I welcome all of you to this event tonight.
Really very very excited to welcome back Amy Uelmen to our school.
Amy is a very good friend of so many people at the University
of St. Thomas both on this side of the river and the other side of the river.
When I walk through the halls of this building with her,
I feel like I'm walking around with, I don't know,
Madonna or someone because everybody wants to stop and talk to Amy.
Amy started off after law school as an associate at a big law firm Arnold & Porter in DC.
In New York actually.
In New York, okay.
Then after that she left and went to Fordham University,
was the founding director of their thriving Institute for Religion,
Law, and Lawyers work.
After that she moved over to Georgetown University,
where she still is currently working as a lecturer in Religion and Professional Life,
and a special advisor to the Dean at Georgetown Law School.
You need one of those raw, don't you?
You need one of those.
She's also a Senior Research Fellow at the Berkeley Center on Religion,
Peace and World Affairs.
What Amy does and what she works on are the things that the University of St. Thomas,
especially the School of Law is dedicated to doing.
She teaches courses and writes about and how
people from diverse religious and political backgrounds can talk to one another.
She studies that and she writes about that.
A couple of the books that she's written recently are
Five Steps To Healing Polarization In The Classroom,
and Five Steps To Positive Political Dialogue.
A lot of her passions in teaching and in
scholarship flow from her commitment to the Focolare Movement,
which is a worldwide religious lay movement that is dedicated also to fostering
communication in the world amongst people of differing faiths and viewpoints.
She is currently the advisor for
cultural and Intellectual life
for the Focolare Movement for the whole North American sector.
Amy keeps us busy, Amy keeps us happy.
A year ago she was here speaking about
a much more serious topic about the clergy sexual abuse and
the reactions of different sectors within
the church including lay movements like Focolare.
In the context of that visit,
she saw posters that we had for a program that we had put on in September,
which was about movies as prayers;
and we dissected the movie, Toy Story.
She saw that and she gasped and she said,
"It has always been my dream to do something like that about Moana."
I said, "We can help at St. Thomas.
We could help your dreams come true."
This visit is a result of that comment in that conversation.
I'm just going to let Amy take it away. Thank you, Amy.
Thank you, Lisa. Thank you so much.
It's great to be here,
I feel really at home.
I think without even realizing it,
I was telling a Dean Vischer,
"I put on the colors of St. Thomas today."
I didn't plan for it.
Nobody told me these are the colors and that it's Tommie Tuesday.
I am really happy to be with you all and I realized this is mainly about pizza,
and watching a movie,
and having fun, and relaxing right before Spring Break.
I'm fully aware of that,
and I just wanted to offer a few literary keys before we see the film together.
But first, maybe just a couple of words about why
a law professor is spending time thinking about a Disney movie.
I want to start with the most personal.
I love this film because it is about a relationship with the ocean.
I grew up in Los Angeles and my high school was about a mile from Redondo Beach,
a beautiful beach area,
and so my own coming of age and understanding of my own sense of
direction as a human being was not
only through late night conversations with my friends at the beach,
much to my mother's chagrin,
but also alone at
the furthest point of a jetty of rocks that went way out into the water,
and I would watch the planes take off from LAX and think,
"I want to be on that plane."
I had just a kind of deep restlessness,
and so I felt my restless heart was in conversation with the ocean.
Moana, for me, illuminates the story of my own restless heart and finding my own mission,
and so that's the first reason I'm drawn to it.
Then I've had a long time intellectual interest in the culture of Disney.
I was an American studies major in college,
and I did my senior thesis on a children's book
written in 1945 called Mickey Sees the USA.
Mickey gets in a camping trip and goes around the United States,
and the thesis ended up with a very critical,
race, gender class analysis of both the book and of Disneyland in the '50s.
I remember putting the finishing touches on the manuscript of
my thesis as my family was arriving for my graduation.
