Like Vader, we all hide behind masks that protect us from the harsh, sometimes toxic outer world; and as with Vader, healing means learning to remove the mask, to return to and reveal our truest selves.
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Chapter VII. The Rescue Dog
“If we’re going to do this,” Lamar said, “the best way is by water…”
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Chapter VI. Seafoam
Ron Holbrooke was strangling her…
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Chapter V. Maybank
Dark eyes, half-hid by the glare on his wire-frame glasses, and a bristly white mustache…
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Chapter IV. Haint Blue
“I don’t know how you can drink that in this heat,” Devin mused…
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Chapter III. Shadow Box
Lamar’s Rio slid into the lot of a dive on the edge of town, some three or four miles up Sixty-one…
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Chapter II. Not a Ghost, But an Echo
The stranger thrust them on in short strokes, stabbing the creek with his paddle like a heron spearing fish…
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Chapter I. A Salt-Edged Blade
It was nearing five o’clock and the breeze, muted here beneath the pines, carried the smell of the marsh…
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Inside the Walls:
An Enneagram Analysis of Stranger Things
The Enneagram reveals nine ways the ego hides our essence behind a mask — like Will Byers hidden in the Upside Down, looking out at the world through the walls of his own house, waiting to be found and freed.
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Turning the Wheel:
An Enneagram Analysis of Lost
An ancient wisdom tradition with roots in Sufi, Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist mysticism, the Enneagram is a fitting lens for viewing and understanding the characters of Lost, and maybe — by seeing ourselves in their stories — uncovering our own secret strengths and wounds.
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Mark Twain and the Folklore of Day and Night
A look at two parallel ways Twain uses folklore and superstition in his works, and what this split says about the author himself.
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Yokai: The Folklore Roots of Pokémon
When Pokemon GO! released in the summer of 2016, it wasn’t my first encounter with a breed of monsters and ghosts unlike any elsewhere in the world: yōkai, the supernatural creatures of Japanese folklore…
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Constellation
It was a sound he might have heard any night on the edge of the woods, machete in hand, bent from cutting bamboo from the slope beyond the highway…
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‘Fighting the Long Defeat’ : Nature and Grief in Tolkien and Medieval Poetry
Especially in The Lord of the Rings, medieval ideas of nature — from its decline and hostility to culture, to its own suffering alongside us — color Tolkien’s writing, where they ultimately develop into a reconciliation between wilderness and hearth…
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