Insights from Amelie

In his autobiography Take Me Home, John Denver says of Buckminster Fuller, "During this fourth decade of my life, this belated passage I was trying to effect from late adolescence to the beginnings of my adulthood, the only other changes wrought in my psyche with anywhere near the same charge of excitement that falling in love again produced, were those connected to getting to know Buckminster Fuller beyond the superficial graces, and through that relationship seeing Windstar's [Denver's foundation that sponsors environmental education] possibilities taken to another, higher level.”

Getting to know people beyond the superficial graces, in a way that empowers us to harness our lives to bring about change for the better in our world.  So many of us live in the superficial graces, never going deeper to the oneness of being that connects us all.
The journey into the depths of ourselves, and of others, is the hero’s journey of which Joseph Campbell wrote.  It is a journey elucidated by many authors, poets, and more recently movie makers.  This week and next, I’d like to explore just how we get to know people beyond the superficial graces through the movie Amelie.

Amelie’s mother was psychotic, which meant she never touched Amelie in the normal way a child receives physical contact.  Amelie’s father had been an army doctor and gave his daughter regular check-ups.   He was not the sort of man who was comfortable hugging his child, so the clinical touch of the stethoscope was the only parental contact Amelie experienced.  As a consequence, when he placed his stethoscope on her, Amelie’s heart would race.  Hearing her accelerated rhythm, her father declared she had a heart condition and was unfit for school.  Amelie grew up isolated from practically all social contact.

She did however have one friend, a goldfish.  The goldfish is symbolic of how she relates to her world.  You can look at a goldfish, but there is always a barrier between you.  You can’t touch, show affection, or receive affection.   When I think of giving a child a pet, I think of something warm that they can hold and love, and that will love them back.  Something affectionate, like a puppy––not a cold fish.  But Amelie’s parents give her only a lone fish in a confined little bowl, a symbol of the way the distant way they related to her.

In response to the psychosis of the household, the goldfish goes nuts and jumps out of its bowl trying to kill itself.  It survives but, deemed too much trouble for this stressed-out household, is dumped into the river.  The goldfish looks wistfully up at Amelie as the Parisian sky weeps, raindrops substituting for the tears absent from the young girl’s eyes––in this family you don’t reveal your feelings.

So Amelie takes to a life behind an instamatic camera, furnished by her mother in compensation for the goldfish.  Just as she could only observe the fish through the glass, now she observes life through the lens of the camera.  Locked in her own goldfish bowl, she is not involved, not a participant, but on the sidelines.

When Amelie moves out on her own as a young adult, she cannot connect.  Even when she is in bed with a guy, we see her staring up at the ceiling, utterly detached.  She felt more from the stethoscope.  You can see there is a caring human being in there, but she can’t connect.

Her life takes a turn with the news of the death of Princess Diana, which so shocks her that she drops what she is holding, and it rolls and hits the baseboard.  The tile comes loose, revealing a secret hiding place in which is stored a little boy’s metal treasure chest from some forty years ago when he lived in the same apartment.  The objects in the little chest represent the significant moments of his childhood.  A toy bicycle, a photo of the Tour de France––symbols of life racing by and the need to engage it right when it’s in front of you or you miss it altogether.

The objects in the box awaken Amelie’s yearning for something more.  She is compelled to track down the now grown boy and return his treasure.  Clutching the metal chest, she crisscrosses Paris following up every listing for the name Brotedeaux.  By connecting with the symbols of this boy’s life, her deeper self is trying to find a way to reach out and touch someone.

Amelie may be dysfunctional in terms of relationships, but inside she is a gracious human being who longs to express the goodness of her heart.  She tells herself that if recovery of his treasure trove causes the boy to respond with anything like the awe she experiences when she discovers something wonderful, she will dedicate her otherwise disconnected life to doing good things like this to awaken joy in others.