I decided to read my uber critical, race,
gender class analysis to my blue collar grandfather,
who's proud to be an American,
and he was a tool and die maker from Wisconsin,
which is maybe part of why I feel very at home in the Midwest.
I remember his voice as I was reading it to him and he's hurt and he says,
"So what are you trying to say?"
I will never forget that moment of what does it take to
have a critical read on the culture around
me without severely wounding the people that I love?
I think that was part of why I'm drawn to working with
popular culture and also why I'm drawn to the work of bringing people together;
also around the meaning that stories might have for them.
With that, my career as a lawyer and as a legal educator,
I've tried to bring ahead a layered reflection,
so thinking both about the critical points,
but also about how people just interact with popular culture with a simplicity.
I find that Disney films,
even as a lawyer,
even as a law professor,
invite me to hold on to the kid in myself.
I hope that tonight is just, first of all,
a chance to enjoy the beauty of this film, the colors.
How many of you have seen it?
Let me just get a show. So you know, okay.
I won't belabor this,
but just to take this moment to enjoy the colors, the music.
I also know the score of Hamilton by heart,
and so I'm a big Lin-Manuel Miranda fan, and the simplicity.
I think if there's anything that I see and hope for in my students it's that they're able
to retain this simplicity also in engaging with the world around them.
Also because most students blink and they're going to be parents,
and they're parents of toddlers,
and then parents of teenagers,
and so stories remain all important as you grow as people, and as parents.
Then in my teaching on the intersection of religion and professional life,
I frequently make references to movies in an organic way,
and so these include: Lion King, Zootopia,
Frozen, The Hunchback of Notre Dame;
there's some amazing work in that.
Even Finding Dory; I think there's a tremendous amount of wisdom.
Then not just Disney but also: Star Wars, Lego Batman, Spiderman;
they're all my very good friends,
and I have either short articles,
or serious scholarship on all of them.
I was just using Lego Batman,
especially the sound that when you shoot; pew pew pew pew.
We were talking about that as the difficulty of when you're listening to someone
you're ready to just shoot back at them,
but it's with a Lego Batman sounds like pew pew pew.
Then the final draw for me of this film is
I saw it in the midst of our current political tensions,
and also in the midst of the avalanche of the scandal in the Catholic church.
This is one of the films that I saw when I was just
in the fetal position with this concern about leadership,
the religious life in our country.
In the midst of that pain and confusion,
I just curled into a little cathartic writing cave,
and one of the pieces that emerged was the work that I did on the clergy abuse situation,
and the other piece was Moana: Hero for Our Times.
I just found deep meaning in this movie as we think about the concern about leadership.
With all of that, what I'd like to do with us now is
share just a few snippets not to spoil your enjoying the whole movie and the scope of it,
but just to put out a few themes as we think about Moana and professional life.
So to give a few clips,
I just wanted to quickly bridge some of the gaps for
the two people in the room who have not seen the film.
Again, I won't spoil it completely if this is your first time seeing it.
I've tried to pick the clips carefully,
so that it maintains the integrity.
Let me just also know.
I'm not going to get deep into the scholarship
on cultural appropriation. It's very interesting.
If somebody wants to pick up that conversation,
we can do that at the break when we refresh our pizza.
But my model for how I'm engaging this as a text,
has anyone read the CS Lewis book,
Till We Have Faces?
Okay. Just a couple of you.
This is my all-time favorite novel.
The people who have read it, if you want to know about Till we have faces, in the back.
It's a retelling of the cupid psyche myth.
Obviously Lewis plays with it.
I see something similar in Moana.
Obviously, they're playing with this Polynesian myth with the figure of Maui.
There's a lot to complain about there.
There's a lot to appreciate there but it's in
the retelling that is pulling out these really deep themes.
I'm going to take this as a work of art,
as a retelling of a myth and then working with that also,
asking myself, what does this have to do with how we think about professional identity?
The three themes that I wanted to pick up on.
