I think Disney productions warped my developmental sense of reality. All of the animated features with forest settings do not reflect the world as I have found it. My walks in the woods are nothing like the stories depicted by Disney. The really sad part of this picture is how long it took me to bring this into awareness, I mean I’m almost sixty-six and it only recently has became really clear.

True is the fact that I love hiking and being in the woods. The trees and running streams are soothing and so relaxing. It is like having mental massage that removes all the stress of daily life. But I have noticed for a while a sense of expectation, followed with a little disappointment on my hikes. I would wonder what the feeling was about. It felt so out-of-place with were I was and what I was doing.

My process for resolving the barriers or discrepancies I find in my personal awareness involves two steps: first, I allow the thoughts to simmer in the recesses of my mind until they are ready to emerge and secondly, after they reveal themselves I reflect on them in a nonjudgemental way. Sometimes this method will take a while for the answer to reveal itself, but the answer always rises to the surface. One day while walking on a trail the answer to my hiking dilemma came to me, not in a flash but in a gentle birthing of awareness. I realized that somewhere in the back of my mind I had expectations that were not coming to life. I was looking for happy little birds, cheerfully sing on the branches along the trail. I expected little bunnies to be smiling at us as we passed. I was looking for chipmunks to be playing along the edge of the trees. I wanted a cute little doe to be sniffing the perfect flowers blooming alongside the path. And of course, there should be a cuddly little bear rolling in the grass, soaking up the sunshine with golden honey dripping off his paws. In other words, I thought nature should emulate an animated Disney film. All creatures should be happy and playful, loving and kind to each other. When a storm would come, all would seek shelter to weather it and then emerge to a bright, fresh world. And when tragedy fell as it does at times, all would experience the sorrow in a loving, kind and compassionate way. How did I allow myself to become so thoroughly and unconditionally duped, and how did I remain that way for so long?

When I was a child TV was magical. I could not imagine how it worked but I loved it. We had three channels and you could switch from one to the other if you did not like what you were watching. There was an antenna on the rood and of course a small one on the set itself. They all had tinfoil attached to them to increase reception. And they all had black and white screens. As a matter-of-fact our first TV had a 7 inch screen, contained in a very large box. There were no “kids” channels but there were a few “kids” shows like the Mickey Mouse Club and cartoons. The TV was controlled by the adults in the house and shows were geared for their viewing; but who cared, it was TV, it was magic. At night I would hope they were so involved in the show they were watching they would forget bedtime and I could stay in the dimensional zone of TV a little longer. Sometimes I got lucky and others not so much.

Mysteries and cowboy shows were big and while I really liked them I also was intrigued with the news and weather. The news shows were awesome. They gave sound and visuals to things and places I had only read about. It was all so serious and unlike most “news anchors” today, the anchors then were fairly neutral. I understand today that somehow I was excepting everything on TV as having some bases in the natural world even when I knew it was not so. I grew up filtering my thoughts and actions through the eyes of others. Unfortunately these others often had something to sell. My perceptions of life was skewed and it troubled me, enough that I was uncomfortable with it.

For a long time I had trouble conceptualizing life. I was expected to view my situations as the cup being half-full or half-empty. I would always go with the half-full view because I thought it the right answer. Always be positive and put a good spin on everything. Oh well, was the answer for things I felt I must accept even when I did not want to do so. It was done in a grudging manner. Then, one day I had an awakening that produced a moment of clarity. I understood that both conditions existed at the same time. The cup was both half-full and half-empty. They defined each other. Neither is inherently good or bad; they had the value that I assigned them. The value I assigned was based on what I thought or felt at the time, and those were almost always based solely on my conditioned reflexes. Those reflexes were the actions in the script I was living as I played my part in life. Somewhere deep inside me I believed that life should emulate the script in my head.
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Turns out that I had “bought” a lot of what they were “selling.”