This sense of ourselves as good, and wanting to express this goodness toward someone else, is the essence of what we call desire.  Desire flows from a feeling of our own joy and a yearning to share that joy.  Feeling wonderful inside, we search out ways to celebrate . . . and someone to celebrate with.

I recognize that this isn’t the usual way people think of desire.  We tend to think of desire as wanting something we don’t have.  You’re life feels empty, so you crave something to make you feel complete.

In fact, the reverse is true.  Amelie is no empty person, she is a fascinating and fascinated human being.  As such, life is calling to her, beckoning her to open up her inner world and share it with her outer world.  This is the case with all of us.  If we feel empty, it’s only an illusion.  We have so suppressed our desire that we no longer are in touch with it and feel flat, needy of something external to excite us because we are not excited about ourselves.  A flirtation, an American Express Platinum card, skiing, casual sex, drugs, mall binging––so many things can substitute for the aliveness of our deepest self.

Amelie is caught in what Saint Paul two thousand years ago describes as the flesh versus the spirit.  Paul’s classic statement on this is found in his letter to the Galatians, where he writes, “My point is that you should live in accord with the spirit and you will not yield to the cravings of the flesh.  The flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh; the two are directly opposed.  This is why you do not do what your will intends.”

Most people on hearing this passage in church probably interpret it in the following manner.  There is a spiritual part of me that inclines to unselfish behavior and delights in the holy, and there is another part of me that is centered on physical gratification, and these two parts of me are engaged in a tug-of-war.  So I am supposed to pray and fast and exercize spiritual discipline to ensure the victory of the higher part of me over the lower part.  Lent, coming on the heels of Mardi Gras, epitomizes this struggle.

If you think about this interpretation, it pits God against God’s own creation.  God invented fleshly pleasure, and then says stay away from it.  In other words, the typical Christian, Buddhist, and Islamic view of our normal human desires makes God schizophrenic.

This totally misses Paul’s meaning.  The flesh, for Paul, is not my physical body with its appetites.  It is rather a philosophy of life, a way of viewing myself.  I see myself in an extremely narrow way, symbolized by Amelie’s restricted existence, and this view of myself limits my capacity for the full enjoyment of life.  Yielding to the fears I have accrued, I compromise myself.  I settle for less than makes my heart sing.  Having such a truncated perspective causes me to exclude, ignore, have no time or place for the larger view of life to which Amelie is being drawn by the spirit.

When Paul speaks of the spirit, he is referring to a view of life that embraces the wholeness of our being.  When I am led by my spirit, I have a fundamental faith that pleasure is God-invented and good.  The gentle tug of the spirit encourages me to give my desire full rein.

The problem with so much relating, particularly of a passionate nature, is that there is a paucity of desire.  People don’t really want each other with an overwhelming passion.  They want an itch scratched, without wanting the person.  They are afraid to ever encounter the person, even while their bodies are entwined––witness the number who only do it in the dark or kiss with their eyes closed.  Their lovemaking is about as connecting as is Amelie’s involvement with her world.  Flesh may touch, but hearts and thoughts are often worlds apart.  There’s no integrity to their relationship.

 Many hardly bother with each other anymore––it’s become too much of a chore.  Or, like Amelie staring at the ceiling, she may be so disengaged that she’s dreaming of the mall.  Going through the motions is the price she pays for spending his paycheck.  People selling themselves out.

It is this narrowing of our desire to a mere scratching of an itch that Paul calls the flesh, and it is in radical tension with the spirit in us that yearns to pull us into an unlimited, unfettered, totally liberated expression of our desire.  As Sebastian Moore comments, “Behind the insatiable lust of the promiscuous and the power-hungry and the money-greedy, is the voice that asks, inaudibly, and with concealed desperation, ‘What else is there?’” Doing things without heart is what Paul means by “living according to the flesh.” We are talking about going through life in a manner that close us off to the deepest possible encounter that we are capable of.

