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Showing posts from September, 2010

Home is Where the Dog Is

In the past ten years I have been teaching The Wizard of Oz to my college LIT students, sometimes three classes per semester, two or three semesters a year, and in recent years,instead of paying attention to the film itself (a film whose dialogue is etched in my memory), I pay more attention to student reactions and responses. Once Dorothy hooks up with her companions along the yellow brick road (a symbol of the third chakra, our core self), we see that each character is not searching for an object like a heart or a brain but is searching for an integral part of himself: chakra he thinks he is missing. Of course we know that no chakras are missing; they just have not been activated in the characters' consciousness. This pretty much parallels the way we live our lives in a mundane world polluted by noise that keeps us from our spiritual selves. Who leads us to our spiritual selves in this film? The same creature who leads all us sharing this blog: Toto, the dog. He is the