metanoia

The little spirits have 'star wars fever' like you can't imagine. It has permeated their play completely! The play almost always has something to do with them hunting down each other with "lifesavers" or building ships and weapons with the manip toys. They speak of the mythology incessantly. Some have seen parts of the saga and some not at all but they collectively piece their information together like a jigsaw puzzle, carefully filling in all the gaps. Sometimes I correct them when they are wrong or confused but most often I observe/listen and try not to feed with my perceptions.

I notice the little spirits have more difficult work deciphering the saga than those of us who grew up with episodes 4,5 and 6. The central theme of Luke becoming a hero and battling evil is compelling. The story twists as Luke finds out Vader is his father but the trilogy ends with Anakin finding his way back to the 'light side'

We had a genuine hero story to savor.

These kids have grown up with the challenge of coming to some sort of terms with episodes 1,2 and 3: a sweet child's metamorphosis into a cyborg whose heart is darkened by pure evil and hatred.

Joseph Campbell described star wars as a 'Monomyth'

"The stories speak to something inside us that wants to know how our world lives, that wants to make order of it and find some meaning. Myths fulfill that in a way that science and facts don't always do, because science and facts don't always give us meaning."

These days I'm thinking of star wars as a child's first tasty lick of 'ultra-violence' which serves to prepare the palette for all the other feasts to come (both imagined and real). How yummy!

I wonder if you study a myth from a different starting point if it totally effects your perception about what that myth means? Does that question make sense? I wonder what meaning the children are savoring? Meaning is such an evolutionary process, always shifting as our knowledge base grows.

It sure is interesting to study the saga(s) through children's perceptions. Yoda said it best, "truly wonderful, the mind of a child is." I'll keep listening/observing.