First, let me give a quick intro to the plot line.
Moana is the strong-willed teenage daughter of the chief of a Polynesian village.
She's chosen by the ocean itself to reunite with the goddess of life,
Te Fiti, to reunite with Te Fiti,
a mystical stone which is the heart of her power.
The stone had been stolen by Maui,
the shape-shifting demi-god and the master of sailing in order to
give humanity the power of creation but then everything goes wrong.
A blight strikes her island,
the fishing dries up,
the vegetation is being destroyed.
Moana set sail in search of Maui to convince him to return
the stone to Te Fiti and to restore the balance to their universe.
This is just the general plot line that will help you get into
these clips that I'd like to just give a sense of, these three themes.
The first question that I wanted to explore is,
how do I know my own sense of mission?
How do I understand?
What form does that take?
Whether it's professional identity, your professional trajectory.
What are the clues and what's the disposition for understanding my own mission?
That's the first question I think to invite you to think about.
The second is who and what will help
me in this journey of understanding my own professional identity?
Then the final question to explore with some of these clips is,
how will I get through some of the inevitable rough spots?
These are the three themes that I wanted to invite,
just a tiny bit of reflection before we see the whole film.
For the first, so for each theme,
I picked a little clip.
Maybe we can just chat a little bit about what you see but just as a way of prompting
us and then I'll have some ideas for a little bit of a reader's guide,
as you then look at the film.
Again for most of us, again, for me it's like,
I think this is probably like the 10th time that I've seen it.
The first clip is,
I think we can consider this the moment that she receives her mission.
If I can make this work, I think we can.
Oops.
Sorry. I knew
I would run into technical difficulties.
Okay. Let me see if I can get out of. There we go.
Okay. What I'd like to leave a little bit of space also,
just to appreciate what you see.
This question of, what is the stance that she has?
What is the attitude?
What are some of the elements that occur to you,
that might also be a basis for what we're talking about?
Yes.
Curiosity.
Curiosity, yeah.
The openness of a child to whatever.
There's a tremendous, I mean,
also this standing in front of the cosmos.
I mean, the colors are just beautiful.
What else is going on in the scene?
Yes.
[inaudible]
I think it ends up being a a telescope of the film that moment.
I mean, that choice to turn to the
most vulnerable in the scene and to keep track of that.
I mean, I think that's really at the heart
of what opens her out than to being able to receive something.
She doesn't see the big picture all at once,
she doesn't see the ultimate destination,
she just sees what's in front of her and just takes it one step at a time.
That's beautiful. That's beautiful.
There's a sense of being in the present,
also and being taken by what's in the present and
then letting yourself be carried with that. Yes.
[inaudible].
When I see this, I think I have to recover that.
Other thoughts that caught your eye?
One of the things I love and I think this is,
I found this to be true in my own professional journey.
Is the readiness to let go of acquisitiveness.
This sense that she sees something pretty,
and actually the shell is meaningful in terms of representing feminine power and beauty.
Also being drawn and letting go of that,
realizing she had to make a choice between helping the turtle to the water
and collecting pretty things for herself.
That those shells then are given back also after that kind of initial stance Yes.
Changing the subject, just a little bit with correlation.
My wife and I watched Frozen 2,
with our granddaughter last weekend.
There's a line in there that I think is wonderful.
It's to do the next right thing.
Do the next right thing.
I just saw Frozen 2 on the plane right now. The next right thing.
Actually, that goes together with the deans flight.
That's beautiful. Other things come to mind?
The other thing I love about this is again,
she doesn't have a grasping and this stone,
as most of you know,
this stone is very meaningful in the film.
Her hands are open.
It's not that she's out there grasping it but it's something that she lets it come
to her and so that's another part of the stance that I find really compelling.
I also love the connection
between what she receives as her mission and this broad view,
I think there's a cosmic quality to that initial contemplation and
so something about her connection with nature and receiving her mission as well,
I think there's something really deep about that.