There is no “higher” and “lower” part of us, there is rather a tension between our radical desire to grow into people who can embrace life with our whole being, and our inertia, our tendency to stay as we are.  This is what is meant by flesh versus spirit.

Living by the flesh is a stuckness in stages of development that were necessary for us along the way, but now represent a refusal to grow into someone who can give their whole being to life.  There is an apt symbol of what we do to ourselves when we limit ourselves like this in the movie.  It is a statue, two feet tall, with a red pointed hat, a white beard, and a red suit.  When Amelie’s mother dies, her father retreats into a solitary existence and abandons any thought of living out the dream he has had of traveling the world.  The little garden gnome was a gift from his work, and he had stored it.  Now, he pulls it out and plants it in cement as a shrine to his dead wife, a symbol of how his life is fossilized in the past.

Amelie, seeing her father’s stuckness, steals the gnome and gives it to an acquaintance  who is a flight attendant.  Her father is troubled that the gnome has vanished.  Then he begins receiving photos of the gnome in front of Big Ben in London, the Kremlin in Moscow, the pyramids in Egypt.  He is puzzled by these snapshots.  An inanimate object is enjoying what he should be enjoying.  Spirit is tugging at his flesh.  He is being invited to think outside his box, to rethink his stuckness.  Though his flesh has drawn back and settled for his limited existence, his spirit yearns to fly.  He is caught in a momentous tug-of-war, in which spirit finally triumphs as we see him get in the taxi cab and head for the airport.

When the spirit begins to stir within us, inviting us to stretch ourselves beyond the social niceties, it inevitably becomes such a titanic battle that our only way forward is a leap of faith.  You just have to go for it, risking everything.  It’s what Paul calls in a letter to the Corinthians walking by faith and not by sight.  You follow your heart and refuse to stay stuck in the way things are “supposed” to be.

The way the spirit lures Amelie into eventually taking such a leap of faith is by catching her in her own stratagems.  She has all kinds of elaborate ways of involving herself in life without ever quite making contact.  Slipping notes into someone’s pocket.  Wearing large sunglasses and a scarf wrapped around her head, even having her photo taken in a black hat and Zoro mask, so she won’t be recognized.  Leaving object where people will find them.  Phoning unoccupied telephone kiosks just when the person she is fascinated by is passing by.

We all have stratagems we use to avoid real contact, ways in which we pick up coins to stop the parade just when it has the potential of becoming exciting.  A little excitement is one thing––but let’s not get too carried away with ecstasy.  We like our fishbowls.  We resist getting out from behind the camera.

Spirit seeks to awaken us to ecstasy in every aspect of our lives.  The essence of ecstasy is the experience of engaging people and situations in ways that draw out our infinite depths.  It is expressing ourselves more and more truly, authentically, genuinely, allowing more and more of our infinite capacity for self-expression to be realized.

There is nothing aloof about desire.  Lust, wanting to scratch an itch without wanting the person, wanting the pay packet without relishing the work, is aloof.  But desire is engaged, committed, wholehearted.  It is living life with intensity, transcending the drabness of ordinary existence, until our whole being is engaged in every moment and we are totally present with the people and events of our lives.

So, play out your stratagems.  But as we shall see, the spirit is wily and will snare Amelie through the very things she uses to escape connection.
In your everyday circumstances, are you aware of the ways that spirit is pressing you to know yourself at a deeper level?  Not head knowledge, not analysis of yourself.  But knowing your heart and becoming aware of an expanding sense of yourself that desires the fullness of life.

In its own way and time, may the spirit corner each of us in our stratagems . . . inviting us to take that leap of faith that will carry us far deeper than the niceties of social graces and so involve us in the parade of celebrating our passion that we don’t even notice the coin.


Insights from Chocolat
The movie Chocolat opens with the words of the village priest, "This is the season of Lent.  It is a time of abstinence, a time of reflection, and hopefully a time of sincere penitence."

