of modern society. Nevertheless, in The Bathtub, in Louisiana, old and young, white, black, and every color of people live together hand in hand, in solidarity, singing and dancing as they go.

            Beasts of the Wild South packs an emotional wallop, and symbolically, it would have kept even Carl Jung watching his dreams.

The Question

       In this new blog format, I was given a survey option. So I wrote in the question: "What do you most like to read about in this blog?" But no matter what I do, I do not see the questions, only the answer options. So please feel free to let me know your answer.
       The painting here is titled "Consonants". It is part of a series I did about the nature of language. I still find new alphabets showing up in my paintings from time to time. I try to allow them to form rather than consciously shaping them.
         Thanks for reading my blog.

Are you locked out?

One of the most important items in a Coach’s Toolbox is a good question. Honestly, listening to my mentor coaches during my certification program made me realize that questioning can be an art form. A question is like a key. When you’ve locked yourself out of your car, you call a locksmith who has the equipment and know-how to find the right key shaped to unlock your vehicle. Coaches are a little like locksmiths. When you are locked out of your own wisdom, a good coach will present you with questions to open doors to your inner knowledge.

A coach has all kinds of questions. Some are sleek, designed specifically to slip between that rock and the hard place where you are stuck.  Others open like an umbrella to cut down on the glare that impairs your vision. Some questions get their power from the moment in which they are asked, others are constantly challenging.

What’s keeping you from getting exactly what you want and need? This question can be applied at the beginning of every day, or to the big screen of your life. Life puts hurdles in our path. Some hurdles are easy to clear, while others stop us in our tracks. Sometimes we can’t even name the toughest hurdle, but our body reacts so strongly, that we are metaphorically “locked out of our car”: we can’t move forward and we don’t know what inner resource has the power to free us. 

Asking yourself, “What’s in my way?” can help to name what you need. If you want your child to see you as an ally, for example, the question can lead you to naming the things that have come between you in the past. Maybe old resentment is in your way, or maybe it’s judgmental behavior. One good question can open a door, get you over a hurdle, and lead you to empowering answers.

How will you know when you’ve unlocked the door? How will you know you’ve asked the right question? The only insurance policy is having a coach to walk the path with you. Sure, you say, she’s selling coaching. But just ask yourself: how many questions can you come up with? How long will it take you to think up new challenging and empowering questions? And will you know how to use them? Just like the person who tries to get the car going without a locksmith, you could struggle through a dozen ill-fitting questions and still not find the right key. Working with a life coach saves you a lot of time, and yes, even money in the long run.

Don't forget: You can have a free sample Coaching session! Reach me at 510 530-4182

The Dent in Self-Identity

Last month’s post opened the topic of finding and maintaining a solid self-identity in the world of mass commodification. While we’re fortunate to live in a time when medicine and health information allow us to live longer than ever before, mass media reaches into even the most intimate corners of our lives fomenting self-doubts and undermining balanced personal dynamics. For example, we are all aging, yet the media message to anyone over twenty-three is that we should look younger than we are. Everyone is a package to be designed and polished for a market place. With 50% of marriages failing, there’s a huge market place for romance. With unemployment at record highs, there’s another market place for work. Then, and this is especially true for the very young, there is a market for popularity and another for style. We’re no longer trying to negotiate the messages from Madison Avenue, now social media tugs at our desire for acceptance and popularity. 

Way back in 1992, when my book, Freeing the Creative Spirit was published, it included a reflection page with a quote from the psychologist, Otto Rank. (Please excuse the anachronistic gender reference.) “Man’s eternal conflict,” he said, “is the struggle between his need for likeness and his desire for difference.” At any age, it seems, we want to stand out, to distinguish ourselves in some way, and yet we want to be well-liked and widely accepted so that we can fit into our ‘tribe’. So we want to be our own person, but also belong to our special group.

How do we do this? If we are overweight, we can lose some pounds. If we look dowdy, we can replace our old wardrobe with a few new clothes. These can be simple solutions, and mostly they impact the way we see ourselves. A sense of renewal can come as easily as a new haircut or a new shade of lipstick. But what about changes that need to go deeper?