Some of the things that came to my mind.
I did a little bit of
examination of conscience of when I was in my first year of law school.
Thinking about becoming a lawyer and the seriousness of the task.
How difficult it was to keep my eyes
open and my heart open in the midst of that to people who might be struggling.
They were tiny things. I was walking with my housemaid at the time.
We were actually walking.
I had this set of experiences during my first week of exams as a first-year law student.
We are walking together and my housemaid who wasn't a law student,
who was doing biotechnology type of stuff.
She almost tripped.
I had this horrible thought because I was on my way to take one of my exams.
I said, if she tripped,
would I have had the courage to let go of my exam to take her to the emergency room?
I realized I was like, oh my gosh,
you are so focused on your stuff.
Then I had another similar experience.
I was walking with one of my classmates from the Metro into our exam and I realized,
we were going into the same section and there was
this competitive environment and I realized as we're walking together,
I can make her more nervous or less nervous about this exam.
I was like, what a monster you are becoming.
You've only been in this environment for six months and
already your personality has completely changed.
I remember making a conscious choice,
and actually this classmate of mine,
it wasn't like she was a little turtle,
she was doing just fine in school,
but I remember making a conscious choice.
It's like, is this atmosphere going to eat into
me and eat into what I care about most, or not?
So deciding that it was more important.
I tried to make it relax,
I think I told a couple jokes,
and we had just a very nice simple walk to the Metro.
But, I remember hanging on to that and thinking,
what does it mean to pay attention
in a deep way to others around me as I'm pursuing my mission?
I have felt, in many ways,
that that also then does open up a much deeper horizon.
So those are just a couple of tiny examples.
What I wanted to suggest as you're watching the movie is,
to keep your eye on the rooster.
Most of you know that the Disney sidekick in this movie is not the smart pig,
who you're going to meet very quickly,
the pig does not come along on the journey,
it's the cognitively-impaired rooster.
To keep your eye on her relationship with the rooster,
which is just another way of opening out what happens here with the turtle.
To think about the relationship between the rooster and
her unfolding sense of identity and sense of her own mission.
That's just a little signal that I think can be helpful.
Also, in asking the question,
to what extent does my paying attention to others actually unlock for me;
what is the sense of my own mission?
That's just the first thing.
The second idea that I wanted to open out with is with two clips.
The first, is the scene where her grandmother dies.
We don't need a spoiler alert because it happens very
early in the film if you're seeing it for the first time.
The second, is when she first encounters Maui.
As we're watching these,
if you can keep an eye on the idea of she is being given a script.
Her grandmother is telling her what she needs to say.
She's receiving from her,
in a certain sense, it's analogous to receiving the stone,
she's being given a script.
Then, the next clip is to see what happens to her when she tries to work with the script.
So this is the first.
Let's see if I can get this to work.
She receives the script and then,
here's her first interaction.
Go find him. Tell him,
"I am Moana Motunui and you will board my boat."
Here's what she does initially with that script.
It hangs together when you see it altogether.
But, I was drawn to these two clips for two reasons.
One is, I often see that,
in myself, first of all,
that when I'm in learning mode,
what I do is,
I tend to imitate or repeat or rely very heavily on when people say,
"Okay, now do this,
and now do this, and now do this.
This is what's expected of you."
How do I follow in those footsteps so that I can remain sure.
This is just one example.
But, I remember when I started working at a large law firm I thought,
I got to stick to the script,
which means you need to be available 24/7,
and this is a very important job,
and they're paying me a lot of money.
This sense of what are all the expectations that are crashing down,
and the most important thing is to survive in the script that is given to me.
I remember one of the stupidest weeks of my life was,
I had decided to give up on going to
a retreat that had been always very meaningful for me.
I thought, well now I that I work in
such an important place with an important job, and this, and this,
and this, if other people are going to be gone in August,
somebody needs to stick around.
