"I trust you... I'll always trust you."

Have you ever looked at your life and found that you've been drawn to particular themes and storylines, sometimes from a very young age, for seemingly no apparent reason? I'm not talking about the really basic ones like love or general heroics, but something more specific? If you're old enough to have had time to see things play out, perhaps you've even noticed that they strangely make sense later. I'll explain, if I can. Ever since 2009, I've had to rebuild myself from the complete devastation, one atom at a time, as many of you have. Part of this process finds me picking apart some of my childhood and looking at inner motivations and mysteries, while staying up all night babbling to myself, dancing around the living room with my mp3 player. In the process I've discovered (or rediscovered) things long forgotten. The particular ones I'm talking about right now (themes/stories) aren't necessarily something massive, and maybe it's just grasping at straws, but I have a sort of theory. I'll leave that for the end, though.

First, when I was a kid my favorite moments in movies and books were so often those that dealt with trust and loyalty, of steadfast honor and devotion when appearances or rumors may have indicated something suspicious. As an example, this clip below of a scene from the film "Legend" just pulled at my deepest within like crazy. I loved this scene, uh! And I always remembered the quote (this post's title). The story went like this: Lili ("Lily") was the pure, innocent princess who Jack trusted above all others and whom he wished to marry someday. However, when he showed her a beautiful secret (two unicorns in the forest), she reached out to pet one, not understanding that this was forbidden. The world soon turned to ice and everyone, including Jack and Lili, assumed it was due to this 'violation'. (However, it wasn't. She was actually innocent enough to touch one without repercussions.) Lili is then kidnapped by the 'dark lord', who tries to convert her to his side and make her his girl. It appears at one point that he has succeeded, as her appearance has changed dramatically and she is seemingly participating in a dark ritual ... sacrificing the last unicorn. If Lili does indeed cut the horn from its head, light will be extinguished from the world forever and evil will have triumphed. Jack believes he knows her heart and her soul, though, and he still trusts her. If he's wrong, the world ends. There's a lot at stake if Jack doesn't kill her before her sword falls:



^ That's one example of the trust theme I meant. Just one of many. It's when those around would think the main character crazy for still believing. Note that this is not misplaced trust. The loyalty here is born of a deep look into the soul and thus can be counted on.

Similar themes of "all is not what it seems / trust your heart" were played out in stories I actually wrote as a child, too. The two examples I'm giving were written before I ever discovered Michael Jackson, so bear that in mind. Around 10/11 years old we were supposed to write a story with a moral. As is the case with most stories I wrote (or read!) as a kid, there was way more going on in my head than what ended up on paper, but if I remember it correctly it was supposed to go like this:

A big, scary dragon lived in a cave just outside of town. Everyone was terrified of him. All manner of wild tales were told, of fire-breathing, torture and certain death. Knights were sent out to slay the dragon regularly, but didn't succeed. Someone (a knight? a child? I don't remember, but let's call him Sam for now) ended up near the cave and sure enough, there was fire-breathing! (But you'd breathe fire too if some yayhoo came to kill you.) Sam, like the others, eventually chickened out and ran away in terror, but not so far that he didn't hear the dragon sobbing in its cave moments later. Curiosity overcoming fear and Sam snuck back to the cave and finally asked him, "Why are you crying?" To his surprise, the dragon turned out not to be such a monster after all, but a sensitive, lonely magical creature, doomed to a life of ostracism and bad press, just for being himself. People just don't understand dragons, you know. The two of them sat around and chatted, becoming friends, and eventually Sam devised a plan to introduce his friend to the people of the town, to show them who this dragon really was. The people, however, wouldn't listen. They screamed and ran and threw stones and shot arrows, like usual. A dragon, it seems, simply was a monster to them. Period. Sam and his friend ended up having to leave the kingdom altogether to find their shared destiny elsewhere, in a land far, far away. (I guess this complicated moral is what earned me less than an A, lol? It was too much like real life, instead of the nice story of reconciliation and acceptance that we all want to hear.)