Lent--a time to restrict yourself.  Don't give in to something you usually like.  After the binging of Mardi Gras, in preparation for Easter, deny yourself.  Rein in your desire.

The Count Delenoe sets the tone of the village.  He is a strict observant of Lent.  But he is faced with a crisis when the North wind blows in a female and her daughter, both in red capes--symbols of desire, if not of the very handmaidens of the devil himself.  Indeed, in due course, the priest will call this woman Satan's helper.

The count is denying himself even normal food, missing meals, eating the plainest of fare--and right before his eyes materializes a symbol of indulgence.  Vianne Rosher, unmarried, and her daughter Anouk, open a store that flies in the face of the very essence of Lent.  Espying the sinfully delicious array, the shocked count enters the premises, introduces himself to Vianne and invites her to church.  When she announces that she doesn't practice, the count crosses to the hairdresser where he declares to the prudish women of the village, "Have you seen the new shop?"

"The chocolaterie?" they ask.

"Shameless," he gasps. "Opening it just in time for Lent.  Brazen.  My heart goes out to the illegitimate child."

The count is terrified of all that this woman's chocolate shop represents.  It isn't just the chocolate, it's the desire to live life fully, indulge oneself, symbolized by chocolate.  For the count, to indulge his desire would be to admit his marriage is over, his wife long gone, and allow himself to develop a relationship with the church organist, who is in love with him but is incredibly repressed, and with whom he is in love and cannot face the fact.

Christianity as understood by most constitutes a massive suppression of desire, with Lent as the epitome of this suppression.  Not only Christianity has a tough time with desire, but Buddhists also propose that desire is undesirable and indeed the very cause of suffering.  Islam also has little tolerance for desire, as reflected in the burqua shrouding the female form.  For many religions, the path to nirvana is self-denial.  They imagine that to elimate desire is the path to peace of mind and thus the way to be closer to the gods.

In direct conflict with this suppression of desire, Vianne serves hot chocolate with chili pepper--an elixir that sets all the senses aflame.  The mother of the church organist is a rebel, unlike her repressed daughter, and comments, "It tastes like . . . I don't know.  Are you sure you didn't put booze in there?  Perhaps you should give it to my daughter who won't let me see my grandson.  If only she would let him run, let him breathe, let him live."

For much of religion, desire is the original sin.  Don't dare live!  Eve, in the garden of Eden, sees the fruit of the forbidden tree, desires it, and takes it.  She wants to breathe a little, explore a fuller life.  She shares the forbidden fruit with Adam, and the two of them suddenly have their eyes opened and become aware that they are naked.  Now they are fully exposed to desire, and the automatic response is shame.  They sew fig leaves to hide from their desire for each other.

Through their contact with the chocolaterie, some of the women of the village stop closing their eyes to their desire and come alive to their passion.  In defiance of the imposed sanitizing of Easter, they plan a fertility celebration for Easter Sunday.  Joyful sex and chocolate are restored to their rightful place as symbols of the wonder and wholeness and magic of desire.  With our desire resurrected, we are raised up into the fullness of life.  A grand celebration with dancing and merriment follows.

Monsieur Le Compte, terrified of awakening to his desire and being liberated from all that Lent depicts, tells Vianne, "The first count expelled all the rebel Huguenots from this village." Huguenots were a group of protestants who became the center of political and religious quarrels in France during the fifteen and sixteen hundreds. "You and your truffles will be far less of a challenge.  You will be out of business by Easter, I promise you that." Suppress desire, drive it far from you, starve it out--this has always been the message of religion.  The Count had "boycot immorality" posters emblazoned in all the shop windows throughought the village.  Forbidden fruit--don't touch, lest you breathe a little and live!

The Count, deadened to his desire through repression, finds himself acting out the consequences of what he has repressed.  As his desire is tantalized by the chocolaterie and the organist, he becomes so angry that his wife has gone, leaving him exposed to the full blast of his desire, that he finds himself in her closet with a pair of scissors cutting up all of her dresses and undergarments.  It would be so much easier to continue burying his desire in convention would she only return!