I assumed, I'm the little guy on the totem pole and I need to suck it up and be here.
I was afraid. I didn't ask.
I didn't ask my supervisor what actually was going on in August.
I also think I was conveying to my friends that I was living this script,
I was doing something very important.
It really was the stupidest week of my life,
because I was there at work and nobody was around,
and all of a sudden I realized,
if something urgent and important were to happen,
it's not like they're going to ask
the associate who's been there for three months to take care of it,
they're going to call the partner on vacation.
It was a moment where I just assumed.
I felt I had received a script,
but a little bit like Moana,
she's like, "You need to do this."
This sense of also feeling it's like wearing a jacket that's a little bit too big.
You feel like you're not quite in your own skin and moving.
I think the driver for interacting with a script is often,
for me at least, I would say in my own experience, was fear.
What helped me start to move off script?
I would like to suggest that some of the deepest moments of
learning for Moana and for myself,
and I think maybe for each of us,
are when we can develop
the almost intuition instinct for when we might want to experiment with going off script.
Just two tiny examples.
One is, I started to play with FaceTime and how important was it?
I realized there was a lot more play in the joints than I thought.
Now, I'm not suggesting not to pay attention at all
to the rhythms of the place that you're working,
but this sense of looking beneath the surface of
my own fear to take the risk of going off script,
and in some ways seeing what happens.
We'll see that's what happens with Moana in a second.
Then, this is just another really tiny example.
But, I remember feeling just very afraid of the small things like how people dress,
what they eat, how you're supposed to carry yourself as a lawyer in a firm, or whatever.
I live in a community,
and so I also have a vow of poverty.
So one of the things I was navigating was also how much to
spend on my daily lunch when people are going out for lunch.
I wanted to live according to my own commitments,
but at the same time I didn't want to look like too much of a weirdo.
So I remember just really struggling with that and realizing,
okay, maybe this is a place where I can go off script.
If you live in New York you can spend
$20 on breakfast between a bagel and a cup of coffee.
I would bring a bag of English muffins from home and I'd put them in the toaster.
I remember one of my colleagues coming in and seeing
my little English muffin in the toaster and looking at it and saying,
"You have a freedom that nobody has."
I treasured that so deeply.
What is the space of my freedom also in going off script?
Obviously, I wasn't going to get fired for having
an English muffin instead of spending money in a different way.
This sense of claiming what is my off-script face?
Just keep your eye out for how Moana works with this script and owns it.
That's one thing to keep your eye on.
The other thing I'd like to just highlight is,
there are at least two kinds of mentors in this film.
One mentor figure, obviously, is the grandmother.
There's also a gravitas to her capacity to guide Moana,
and we see it in a very profound way in a moment.
But, what I wanted to suggest is,
when we think about another kind of mentor,
who in this film, I think,
would be characterized by Maui.
Maui has his own issues.
Maui has his own fragility,
his own limits, his own story.
I think there's something very freeing
about realizing that there are different kinds of mentors.
Just keep track of how Moana realizes she doesn't need to idolize Maui.
He's a demigod, right?
She doesn't need to idolize him.
She has a lot to learn,
she's got a skill set.
But it's in breaking free from the idea
that every kind of mentoring relationship is the same,
first of all, she's getting something from
her grandmother and she's getting something very different from Maui.
A kind of invitation just
like following the rooster for her relationship with the rooster,
also following the relationships that she has with the different mentors,
because I think they can also speak differently to how we
think about our professional journey.
Also, the other thing I like to encourage my students
to do is not only think what kind of mentors do I want,
but what kind of a mentor can I already be to the people who are younger than me,
or behind me in school.
Everybody's got cousins, or younger siblings,
or friends and so the sense that also the
more that we dig deep into what we're looking for in a mentor,
also to practice those types of skills,
not just skills but relationships and desires and
hopes also with people who are looking up to us,
regardless of our age.
