Tags
Dorothy, journey, life, lost, mentors, ruby slippers, Wicked Witch of the East, wizard of oz, Yellow brick road
We all have a path in life. In fact, it is infinitely more likely that we have several paths in life. Each one leading to a separate place, each journey a unique adventure full of different people.
Depending which road we take at any given point in our lives can change our futures drastically.
We use self-awareness, inspiration and instinct to chose this path, however, we truly can never know if the choices would lead us to our intended destination. The only certainty is the outcome of those decisions. Once we find them, we may realize they are not what we wanted or were meant to have in the first place.
In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy dreams of another life, far from the grey monotony of life on a small farm in Kansas. She is bold and unapologetic and takes matters into her own hands, creating the possibility of a new future, one she builds for herself. A place she believes she will find fulfillment.
An unexpected turn of events lands Dorothy in an unfamiliar land, surrounded by unfamiliar faces. Not knowing what to do or where to go, only that she, by the luck of fate has acquired great power. As reward for killing the Wicked Witch of the East, tormentor of Munchkin Country and its peaceful inhabitants, Dorothy earns the highly sought after source of the ill-fated witches power; the elusive Ruby Slippers.
However, though she possesses these slippers and their unmatched magical capacity, Dorothy is clueless how to harness this new-found power. She cannot if figure out how to utilize their strength. She had capability yet lacks knowledge.
Dorothy is thrown off by this unexpected bump in the road and is overcome with concern for her family. She has been freed from the shackles of stubbornness and self involvement. Dorothy only wants one thing. To find her way back to the home she once resented.
Landing in the colorful, bright magical land of Oz, the light shining on her Technicolor face, she realizes that the thing she wants most is what she already had in the first place. A home.
At some time or another we have all been in this situation. Well, not EXACTLY this scenario, but you get my drift.
Perhaps when you were in this predicament you had an angel, a mentor, a pink bubble of hope float down and grant you the direction you needed to find your way. To show you which road to take. One where you may face hardships but also make lasting friends, learn who you really are, what you want and how hard you are willing to work for it. To make those dreams possible for those around you and eventually make your way to where you want to be in life. To a place you can call home.
Some of us never get a visit from Glinda, Good Witch of the South, and we must blindly chose our own paths. This is not always terrible, as they say, it is the journey not the destination. Well, that’s what they say anyhow.
~ the Salem inspired audacious amateur blogger
side note…ever notice how Glenda said that bad witches are ugly then asked Dorothy if she was a good witch or a bad witch?
Yes, well I recently learned at the Salem Witch Museum (which by the if you are ever in Salem, MA – SKIP IT, waste o time if you’ve ever read the crucible) that the whole green face wart covered black hat thing depicting witches was, well not completely, but heavily impacted by Hollywood and The Wizard of Oz. Apparently the directors got ultra excited about “color” being new to cinema and other new technologies and took the old hag witch thing to a whole new level.
That said, I think “bad” witches being thought of as ugly originated in Europe, because they were usually unwed or older women in the community who still followed the pagan ways, acted as midwives and used herbs and other nature based tools men felt threatened by their knowledge of. So, if you were young and pretty, why would you be an “old maid”? You must be a “good witch”, which I can only assume means a good subservient wife who used her “powers” to please her husband.
I actually learned a lot on this lil side trip!
I said….I learned a lot from your trip too! LOL Love your response.
haha, thanks! That stuff is always fascinating to me. how images are created, and “labels”. A lot of it stems from like Victorian era England, at least from what I recall from my sociology courses on Foucault.