Lesson #6 on Becoming a Ya Ya Hiké: Finding Empathy

     In my children's fantasy adventure novel, Kiva & the Stone Nation, Kiva learns how to become a shape-shifting shaman from Scout, the girl-shaped stone tasked as her guide. As Kiva's lessons continue she is taught that the best way to shift is to connect with the object or person she wants to become.  But after she shifts successfully for the first time she is warned, “You just learned lesson number six the hard way,” said Scout. “When you use a real object as a guide in shifting, you connect to every cell of that object—its thoughts, its feeling, its senses … and, as you just found out, its memories.”

   What Scout is teaching Kiva is the same lesson found in one of my favorite books, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. In chapter 3 of the novel Atticus Finch says to his daughter Scout, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view-until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."  

     What both the stone, Scout, and Atticus Finch are trying to convey to their pupils is the concept of empathy. We humans have a propensity to judge quickly. Numerous research articles have been written on how first impressions often become the basis for how well relationships fair. So if there is a bad first impression, even though the person may be a nice person having a bad day, we often forget how complex humans are and instead remember only that bad first impression. "Climbing into someone else's skin" gives us the opportunity to step back from the first impression and remember that we all have many stories inside of us. Our families, our past, our upbringing, good and catastrophic events we have experienced, all shape who we are. I'm also a believer that deep inside every person, even the one's we consider untrustworthy, there is a spark of the Divine. Climbing into someone else's skin allows us to find the Divine in all people. And as Kiva & the Stone Nation reminds us, even the creatures of the forest and the stones have stories to tell. 

     Take a moment today to think about a person, creature or object that may have given you a bad first impression. Then "climb into his (their) skin and walk around in it." I'd love to hear from you what you learned.

Happy Reading!


     

LIFE IS AN ILLUSION

According to Scout, the girl-shaped stone in my novel, Kiva & the Stone Nation, “Only a few creatures in this forest walk beyond the veil of time and space, even though, if they wanted to, they could learn. But as you have begun to understand, walking beyond the veil of time and space isn’t easy. That’s why most animals and humans prefer to stay ignorant, oblivious to all the other realms.”

This is Lesson #5 to becoming a YaYa Hiké. What Scout was trying to teach Kiva in this lesson is that life is an illusion. If we never look beyond the solid form of anything then we are living a lie. For everything in the Universe is made up of energy,such as quarks and particles, that come together to form the solid. Yet in a blink of an eye everything can change form and become something else.

Think of a tree in the forest. As you walk past this majestic symbol of nature you see rough or smooth bark, long or short branches and leaves or needles as they sway in the breeze. But as the seasons go by you also see that a tree is a living being, filled with resin and chlorophyll along with sap and heartwood to bring the tree alive as it breathes in carbon dioxide and breathes out oxygen. Now cut the tree down and it becomes a piece of wood that can be shaped into houses and furniture, or burned for heat until all that is left are ashes. Yet how often do you stop and look at the tree and see where it came from, where it is going and see its potential future.

Even once that tree becomes a piece of furniture it is still just an illusion, because at a molecular level it is quarks and particles and energy bouncing in and out to create the solid form. And with everything, it is constantly changing and shifting and will one day return to its particles and quarks' stage like everything else.

So everything in the world is energy and energy never stays the same, always shifting and changing to become something else. There in lies the truth of the illusion. So take time everyday not just to smell the roses, but to pay attention to them at the minutest level, to see where they have come from, what form they take at this moment and what their future potential can be.

Below are a few interesting quotes I thought you might like on illusion.

Happy Reading!

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. Albert Einstein

There is as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream. Ralph Waldo Emerson

If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion. Herman Hesse.