When I was a kid, the song “Puff, the Magic Dragon” had an enormous impact on me.<\/p>\n
“Puff”, without exaggeration, provided me with one of my first experiences with actual heart ache. (Little did I know, how much was to follow!) When you’re that sad<\/u>, and that hurt<\/u>, the pain you have really does seem like it is coming out of your heart. The actual ORGAN.<\/p>\n
I was not ready to grow up yet, of course, when I heard the song first. I was 8 years old or whatever … but my little 8 year old self WEPT for poor little Puff, creeping back into his cave, rejected by Jackie Paper. I would literally put my hand over where my heart was, and press in, hard, trying to soothe the pain.<\/p>\n
I made the promise to myself (how many such promises are made! and how many are kept?) that I would never ever ever EVER turn my back on Puff the Magic Dragon … I would NEVER do what Jackie Paper did!<\/p>\n
It’s interesting … haven’t thought of that in years. My feelings, whenever I heard the song, were so melancholy, and so deep, and so cutting that they qualify as “soul-growth”.<\/p>\n
Along those same lines: I saw the movie “Bless the Beasts and the Children” when I was 10 years old. Has anyone else seen that film?<\/p>\n
I was probably too young to see it, but hell, it was running as an after-school special, so I had no idea what I was getting into.<\/p>\n
It’s about this group of misfit boys who are all sent to a reform school, a kind of “Boy’s Town”, out in the desert. Each one has a specific problem – violence, babyish behavior (one kid still has a security blanket and he’s 14), illiteracy, whatever. They have to work on a ranch at the reform school – and there is a pen filled with buffalo at the ranch. Or maybe it’s wild cattle. Not sure.<\/p>\n
And this group of boys get the idea: “Those buffalo should be free- they should be roaming the plains – Let’s set them free!”<\/p>\n
Elaborate semi-illegal planning follows. The boys bond as a group. They are going to make this grand gesture – they are going to rebel – but in a way that does some GOOD. They aren’t gonna be losers anymore. They are going to be heroes. They are going to free the “beasts”.<\/p>\n
Finally – after much tribulation – the boys open the gate.<\/p>\n
And the beasts – so tamed, so UN-wild – do not know what to do. They do not run out of the gate, they do not make a move. The beasts choose to stay in the pen.<\/p>\n
The boys all are screaming at the beasts – crying – pushing at them – “RUN! RUN! YOU’RE FREE! WHY WON’T YOU RUN??”<\/p>\n
Anyway – this film remains so vivid in my mind that, to this day, I can remember certain lines from the film, certain camera shots.<\/p>\n
That movie made me so sad<\/u>, it devastated me so deeply<\/u>, that I would say I probably have never fully recovered. By that I mean: before I saw that movie, I was ONE way. After I saw that movie, there was a shift. I wasn’t quite the same afterwards.<\/p>\n
I haven’t seen that movie since. I have no idea if it was good, bad, cheesy, stupid. All I know is, it opened something up in me. An enormous abyss. I was a child, a young girl, but the abyss yawned wide, and I was suddenly, for the first time, able to see the sadness of so many people, the grief waiting for me out in the world, how sad things can be, how things sometimes do not work out.<\/p>\n
It was a moment where the child died a little bit – making way for the adult.<\/p>\n
My soul grew up after seeing that movie.<\/p>\n
Thoughts on all of this:<\/u><\/p>\n
An early encounter with the sadness of the world, of what I would call the human condition, can expand the soul.<\/p>\n
However<\/b>: too many encounters with the sadness of the world before you are “ready”, or – too many encounters in general, shrivels the soul up, embitters life, hardens the edges.<\/p>\n
Some damage to the soul is irrevocable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was a kid, the song “Puff, the Magic Dragon” had an enormous impact on me. “Puff”, without exaggeration, provided me with one of my first experiences with actual heart ache. (Little did I know, how much was to … Continue reading