Week Six: What would you Change?

I love this video.  I have to admit after stumbling by accident into the Jubilee Project last week, I ended up digging a bit deeper into this during week six.  I find that so many of their videos line up perfectly with my focus of transitions and change and risk-taking.  However, they do have a bit of a formulaic feel after you watch a few of them.

The storytelling part of this really creates empathy between the individuals in the video and the viewer.  Every woman who has had a child can identify with the woman who wants to erase the stretch marks she has earned as a result of pregnancy!  We all wonder if we should cover those grey hairs or not--even men these days are doing more than just dabbling with hair color which is quite a shift in my adult experience.  (Of course, they could go the route of my husband who opted for bald as a recourse to turning grey!)

The digital literacies demonstrate in this video are fairly sophisticated--without appearing so.  This is deceptively simple in terms of setting.  Just a tall stool in an open room somewhere.  However, the lighting is perfect.  The camera angles are flattering.  The background music enhances the overall feel of the message--it's a good fit for the message.  All of the technical features come together for a cohesive whole.

It is in the message though that the strength is really found.  This is what the Jubilee Project excels at--the delivery of a message which is thoughtful and thought provoking.  It takes me back to one of my favorite quotes from Robert McCammon's A Boy's Life:

“You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves."

Then I view a video like this and it occurs to me that we were all kids once who would only change their bodies by growing mermaid tails or wings so they could fly.  I wish we could embody that wishful ambition for living magical lives instead of allowing that to become consumed by the trials of daily living which quickly reduce us to making a living rather than living a life.  Those are two very different things--the first of which will never require a mermaid tail or a set of wings.  So, in periods of transition and thinking about risk taking, I am wondering how to make that mindshift backwards and rekindle the comet fire within myself and the students I serve.