This writing exercise was suggested to me by a friend who found this video compelling. Watch the video, come to your own point of view, and then, if you are curious, read my interpretation below which is based only on one viewing.
The Lost Man
A man is lost in the English
countryside. He points out, "you would think it would be impossible to
get lost in this day and age," this reveals he is a product of our
tech-possessed time.
As he wanders, he comes across a snail.
Snail medicine is protective, as evidenced by the shell. The snail
has a hard exterior protecting an animal that is soft and has no
other sort of protection. The snail shell resembles the cochlea canal
of the inner ear which symbolizes hearing and the man can communicate
with the snail.
The snail tells the man he can guide
him home. The snail gets the man out of the green fields of the
English country side into a dark wood. Suddenly a wounded fox appears
on the road, beaten and bloody. The fox growls at the man. The man
is afraid.
Fox medicine represent the power of
invisibility but I do not see that as apt in this case. Here I think
technological man has lost himself and the fox represents the ego.
The ego is much maligned in our day but its true function is that of
trauma response. The ego only comes into being when we become
traumatized. Its job is to protect us.
But technological man is so far removed
from himself that his, has spent so much time beating up his own ego,
that, when he confronts it, he fears it.
The man finally sleeps under a tree.
The snail stays for a while but has to leave, I had one theory that
the snail was like the Christian Holy Spirit, but once you get the
Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit stays with you, even following you into
prison and other dark places. So, in this case, it appears the snail
helped all it could and at the same time, used the man to get a lift.
The fox dies and while the man sleeps,
it purifies and decays and goes back to the earth. This represents in
some way the split that caused the ego is healing and so the man
wakes up but he is so used to the spit in his psyche, healing feels
like loneliness instead of completeness, which it actually is.
No doubt the man will follow the snails
advice. He has already found his way home but simply doesn’t
recognize it because he had different expectations of what “home”
was.
