Saturday, October 25, 2008

Beware of Poppies

The gleeful chorus of the Emerald city dwellers....

YOU'RE OUT OF THE WOODS YOU'RE OUT OF THE DARK YOU'RE OUT OF THE NIGHT...STEP INTO THE SUN STEP INTO THE LIGHT....
As Dorthy and her team were on their way to see the wizard and were within reach of their quest.... they ran into a field of poppies.

A lovely distraction, a beautiful serene burst of nature. They were lulled into a deep sleep..and out of the ether's came a snow shower to wake them up. A dusting of ice to calm the affects of the hypnotic poppy.

They were willing to fight the good fight, face their fears and the danger, no matter the out come they took a journey. Their psychic spirit called upon the good witch to help them . They got up, dusted themselves off, made it to Oz, and fought to be seen.
Dorthy and her pals never felt they had what they needed when they met the little man behind the curtain. However, they found they already had inside of themselves, what they needed.
They had to look within, take personal responsibility and then and only then could they go home.
The tall poppy syndrome is when a poppy gets taller than the others , it is cut down to be uniform to the others. Dorthy stood tall and she found her way home.
Are we moving out of the dark into the light, or are we being lulled into the hypnotic mass of the poppies ?





Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Responsibility...


.... the state or position of being accountable to somebody or for something, the blame for something that has happened, authority to act to make decisions independently …..a duty.

I woke with a dream after the first debates. I was struck with the word “responsibility”.


This word inside my head played itself out in various scenarios. Starting first with the obvious , others not taking responsibility. There is so much frustration and the anger all over the world. Now it is in our back yard in a way we can't ignore. So how do we change all of this?

I watched a scene from the TV show Mad Men and was mesmerized with the immense selfishness and entitlement we all possess. Don takes his family to a park for a picnic just after he has bought the new car. He’s concerned about his car getting dirty on the inside from his kids. In preparation to leave the park, the camera man pulls back to a wide shot of the family picking up the blankets and shaking them out. They conveniently leave behind all the trash. Chinett napkins and Dixi cups scatter in the wind. That action and the obliviousness of the whole family to not seeing their mess and taking responsibility to pick it up, spoke volumes to the emotional life of not just the family but the era. The unconscious mental murmur of somebody else will clean up my mess.


It’s like the image I have stuck in my head of GW Bush on Letterman during his first run for the Presidency. The show was going to commercial and instead of moving right way, the camera lingered on Bush. A page, sent to reset Dave’s desk passes in front of Bush. GW Bush unabashedly reached up, grabbed the edge of her sweater and cleaned his glasses with it.

We are going to see things in the next few months that no one will have predicted , not even a good psychic, but we can feel them already.

Unless I take full responsibility for me and what I do, then I can’t change anything. Clearly we see this with our elected officials and the news media but why not start at home. A personal act of responsibility would be to deal with your own garbage, clean up your own mess, and stop blaming others.

So I guess we do have the whole world in our hands.