As a life coach I exercise a good deal of intuition. Someone may come to me talking about needing a new kind of work, and inside their words I sense a spiritual hunger they cannot yet express. In just this way, a quest that begins with a membership at Weight Watchers may really take hold in a deeper excursion into self-identity and self-understanding. The term ‘mid-life crisis’ has been tossed about for decades, used to signify aging. But any period of self-examination is really a sign of growth and maturity, not age. Age is chronological, personal development is multi-dimensional, it is not calculable. You can’t weigh it, or count it out on a calendar. Without self-examination human beings just get old. Like fruit, their chronological measurement simply leads to slow decomposition. But humans, while their bodies may decline, can continue to blossom and give fruit right up to the moment the spirit departs.

Recognizing the potential of your inner life force is the first step toward celebrating a unique self-identity. This is especially important during times of drastic change. You might lose one hundred pounds and need to get reacquainted with the person in the mirror. You may find yourself alone after 30 years of marriage. You may survive a life-changing cataclysm. A brush with death, or the challenge of living with a physical disability can seem devastating, until the future can be seen through the eternal spirit within. Get in touch with your inner flame! It's that thing I call the inner pilot light. Through the coaching process we can access the power waiting to be summoned. It’s your power, even if you can’t see it, I can. I can call it forth, and guide you to the next level of discovering life anew.

            In the photo included with this post, titled “Self-Portrait in Grass”, I photographed my shadow bearing witness to my presence on the planet. It’s not a great photo, it just captured one of those moments in life, where everything shifted just a couple of degrees. I saw my shadow on the ground, and suddenly recognized myself in a totally different context, literally as part of the earth. The image gave me a distance from my ego-self. The camera was aimed at the grass and dirt, the ground of the park, and suddenly I recognized myself, and it became a self-portrait. It’s an example of the multi-dimensional way of comprehending being. The experience and image stayed with me as another level of self-identity as Earth.

A Brand New You?

I grew up thinking that “branding” was something Rowdy Yates did to a herd of cattle. I never planned to have a ranch, so it never occurred to me that I would have to design a brand. But here we are in the new millennium and branding is something we do to people and companies and products, and if you don’t brand yourself cowboy, you’re nobody.

To survive the fatal virus of anonymity we are encouraged to swallow the medicine of constant self-promotion. Some of us are better at this than others, of course, but this daily push toward fame and acceptance has an inner impact on all of us.

We are living in a time of mass commodification. Everything and everyone must be part of the market place. Whether you want to succeed in business or love, you’ve gotta have a good head shot and snappy copy. My question is: what’s happening inside of us with this continuous push to expand our number of “friends” and contacts? We are bombarded with the message that we are not enough, and we are not doing enough. If one is an adult meeting this new age of marketmanship, then a sense of pre-existing inner equilibrium could help counter balance a healthy identity and sense of innate value. But imagine being thirteen!

Between mass media and social media young people and women, especially, are taught to  be thinner, younger, and/or sexier. Everything from mascara to face cream is sold as the magic elixir or potion to ‘make you shine’. Men should be “winners”, a goal that apparently counteracts both age and girth.  

We all want to look and feel our best, but with the constant professionally-powered force of Madison Avenue, it takes an extraordinary personality to maintain a fully self-determined identity. Even the most polished players in the fame game are criticized and dissected, in fact that dissection is big business, too. “The 10 Worst Dressed.” “Who’s got cellulite in Hollywood?” Who are the top A-Listers this year? The Ten Wealthiest in the World? The Sexiest Man? All these meaningless headlines will reach you even without a television, unless you grow all your own food, wash your clothes at the river bank, and don’t have access to a computer.

I’m not against fashion trends or Hollywood headlines, I just want every person to be optimistic and joyful, to find their own style, and to express themselves without bashing or being bashed. We can look great, we can be healthy, we can even be ‘fashionable’ on our own terms. But in this mass media driven society, that’s not just a choice, it is a process. Look forward to my next blog to learn more about it!