Friday, August 30, 2013

WALKING LIKE A MOVIE GUY


Where I walk in the mornings is along a bluff overlooking the rocks and sea.  I follow a path that curves along the edge but wide enough for three people to walk abreast.  I walk for about 40 minutes along this route and then make the turn home but I go upwards towards a road which is inland and above the cliff walk by about a quarter mile.  It gets my heart going a bit faster and I end up higher on the ridge where I can overlook a broader picture of the ocean, craggy shoreline, and the ridges and sand dunes to the north.  Once I reach the top, there are a few dips and rises but mostly it is a rarely traveled paved road that parallels the bluff walk in reverse.  



But the time I reach this higher point, I can see the distant speck of the white  van and I feel happy.  The hormones secreted within my brain and nervous system, peptides, are activating my body’s opiate receptors, causing an analgesic effect.  We know this process as the “endorphin rush.”  If you are active at all, you know this as a welcome and pleasant feeling.  


There is a spot on the road when it is only downhill to the car and I can see the ridges above the cove and the Rock at a distance.  It is such a vast and spacious view that it always takes my breath from me.  The way that I am walking and putting down my feet changes, in this small almost imperceptible way.   I begin to feel something in my body, a bit of ego, probably, for completing the loop.  But there is a kind of swagger in my body and steps.  I am immediately mentally transported to a movie image. 


Do you remember the movie Witness?  It is a police thriller about an Amish child who sees a murder, and Harrison Ford, the detective John Book, goes undercover on the child’s family’s farm to hide and protect him.  He falls in love with the lovely Amish woman, Rachel played by Kelly McGillis.  At the end he is torn but ends up leaving and not pursuing the relationship with her.  All along there has been this big strapping Amish man who has had eyes for Rachel.  In the final scene, John Book is driving out the long driveway, heading back to Philadelphia to his life there.  His car heads up a rolling hill and as he is about to go over the crest, he sees Daniel, the Amish man, casually striding towards the house where Rachel lives.  You see John Book's car stop for a moment and then he drives on.  As we watch all of this, Daniel takes long steps coming down the hill.  We know, as did John Book, that he is heading for the porch where he will woo Rachel to be his wife.  There is a quiet confidence in his walk.  One might say swagger, but it is more of confidence than ego.  There is a solidness to his step.  He comes down the hill and you can almost feel his feet hit the dirt, each step landing solidly and strongly in the dust.

This whole movie scene gets played out internally each time I come over that final rise and start down the hill.   I suddenly feel that heavy footfall, the brightness of spirit, the confidence or maybe pride coming down the home stretch of my journey.  It is just like Daniel did in that final scene in Witness.  I am embodied by his image and character, solid, sure, content.  I was thinking yesterday about how often movies have amplified my life’s experience.  How like theater, the arts, opera and myth, movies become portals to our experience, a way to see the big and small moments of our lives, from just a bit outside of ourselves.





There was a TV show named Northern Exposure.  It started in 1990, and took place in a fictional town in Alaska called Cicely.  If you have never seen it, you might take a peek.  It is a wonderful blending of people, culture and ideas, and for TV, way ahead of the cultural curve.  There was one particular show where a young Native American: Ed Chigliak, a man who is in training to be a Shaman, is visited by an elder of his tribe.  Leonard, the elder, is asking about the white people’s stories.  He comes from a society where story is like myth, it holds lessons, healing and cultural references that inform and companion his people.  Ed, who lives among the white people of the town cannot answer Leonard’s question about where the stories are.  The show follows this quest until the ending minutes where Ed, a budding filmmaker is sitting in a dark theater watching Citizen Kane, when Leonard comes in an sits beside him.  I don’t remember exactly what is said, but it is clear that they both might understand that movies in Western Culture are our stories.  Or at least one of the ways we hold our personal and cultural knowledge.

In the final minutes of my walk, I do like the silky feel of shifting between the threshold of my own feet hitting the pavement and the imagery from the movie.  It is a sweet place of resonance, introspection, amplification and separation.  

I would like to ask you to think for a moment of one, or twenty of those times where your own breathing life is blended with an image from a movie.  Maybe one where the images seem to blur and become one.


A little consideration, a moment, a memory.

Send them on to me at bmwmft@aol.com.  Thanks.. and good walking to you!  Misty

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