The root of all dysfunctionality is the deadening of our passion.  When you deny your deepest self, your desire is going to turn rogue--you will find yourself cutting up dresses.  Denial of our desiring self is the root of all evils in our world.  It is not desire that is original sin.  Our original sin is the denial of desire--the restriction of our fundamental yearning for the full expression of ourselves in every dimension of our lives.  When we conduct our everyday lives as if it were Lent, we are the walking dead, in need of an Easter resurrection.

The denial of desire is the touchstone for alienation from ourselves, our fellow humans, and the very planet itself.  Desire is basic to being.  To be alive is to desire.  If you didn't desire, you'd die . . . the lifeforce functions through desire.  In Chocolat, you see the count sitting at his work desk, and his secretary has put some food there.  Nothing too tempting, just basic sustenance.  Finally, starving, he is forced to eat.  Again and again, you see the tension between the count's religious belief that he should deny himself, and his longing for food, conviviality, the fullness of life.

Desire isn't craving that which you don't have.  It's this craving, which is neediness because you don't feel complete in yourself, that the Buddha realized causes us grief.  A kid on Bourbon Street sees the latest pair of Nikes, pulls a gun, and seizes them.  That's not desire, that's a sense of emptiness craving an identity.  Desire is you feeling fantastic about yourself and wanting to express how fantastic you feel.  Desire isn't hankering after something you don't have, it's wanting to be who you are and to invest yourself in life.

The difference between need and desire is the fullness of being that makes possible the investment of yourself. If you don't feel wonderful, you use others to prop you up. You move from place to place when they fail--like Vianne, and like the river rat who comes into her life but leaves again because he tells himself that to stay is too costly.

When the Count denies himself normal enjoyment, tells himself chocolate is forbidden fruit--and the organist is forbidden fruit, even though his wife is truly long gone and he knows it--he sets himself up to crave these things.  It's not the wanting that's the problem, it's the craving, which is a quite unnatural feeling.  You're afraid to go for it, yet you can't stand the thought of being without it, and so you are caught up in what we know as lust.

Lust is not the same as desire.  Desire wants the object of one's desire.  Lust is what happens when we are in flight from our desires.  We borrow the person to scratch an itch for a moment, but we don't invest ourselves.

There is a theme that runs through Chocolat.  It is that awakening desire, symbolized by chocolate, is an aphrodisiac.  Now I understand why my Sunday school teachers in my teens taught me to be afraid of desire.  They were like Monsieur Le Compte.  I needed to be strong, they admonished.  This is what the count stresses to his constituents.  The definition of strength is the ability to put attraction to chocolate--or a pretty organist--out of one's mind.  Strength, the count and my teachers emphasized, is not wanting.

And that's just the problem--we have so many couples who are together without wanting.  Bodies entwine, but there's no real connection, no true looking into each other's souls, no real desiring of the person . . . no investment.  You want the sensation of sex, but you don't want the person.

The problem in our sex-saturated society isn't too much desire but too little desire.  There's a lack of desire in most sex.  People don't really want each other.  It's not desire that's the cause of our heartache, our anguish, our suffering, as so many think,  it's neediness that borrows the other for an ego boost but doesn't want the other.

The river rat finds himself so deeply touched by Mademoiselle Vianne that his desiring center, until now denied as he flits from landing dock to landing dock, at the end of the movie brings him home to himself and a new life.  He's dressed differently, looking like he's cleaned up his act, and he's ready to invest deeply.  Lust has been transmuted into desire.
Desire is investing myself in that in which I am involved, instead of holding it at arms' length and craving something different.