I would encourage high school students to do the same,
or older elementary school students also to think about those types of relationships.
Any other thoughts about this other idea,
either the scripts, or the two kinds of mentors?
Again, we can keep our eyes on the things you want to add into the mix. Yes?
I appreciate the idea of thinking about scripts,
but as I'm hearing you talk,
I'm also thinking about to what extent does one
have to feel a sense of belonging in those structures,
or within the organization,
in order to feel comfortable to go off script?
That's a great question.
Sorry, did I interrupt or anything? Yeah.
So that to me seems to be a bit a of a challenge
when we think about certain groups or
population or demographics where you go into particular kinds of law firms,
where they might be the only one?
Again, making these decisions around when to go off-script,
when I could go off-script,
what's going to be repercussions should one do it? [inaudible]?
Yes.
You know what I mean.
Absolutely. Yes.
I just wondered what your thoughts are or again, to my opinion,
I just wanted to make a comment that what [inaudible] frame these ideas or scripts.
To layer with that would be,
what is the decision making process?
I remember consciously thinking,
if this job requires this of me,
this type of adherence to a script,
then I am going to decide then it's not worth it for me,
or it's not the right place,
or it's too much of a distortion of who I am.
This all goes into the layers of we all need
to find jobs and we need to pay off loans and there are economic realities.
So there's a kind of pain also,
where the rubber hits the road in terms of how this personal digging deep,
in terms of maintaining a sense of integrity,
plays out into my unfolding sense of identity.
I think the big first step would be,
what does it take to get beyond a reasoning based in fear?
Then, it can go in different directions and there might
be different reasons to stick to scripts or not.
But that work of developing
a depth in the decision-making process that moves beyond fear.
I think that's actually what's going on in this movie,
in even deeper message, I think,
at the heart of this,
beyond just going off script.
That's another another piece.
Other thoughts? Yes?
For adventures such as these,
it's entirely about going off-script.
Yes.
It is to define the expectations for a very few expectations.
No one leaves the island.
That last line of her dad.
Parental [inaudible]
Yes, absolutely. Yeah.
The other point that I thought,
the mentor mentee relationship,
where you have a demigod ostensibly to help the human and just
like for a mentee relationship where really
the mentor takes away from their relationship and learns from the mentee -
Absolutely. Yes.
It's just as the mentee learns from the mentor.
It's a beautiful theme that runs through
their relationship and it opens up to a kind of intimacy and a space for vulnerability,
a space for deep honesty running in
both directions and there's something tremendously beautiful about that,
that runs through the film as well. Yeah.
Can I just add?
Yes.
I just want to add to what gentleman said in terms of the mentee,
because I think that you are intimating this,
but just to put a final point in this idea that
mentors are often perceived as those who know everything.
Yes.
One can learn from those mentors who are
struggling and they are challenged in their positions and one can learn from
those challenges that the mentors going through and being open
and observant enough to understand those dynamics as you take it in [inaudible]
That's huge, right?
It unlocks just a tremendous amount of space in professional life.
I can remember particular moments where I
realized that the person I was looking up to as a mentor was
not perfect and how that opened a completely different space in my heart and mind.
That it wasn't about imitating,
or idolizing, but about building a real human relationship.
So, it's another great piece.
Yeah. Rob and then back to you. Yeah.
Do I have permission to put you on the spot?
I don't know. It depends.
Because you've spoken publicly about this,
but the story you've shared before about the email exchange at the firm,
because I think it so powerfully captures going off script,
requiring enough self awareness and
self knowledge to know where the integrity pressure points are going.
It's a willingness to go off-script not just for
some unfettered autonomy or just being different for the sake of being different.
It's because you know who you are and where you stand.
Back to the question of belonging.
When the price of belonging will be too steep for integrity such that
you have to test that boundary and you may or may
not find that it's an actual boundary or not.
[inaudible] I know I put you on the spot.
