I promised myself that this would be a Sandy Hook Elementary -free zone. I thought we all needed to have a safe place to go to not have to think about that awful day almost a week ago and begin the process of healing by dreaming of different things to think and talk about.
I am breaking my promise.
Today marks the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Grimm Brother's Fairy Tales Collection.
Don't worry I am not up to my usual flippant act of comically connecting two seemingly different subjects.
First of all let me list the subjects I will connect here:
1. The Whitewater Valley area of Indiana
2. Fairy Tales/Brothers Grimm
3.Unspeakable Tragedy / Sandy Hook Elementary
4. The importance of Writing, Communication, and Human Contact
5. Innocence/Knowledge/ Wisdom
I really do think this is an important post for everyone to understand. My love of history, tales, writing, and loving life just seemed to have no point in these last few days.
Until I flipped on the laptop and on my Google search engine page was this funny little graphic with Little Red Riding Hood. Usually I don't mess with these annoying grabbers that Google tries to suck me in to with their marketing of articles and products, but I could not resist Little Red Riding Hood today. And there in lies the point.
After all, if it is something I don't want to look at I can just "x" out of it right?! Harmless....
Little Red Riding Hood thought that her actions were harmless too....
http://www.usm.edu/media/english/fairytales/lrrh/lrrhji.htm
The Brothers Grimm wanted so very passionately to convey to ALL, not just children, the importance of heeding good advice, or wisdom. Using wise knowledge to maintain your innocence. Or how to get through a tragedy - if that is even possible. They wanted to convey that there were horrible evil things out there that just do not seem to be that harmful....but we must listen to the older, wiser ones to have the knowledge that will bring US wisdom about life. They wanted to do this in a manner that would best fit the ones who needed it. Somehow, they knew we would ALL need it. And we would need it in a bound safe little collection of stories.
So how does the Whitewater Valley come into this?
Well, as has been said many times before the middle part of the U.S. was settled predominately by Scottish, Irish, and German immigrants and pioneers. Many have said that Indiana so very much resembled the Black Forest of Germany. The blackening canopy of trees that extended beyond its borders was home to many resources and unseen fears to those trying to make a nation out of its dark, often cold and damp, recesses. These were qualities that the Germans, Irish and Scots knew all to well. They knew how to live with it, they knew how to use it to their advantage and make it a paradise. My family are descended from these first white settlers. Many others who live here have that in common. Along with their genes we inherited their stories and bit by fading bit their attitudes.
Growing up on a heavily wooded farm in Fayette County Indiana in the 1960's and 1970's I thought my surroundings very much resembled those of Snow White and Rose Red's, or a hundred other backgrounds to stories I was read as a small child. I identified with the characters and so I could identify with their plights.
The key here is: those characters, those plights could be stopped in an instant! All I needed to do was slam the cover of the book shut! Breathlessly I could take what had been on those pages and inhaled into my senses, my mind's eye, and try to assimilate it into what I already knew. AT MY OWN PACE.
Questions about good and evil, safe and harm, poor and rich, plenty and want, reality and lie, beauty and ugliness- these were all addressed here. The original versions of these stories were often what we would call violent and horrific. When they were collected and rewritten by the Brothers Grimm they were more close to the truth of how life's stark realities were then. (Of COURSE there were not any talking animals and dwarfs that dug in gold mines and took in lost beautiful waifs unmolested - of COURSE there were no Fairy godmothers who turned pumpkins into carriages and mice into footmen!)Then Walt Disney Studios and Pixar came along....watered down and bastardized versions of the originals muddied the lessons the Brothers Grimm were hoping to convey.
Especially Walt Disney Studios, and of course the hundreds of other production companies and publishing houses, came after WWII. NO ONE wanted to relive the atrocities the Nazis brought forth. Every one in the world had had enough of the depression, starvation, war, horrific cruelties, and even sub-animalistic tendencies - everyone had thought they had learned their lessons and it was time to go on.
The Brothers Grimm were at just such a time in their history when they decided it was NOT time to move on and forget those warnings. They were good warnings, they were good lessons. Sometimes things happen in life by no fault of our own, sometimes no amount of warning and lessons can divert disaster from visiting us. BUT we can learn how to carry on. We can learn how we continue to act human, how to hold on to decency, how to hold on to love, how to hold onto hope.
People, there is definitely a difference between seeing something with your own eyes-experiencing it in your mind to the point of it imprinting there before you give it permission to, and reading and learning about something. There is a finesse to allowing this information- this concept cooked up by another human mind - to be accepted and processed as truth or lie. Then the truth or lie must be positioned somewhere in our minds. We have to judge it and decide is it worthy of note. Is it just complete rubbish and needs to be discarded and forgotten (but do we REALLY ever forget anything?) Our minds learn as we get older how to do this processing faster and faster based on previous examples. This becomes a part of our mindset, part of our biased thinking. Most of this learned biased thinking is beneficial - example: wolves will probably eat you given the chance. Some of it is very destructive socially- example: Step mothers will probably lead you out to the woods and leave you for dead given the chance. BUT, if a person has the time and chance to weigh this information against concrete examples they KNOW to be true - much of this socially destructive biased thinking can be undone, or at least modified.
So, seeing and the mind experiencing an event is much more likely to sink into our minds faster than the event or information that is presented for thought and introspection at our own pace.
In a few studies I have read over the years it has been said that the Grimms helped shape German imagination, communication of those ideas, and language. History has shown that the German people have been creative and imaginative as a whole. Before WWII it was said that Germanic cultures had a high sense of right and wrong. There was a rigidity to it as time wore on, some said. Now we refer to the German Guilt. This sense of right and wrong holds them to a commitment to be better, to never let the big IT happen again. The dark stories of the Brothers Grimm seem to land on the lap of German blame. Those stories were collected because they were world wide archetypes- a theme of passage from innocence to experience.They were not meant to showcase "just how dark the Germans are." I have seen and heard from Germans many times over: there is this stifling of new ideas and dreams in the suspicions that they could produce another homicidal Pied Piper ready to soothe the ills of those willing to follow along.
I believe this is an another tragedy. I believe there are a great many works that have gone undone because of the grief and fear and blame that has been held so tightly by a people that also carry a self shame.
We need to be careful what we allow in our minds' eyes, what we allow in our conversations, what we allow in our hearts. Not to be like the self condemned Germans, but to protect our sense of love, innocence, hope and perseverance. Take the time to process and filter what is being said, what is being heard, what is being seen in the media. I am NOT making a call for censorship, or regulations or anything like that. I am making a call to beg everyone to use their minds, use their wisdom they have, use their sense of love and carefully and lovingly consider what you teach and carry on to the next person you see today, and the next day. Do not let these things we have seen and heard make us fearful and reactionary beyond what is reasonable.
This time before Christmas I ask that you slow down, unplug, take a deep breath, clear your mind and focus on what and who are most important to you. Choose to see, do, think, and speak intentionally.
It is perfectly fine to cry for the children, the adults, and their families at Sandy Hook Elementary School. For them, the Big Bad Wolf was real and he devoured them. We did not get to be the Wood Cutter that rescued them, because this is not a fairy tale, this is real life. It is OK to not know what to do or how to move forward. Grief and Mourning is this phase of life, the next one will be healing.
-Suzanna
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