If I am with someone with whom I cannot invest myself, or in a job in which I cannot invest myself, then I need to have the strength to follow my longing to become a fully invested person and change my situation to one in which I can invest myself.  Anything less than to desire with all my being is a lack of integrity.  Salvation, which is a word simply meaning health or wholeness, is the ability to bring my whole self to whatever I am doing.  I am fully present in the now, instead of my thoughts and eyes roaming everywhere but where I am, craving something different.

When the until now repressed church organist emerges from the Chocolaterie with a smile on her face and an arm lovingly rested on her son's shoulder, accepting at last the boy's desire to breathe and to run, the count sighs, "All of my efforts have been for nothing." He goes to the church, kneels before the crucifix, and picks up a silver dagger.  In righteous rage, he breaks into the chocolaterie and, seeing a chocolate statue of a naked woman, slashes it to pieces.  But when chocolate accidentally touches his lips, he is done for.  He eats the chocolate woman, gorges himself on nipples of Venus, and satiates his soul with every variety of chocolate.

That's what lust is.  It's desire denied, then gone wild.  You don't want that much chocolate, that much alcohol, or sex with a variety of people . . . it's risky behavior that can make you sick.  But when you can't yield to the normal flow of desire and invest yourself, you create a monster within yourself.  You set yourself up for an orgy.  As Jesus expressed it, you are driven by a desperation that is tantamount to adultery.  Why?  Because sexuality driven by need instead of rooted in desire for a person so often explodes into affairs that wreck lives.  Suppression of desire turns rogue, causing our desire to be experienced not as a free-flowing enjoyment of our goodness and worthiness, but as a driving compulsion.

So where does our denial come from?  Why do we suppress desire?  Why can't we simply accept the fact that we love life, and we want to indulge to the fullest?  Why can't we celebrate the rapture and the ecstasy that desire embraced make possible?

You watch people coming into the chocolaterie fearful just to buy a chocolate!  But it's not really fear, it's embarrassment.  They are ashamed to admit they love to give themselves up to pleasure.  I mean, you're supposed to hold back, not surrender to ecstasy.  We actually use the term "sinfully delicious" for things like chocolate--and of course just about everything to do with sex is sinful!  It's like, if you really love something, totally indulge your senses, then you feel guilty.  You search for fig leaves because you're ashamed of wanting something that's so good.  Churches are in the fig leaf business.  They have a knack for identifying the things we can't hardly stand wanting, and brand them forbidden fruit to let us off the hook so we don't really have to come to terms with our desire.

Underlying this guilt is the sense that you don't have a right.  This is the essence of original sin.  Isn't this what the garden of Eden story is about?  The foundational story of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was composed precisely to confirm people's inner sense that they don't have a right.  It's a story devised to let you off the hook, so you feel justified in repressing your desire and holding back from investing yourelf fully.  It plays to people's self-deprecation, which is the bait for all systems of control.  Says the story, the things you want most of all are forbidden to you--and if you dare go for them, you're going to get it in the neck.

 Besides which, you're going to feel terrible shame.  You low life, you!  Suppress your desire.  You're not worthy of this much enjoyment.
"Don't be afraid to go out on a limb," someone has said. "That's where the fruit is." In Chocolat, Vianne goes out on a limb.  All her life she has been in flight from the full expression of her desire.  Every time she runs into society's disapproval, she moves on, dragging her daughter with her.  Her daughter's imaginary kangaroo, Pantouf, is an image of how she hops from one place to another, never settling and facing her fears.  As the story unfolds, and she yields to her desire, she draws around her a network of meaningful relationships in which people can connect deeply.  They are invested in each other, and in their venture together.  Love flourishes.

The movie illustrates how, far from being a sign of weakness, it takes strength to embrace your desire, instead of running from it.  It takes courage to really want.  The fearful person is trapped in a cycle of guilt over their most basic desires, compounded with a craving for all that they reject, which tortures them in a living hell.

It is the priest who, on Easter morning, discovers the count sleeping off his chocolate orgy in the window of the chocolaterie, covered in chocolate.  In his sermon that morning, the priest talks about "not measuring our goodness by the things we don't do, the things we resist, the things we deny ourselves, the people we exclude.  We need to measure our goodness by what we embrace, by what we create, and who we include."