The next school year, when I was 11/12, one of my creative writing projects got published in our city's newspaper via a 6th grade writing contest. We had to choose a photo and write a short five or so page story about it. I chose a picture of an old tin-roofed mill beside a still pond. It went basically like this:

Jane is a girl of the my age at the time. She lives on a farm and likes to explore the countryside during the summer. Being a tomboy, she manages just fine on her own. One day she winds up all the way out by the pond and mill, where she's not really supposed to go. She walks around the water's edge to the mill and decides to take a break in the grass nearby and ends up watching the clouds and drifting off to sleep. She awakens when it's already too dark to see well enough to get all the way home. It begins raining. She sneaks into the mill for shelter. It's dark and dank inside and she's in for a real shock: there's a man staying in the abandoned mill! Initially she is startled and tries to run away, but then decides he seems alright. She learns that his name is Max and that he's a total drop-out from society. He had a great job in the big city, but found it all unfulfilling. He's a dreamer and an artist, seeing so much more in the world around him than others do. He goes from place to place with nothing but a rucksack and some charm, sleeping wherever he ends up for the night. Jane and Max stay up late talking, while he shares with her some of his food. He tells her about the hidden wonders around her that others have forgotten, like the rhythm that the rain beats on the metal roof as it falls, or the way the sunlight reflects in the dew-laden air at dawn. He opens her eyes and imagination to the magic within nature and tells her never to lose that, not to let society take away that childlike innocence in pursuit of adulthood. Eventually she drifts off to sleep and awakens early in the morning to find that Max is gone, away on another adventure in a new place. She realizes her parents are probably worried sick (you think?! - and hey, why didn't Max stay to make sure she got home safely? Oh wait... I was just 11, nevermind...), but she stops in time to see the mist over the lake glowing pink in the sunrise, beautiful and wondrous, just like Max said it would be. She vows to never forget him or his wisdom and runs on home, never to even tell the story of Max to her parents. (Smart enough, I suspect, to not give them a heartattack with the knowledge that their 11 year old daughter spent the night in a dangerous, delapidated building with a questionable adult male hippie transient, lol.)

Again, all three examples here pre-date my discovery of Michael in 1984, but I'm guessing those who would actually read this blog probably saw some parallels right away, such as: 1) trusting someone said to be an untrustworthy destroyer of innocence, because you know their heart, 2) the "monster" turns out not to be a bad guy after all, but instead is a misunderstood friend who just wants to be loved (ok, he does breathe fire sometimes, but he's a dragon - nobody's 'perfect'), 3) sometimes the rumors aren't true!, 4) and sometimes people want to believe the rumors anyway, no matter what you tell them, 5) you can't necessarily convert the ignorant ones to the light of truth, 6) your home kingdom may be filled with sensationalized BS about you, causing you to seek refuge elsewhere, but nevertheless you may find a friend or two close by, 7) the archetype of the magical teacher who comes into your life, opens your eyes to wonders, and is once again leaves, while you are forever thankful for the transformation, 8) adulthood can suck the life out of you, but it doesn't have to - you have a choice to retain something of the child within if you exercise the faculties of wonder and appreciation, 9) sometimes you have to go outside the ordinary to find your destiny, 10) those around you might not be so understanding about a kid forming a special connection with an adult outside the family.

And this leads to my theory in a roundabout sort of way. I realize all these things are classical dilemmas, archetypes, elements of myths and stories retold for ages. Yes, all true, but it's the particular draw and fact that I wrote those two stories at a young age that intrigues me. These are just scratching the surface of this subject, but what if we're drawn to issues that we have chosen to confont in this lifetime? What if a blueprint or outline of our life, a divine plan we helped create for ourselves before we were born, pulls at our psyche from birth? What if we have specific lessons to learn, special jobs to do, great dramas to play our part in and we know this at a deep level and thus bring those things up to confront over and over, as if to prepare ourselves for what's to come? Human beings are always looking for dangers around us, running scenarios to find solutions for escape, but what if there are primary issues at a soul level that echo through us years beforehand? Could someone be destined to save someone from a burning home when they're 40 and afterwards be stunned about it, because all their life they'd had this weird feeling about fire, dreams of a person trapped in a fire, etc? One could argue they were braver in the face of this danger because of their draw to the topic, but couldn't it be possible that they were drawn to the topic to prepare for this event?

Or is it just a self-fulfilling prophecy? How would we know? Maybe sometimes? But I don't think it's self-fulfilling that I wrote stories before even knowing who Michael was (in 1982 to 1984 - when the world LOVED him) about a misunderstood dragon hated in his own land because of false assumptions and rumors, that "I", the human in the story befriends, or of straying from the typical path and ending up sharing a secret connection with a man who is a magical teacher, showing me the wonders of remaining childlike and looking for beauty. Actually, this kind of blows my mind. It sounds too 'good' to be true, but it's really the tip of the iceberg. A giant one it's taken years to realize is even there. But I'm not writing this post today to try to convince anyone of anything. If that were so, I'm guessing I'd have done a pretty poor job by this point, lol. I'm just thinking out loud, really. So what about you? Do you find similar things in your life?

"My friend, my someone in the dark, was you..."