Okay. Now there's no escape.
There's been more than one time in my relationship
with your dean when this has happened and I said, I will get you back.
Actually, there's more than one email exchange,
but the one you're talking about was with the Steinberg case.
I was working at the firm when there was a pro bono project,
working on one of the partial-birth abortion cases and an email came out from
the firm from one of the managing partners or whatever pro bono saying,
"Victory for the firm",
with a whole analysis that was
very denigrating of the pro-life side of the argument.
I've written about this and so, I'm on the record.
But I read the email and
this is one of those times where I'm very grateful that I didn't react immediately,
so I slept on it.
I have very deep concerns about abortion policy in our country.
I went home, I talked with my friends in my community.
The next day, I sent an email to all attorneys, it's a big place,
saying, "I thought on such an important and sensitive topic,
it would be important to keep in mind that for some of us in this firm,
this is a day of profound and terrible sadness."
Sent it.
What happened, as a result,
was an incredible firestorm where people were saying,
"Oh, you know," they started all of
a sudden getting anguish that there wasn't room for intellectual diversity in the firm.
Anyway, it provoked a conversation about whether there would be,
without generating conflicts of interests,
space to have pro bono representation on the other side of the abortion controversy.
Yes, I think that's right.
There was a script in the firm where I was working,
a very clear script.
But what happened then,
as a result of that,
is that many attorneys started coming.
This has happened to me in other settings where I was even in
the bathroom washing my hands and somebody came up and said, "I agree with you."
So coming in and saying, "Yes, we've got it.
We've got to open out this conversation."
Not a question of starting a civil war in the firm,
but of just saying,
"First of all, there's a variety of opinions on this and we all work here."
So yes, I think these questions I
found after I gave myself about six months to get the lay of the land,
give myself a little bit of permission to get a sense of where I was,
get to know the players, have enough information,
and also make some friends,
try to get to know people,
to not just be reacting.
It's work that requires a lot of digging deep.
Other thoughts on this? Yes.
I just want to build upon the value of friendship which
is more challenging maybe within a work environment.
Yes.
"But if you can," as C. S. Lewis would say,
"the value of friendship is that you can be so much more
candid and still not lack love each other.
You know that your [inaudible] of friendship is such that you can risk that."
Absolutely. Yeah.
That's what's such a beauty of friendship in or outside of where you
work that helps balance all of the other parts of life.
Here, I would emphasize the outside part, as well also,
because there may be more places where it is very difficult to
generate that kind of trust as we just noted.
So for me, also,
one of the tests of whether a workplace
was becoming completely draining of my life was do
I have the time to cultivate
the kinds of friendships with people who will tell me the truth,
who will tell me, "You know what,
it seems like you're getting pretty fool yourself," or "You know what,
don't worry too much about what they think,"
also the variety of relationships that we need to stay healthy,
especially in this time when our professional journey is unfolding.
Other thoughts? Okay. The last clip ties this all together really beautifully and
it comes at a moment in the film where Moana is really at her lowest point.
If you haven't seen it,
it does not completely ruin the film.
You can appreciate it for the beauty for what it is.
This is after a failed attempt to return the stone.
A serious rift with Maui,
she's really at her very lowest point.
I think the question arises,
what do we do with these really, really rough spots?
What does it mean to encounter deeply
our own limits and
how those moments can actually become really defining.
So let me see if I can get this started at the right.
That could be the subject of a doctor or feces.
There's so much in there.
I don't know if there's things that just immediately come to
your mind or that you wanted to surface.
My favorite part of this is that the grandmother,
when she says, "I tried and I couldn't do it," the grandmother does not say,
"Yes, you can honey, you can do it," right?
I find myself reflecting in my own mentoring relationships.
What does it mean to just receive where the other person is,
how they're feeling, what's going on,
and that expression of just unconditional love.
If you are ready to go home,
I will be with you.