A spiritual master was asked by a disappointed visitor, "Why has my stay here yielded no fruit?"

The master responded, "Could it be because you lacked the courage to shake the tree?" Vianne had the courage to shake the tree.  In your work, your play, your romantic life, do you have the courage, the strength, to truly shake the tree?  Are you ready to awaken to desire, to go for what you want?  Or do you prefer to stay locked in a half-life in which guilt and fear keep you from ever tasting the wonder of what society likes to label "forbidden fruit?"

The North Wind, a clever wind, figures prominently in the movie.  It is a metaphor for the way the deep Mystery of being that draws us toward salvation--which is the full enjoyment of every aspect of ourselves--is at work in our lives, inviting us to the ecstasy of celebrating who we are.

 Always when the North Wind blows, it makes trouble for us.  It wreaks havoc with our usual, normal, mediocre ways of doing things. It breaks open the doors of our lives, bringing an icy blast that gets our attention, stops us in our tracks.  It shows us that our present deal with life isn't working.

What is truth?  This is an age-old question, and it is the question Chocolat addresses.  It asks us to allow the North Wind to blow away the fake ways we live, the facades, the pretense.  Only then do we find what truth is . . . and it is to be true to our deepest selves.

The count is anything but true to himself.  He has bought into an idea of tranquility that isn't peaceful at all.  The little town has an air of peace, but it is born of suppression. Yet the very thing the count, through his moralizing, represses becomes his liberation. His desire is at last unleashed, and by the end of the movie he's even thinking of dating the organist!

When it has blown the false out of our lives, the North Wind is needed no more.  The statue of the count's ancestor in the village square, at first frozen and dour, begins to thaw.  By the end, it is smiling.  A south wind now blows, bringing connection rooted in desire that isn't suppressed but that is invested in relationships.

And it all began with one woman.  The entire system, built on the count's repression and maintained by suppression, crumbles because one person refuses to play the games, refuses to be phony, and finally stands tall, true to herself.

Vianne doesn't get there in one step, though.  And neither do the others who enter into the new consciousness.  After all she does to help others discover themselves, Vianne suddenly finds herself wanting to run.  In the wake of a fire on the river rat's boat, she is ready to call it quits.  She packs her bags to leave, with the urn of her mother's ashes, continuing the patterns of behavior she learned from her family of origin.

There is a neat interplay between the conscious characters, revealing how none of us is a world unto ourselves, and how we move into being true to ourselves with the help of each other . . . and yet it is a reality that must dawn in each of us individually.

Vianne brings Josephine into a knowledge of her true self.  At first it is a borrowed sense of self.  Josephine can only make the stand for herself that she makes because of Vianne.  But when Vianne wants to run, Josephine questions whether there was any substance to what Vianne taught her.  This is the moment when Josephine comes into her own.  She realizes that Vianne may want to run, telling herself nothing has been changed by all her efforts, and she may be totally on her own in her newfound consciousness, but there is no denying she has been changed forever.

Josephine's ability to stand tall now impacts Vianne, who at last sheds her self-doubt completely and realizes that her running days are over.  As the women own their new identity, the entire village system crumbles and even the count finds his true self.

It's only when it seems impossible to go on that we at last realize there is no going back and fully embrace our new identity.  This is true for Vianne, Josephine, and the count.  It is sheer desperation that drives them to finally stand up and be counted for who they truly are.  When they are at last no longer anxious about themselves, the whole system undergoes a shift.  Everyone is transformed as the phony tranquility of the village comes to an end.

The tranquil, orderly, everything-in-its-place village of the Count Delanoe yields to a delight with life that births a new kind of tranquility in the village. It is a tranquility of the heart reconciled to its yearnings and longings, instead of the facade of tranquility achieved by suppression.