I enjoy watching movies and television series. It is a pastime I grew up with and savor on random weekends and late nights. Netflix & Chill is one of my indulgences. As a preteen, my mom and I spent quality time watching movies on Sunday afternoons. I even have my favorite VHS’s marked in storage for some future archival exploration. As I recall these experiences, I realize that I relish the idea that every flick or drama possesses a challenge to be overcome. A central conflict spurs off into many interrelated situations and series of events that require immediate discernment for the preservation of something— the self, family, community, material possessions, love, pride, success, image, belief, and paradigm.

The construction of cinema from plot building, to screen-writing, table readings, rehearsals, videography and editing is a journey of fantasy, creation, and compartmentalization that reflects reality. A spectator, observing with a sense of openness, vulnerability, and judgement, attends to what unfolds on screen. With the human capacity to embody, connect, and reveal an imagined personality, actors somehow tap into and manipulate spirit, an invisible energetic space, and transpose the incorporeal into the material realm. Their manifestations are captured and consumed by perceptive eyes.

When we are motivated to feel, think, and respond to a scene in a movie, we are being moved by someones’ imagination— a collective and ever-growing creation. The rapture of emotion communicates a silent yet palpable resonance that we are deeply alive. It moves through the film and off screen into our minds. Sometimes, our hearts overflow to the visual tunes played and tears fall from our eyes or words spout from our lips. 

Have you ever paid attention to the music that plays during scene transitions and thematic build ups? Have you experienced the suspense residing in a harmonic crescendo or ominous lyrics? Have you ever considered how you’d perceive the movie differently if the music was not there?

I don’t close read songs or scripts often enough and understand that anyone’s interpretations, both deep and shallow, are subjective. This stream of consciousness is as much a conversation as it is a projection. Your responses to this speak within and through you. Are you listening? 

People say to me as I say to them, “I see myself in you.” The meaning is only as pervasive as our individual choice to apprehend the statement and its underlying message(s). As an affirmation, the phrase resonates before I can make sense of the individual words on their own.

…What does it mean to see ourself in someone?

We could potentially understand the idea if we compared it to literally looking at oneself in the mirror. A habit so trivial in contemporary culture, taking selfies are the epitome of overstatements— the manufacturing of self-image and projections of what we want to see. What if we didn’t have control over the portrait captured by the camera lens or the ability to alter what any reflective surface shows us? 

You may have looked in the mirror…Has anyone ever held a mirror up to you?

Have you scanned it and glimpsed the ugly parts of yourself? Did you recognize that the blemishes occupy the same space as the glow that emanates from your soul? Have you ever mistaken the person carrying the mirror for the object itself— they holding the reflection for you that resembles them… like a silhouette, a figurine supporting its own story, a messenger? If a silhouette is a shadow of something projected onto a surface or medium, what do you make of your image in a mirror? 

Portraits in the mind become motion pictures, just as thoughts become words and actions. Have you ever watched a movie with a protagonist who is in perpetual self-talk, and the part of them that talks back, is personified? The personification, a metaphorical apparition of their self-reflection, takes form as a reimagined self, a younger self,  angel/devil hovering over shoulders, a loved one who died, or someone who has triggered a revelation of the Essenes. Have you seen yourself in seven ways? Have you ever felt heartbreak from a memory that reached to the base of your breath and clenched tight, throat sore, coughs for air, prolonged despair, self-sabotage, then a spontaneous shift to its transformation into something else? 

…Darkness sheds just as light does, like a capsule that has burst. The protective coating opens and the stuff within the vessel pours out to be seen and felt. Would you explore the stuff in a time capsule if it was buried in your heart?

I’m curious and love an occasional adventure into the unknown, to peer below the surface of the mundane and surrender to nuance. On walks home, I’ve studied my shadow for casual entertainment, observing how it fragments, how it move like me across walls with contours just shy of complete resemblance. Have you ever noticed how a shadow, is slightly one moment, one pace, one glimpse ahead of you— like the future at your fingertips? Did a shadow ever push you to the edge of what you thought you knew about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

What are you pursuing? 

Purses are not illegal. We pack and carry baggage willingly. We chase the bag and try to secure the bag. I’ll admit, I’ve been a bag lady… What’s really in the bag?…A bunch of stuff.  Isn’t a bag like a capsule, a shadow, and a mirror?

A mirror, light fractured and alchemized through metal, is an apparatus of fractal enlightenment, a gift akin to silver and gold. We value it and receive all the beautiful things it reveals to us. It is full of stuff— be you to regard less. I was told not to prosecute gold when it is not polished and adorned with perfect lines. By the time we decipher law into linearity, we will have lost the purpose of transactions.

Trans-Act-Ion ⇔ Change Is Energy ⇔ Currency

motion ~ constancy ~ circulation ~ frequency ~ resonation ~ vibration ~ sensation ~ perception ~ sound ~ noise ~ communication ~ language ~ instrument ~ synchrony ~ harmony ~ song ~ music

Music is universal. I perceive God as the Universe. If music is motion and motion is energy and energy is nature and nature is God, then is music God? Is moving God and to move God? If everything moves is everything God? If we create and embody motion pictures, are we God? 

I used to be a Christian. They say that we are made in His image. Well, I saw myself in him. Christian showed me my most profound joy and my deepest pain. To dance with him was a dream, imagination and flowing motion. He is s(he). If I do not mistake the mirror for his silhouette beholden— the memory exhumed from my heart, is he God?

How long can I carry Him before she changes?