A love that is not tied to the accomplishment of
a task or any dimension of being able to do it, right?
Being able to follow through.
That's one of the things that strikes me most deeply.
I love the line,
"Scars can heal and reveal not just past events,
but heal and reveal where you are."
This notion of kind of our own experience
of woundedness also is kind of a map, right?
A guide. There's just something really profound
about what does it mean to not just deal with limitations,
but take them as a guide.
I think there's a lot there,
but you may have other kind of initial reactions. Yes?
Again, I've not seen the movie -
Not yet, right? [LAUGHTER]
- I'm just reflecting on just the few clips that I've seen.
I have to say I appreciate the reflection or your sort
of comment on scar comments
because I think it's completely [inaudible] as well as the sense that,
again, unconditional love, things happen and it's okay to fail and still move forward.
The thing that struck me though,
[NOISE]for me I was thinking,
poets and spiritualists [inaudible] who are often,
sadly he passed away,
but often talks about crossing thresholds.
This idea that you experience loss or something that's overwhelming,
it's like crossing a threshold.
When I think about the grandmother dying is a crossing of the threshold for Moana.
Then this moment when she discovers her notations,
in some ways, it's also like a crossing of a threshold.
That is to say that when you cross the threshold,
you're going into another world.
You're having to calibrate that new world.
When I saw these clips and this last one,
that's what I thought of immediately.
There are other but that was one of the things that struck me as this idea that we
are in the life and certainly the positioning and leadership of the [inaudible].
Her extraordinary moments where we are crossing the threshold and we go into a new world.
We're crossing that threshold into a new world.
The old world is gone,
and we're having to re-calibrate
Yeah.
Our ideas and understandings.
It's beautiful.
Can you stay and see the film with us?
Is that? Well, no pressure.
No pressure, but all of those themes are in
there and I think you also put it out so beautifully.
Without realizing it if you haven't seen it,
but you put it out beautifully,
kind of what is the map also of the part of the film also that follows this, right?
What is it that she crosses, right? Yeah, Lisa?
I also love the line of,
"the call isn't out there it's inside you".
Yeah.
Especially in light of all the things the grandmother had just said
about the scars revealing who you are,
your friends, the people you love shaping you,
and her realization of,
I cannot wait for that perfect script to be delivered to me [inaudible] ,
it's being developed and shaped as part of who
I am but it's the me that's been shaped throughout my experiences -
Absolutely. Yeah.
That's me that I'm looking for [OVERLAPPING].
Yeah. Yeah.
Some might idealize me that I might some day appear.
Not some older me that didn't have those scars
Great. Notice what's happened to the initial script,
which is, "You will find Maui and you will tell him,
get on my boat and you do this," right?
Instead, this script or her own story is not a script.
Their own story is,
"I am everything I've learned and more.
I delivered us to where we are" not what are you going to do?
It's like, who am I and who am I, right?
That question. There's just a depth to the to the text here,
which is really, really wonderful. Yes?
Yeah I think actually for Moana this is particularly [NOISE] [inaudible] difficulty.
She's not strategizing about how to solve the problem.
She's on a mission and she talks and she's been in a very difficult roadblock and
she needs to figure out who she is and what she needs to do as a result of who she is,
to follow that path.
Yes.
Wherever it might take her.
Yes, yes.
That's why it's not about solving the problem.
Absolutely. That is also,
I'm not going to spoil the end because the end is just really,
I mean, most of you have seen it,
but it's so powerful.
But if we think about the very end,
so keep your eyes peeled,
to read the very end through this text, right?
Her own experience of limit.
What kind of insight that gives when she's facing serious,
not just limits, but kind of what seems to be cosmic evil, right?
What's the connection between the steps that we take
within and the way that we work with our own limits and read our own scars, right?
For then what is it that we need to do to face limits,
and suffering, and difficulty in the world?
I think there's a beautiful parallel between this scene and the very end of the movie.
