What’s with the Mirror?
One morning during the pandemic, I woke up, made my coffee, and suddenly realized the whole world was a mirror. And I was a mirror too. Everything I could see was also seeing me. (No psychoactive substances were in that coffee!)
As mind-blowing as this new perception was, it came with such clarity and peace— a sense of “all’s right with the world.” The perception came and went, depending on circumstance, but it comes more often now, and I welcome it with wonder. I want to share it with my fellow humans somehow, because I believe this is a perception available to anyone.
Why Another Blog?
Since we are now swimming in a sea of blogs, I ask myself — why should I add this one? For some reason I googled “blog” (I google, therefore I am), and discovered the word “blog” was kind of a joke word, derived from “weblog.” In the early 90s, Peter Merholz broke it into “we blog.” And hence that dorky word was born.
I love that he saw it as “we blog” — as a We-thing. We all have a voice, and all of us contribute to the choir of We.
I love the We. Apparently every generation since World War II has been considered the Me Generation. No doubt we’ve become very me-centered since The Greatest Generation, those who lived through the depression and World War 2 and knew first-hand that survival is only possible through community. But in 2024, I’m pretty sure we’re about to turn that Me-centeredness upside down. I hope we don’t have to fall apart tragically to do so — but I do believe we are about to enter the We Generation. It’s all in the mirror. We are networked inwardly and outwardly. The internet is just one externalization of this inner reality.
This “we-ness” shows up in other ways all the time. I’ve always been amazed when driving the freeway system in LA how few accidents there are, when you think of the odds. (But don’t think of the odds! Just sayin’) It’s a testament to how linked we are as humans, like murmurating starlings. That isn’t just because we have smarter cars. It’s because we feel or sense ourselves connected to one another. It’s in our own biotechnology. I mean, we’re at least as sophisticated as starlings!
Screens as Mirrors
One very clear example of how much we see ourselves in others is the way we connect to our screens. We find ourselves reflected in story and character. Whether it’s taking in a BBC series, a TikTok reel, or an influencer testifying about some divine skincare line, we are linking ourselves to others’ stories. Humans have always looked for ourselves in the light of others’ stories — whether around the fire or the screen.
I’m fascinated with the way our screens inform who we are individually and collectively. Sometimes we can see this happening in our lives and world. But most times, the screen stories live inside us, and our society, very subtly, outside our awareness.
What impresses itself upon us from our screens, large or small, will express itself in our external lives. The human species has never in its history received stories delivered on the light emanating from screens — deposited directly into our nervous systems through our eyes. I feel it is vital to pay attention to this phenomenon. Philosophically it’s fairly easy to make sense of this — through the principle of correspondence. Scientifically, I believe Newton’s Third Law also plays out here. If object A acts a force upon object B, then object B will exert an opposite yet equal force upon object A.
If you don’t think of light as an “object,” hey — photonic force is a thing! https://van.physics.illinois.edu/ask/listing/25334
I’m happy to report that the field of neuroscience is making serious headway into this relationship of screens and our neurology with significant new studies. I’ll include what I find in future writings.
Where there is light — even from our screens — there is opportunity to see more about ourselves. I’m happen to believe, and have experienced as true, that a fulfilling life depends on a certain dedication to the Delphic maxim “Know thyself.”
Me in Brief
Brevity is the soul of wit, or so said Shakespeare. I’m with him. I love making a point in as few words as possible. I started my career writing taglines for movies. My personal fave was for that sweet, brilliant movie, Babe: “A little pig goes a long way.”
So I like to keep things brief. You might be relieved that my preference will always be to keep these missives short and sweet. Maybe not tagline short. But this “getting to know you” blog might take you on a longer journey — so bring popcorn.
Hmm. This makes me wonder, what would my tagline for “Mary Erickson: the Motion Picture” be?
I’m like most people — I want to be a happy human. I also want other humans to be happy. I’ve often tried to MAKE other humans happy — to dubious effect. After thirty years of working in Hollywood, I know the human hunger for entertainment, and the way we use entertainment in our quest for happiness. Since those early days in the studio system, my central passion has been to explore how our love of screened entertainment can make us better humans, rather than risk losing our brilliant humanity to our screens.
There are enough people spouting rebukes of our relationship with screens. I want to use our attachment to screens as a means of knowing ourselves better, becoming more human, and more WE, through the way we inhabit — or are inhabited by — our screens.
Me in Depth
If you’re reading this, you deserve to know a little about me. Maybe I’ll even come up with the tagline for myself.
My origin story arises from a collision of opposites. I guess that goes without saying, since all of us erupted from some kind of Big Bang (lol).
I was born in Billings, Montana, or so I was told. My dad was a Methodist minister in Huntley, a little unincorporated town east of Billings. Mom was a high school English teacher in Laurel, a little incorporated town west of Billings. They’d have done well to stay on their respective sides of that booming oil town. But then I wouldn’t be telling this story.
As opposites eventually do, they met in the middle — in Billings. When they got hitched, they probably thought they could safely establish other midpoints between their very divergent points of view — Dad’s right wing and Mom’s left wing, Dad’s bowling league and Mom’s civil rights and Great Books groups. Mom’s conspicuous virtues and Dad’s concealed vices. There was very little common ground in the garden they planted together, and the ground from which I sprang to life. It was decidedly uncommon, unsafe ground. But my wonderful, long-suffering Mom tried her best to keep up appearances, which meant burying what she knew or could never admit.
Over the years, we ranged the Rocky Mountains, although our family truly took root in Montana. You may know Montana as Big Sky Country — also the Treasure State. I see Montana’s Big Sky as its treasure, in that you can see yourself quite clearly under it, if you’re willing. A friend who visited me there could not bear the exposure. That sky really does expose you — like it did my Dad in 1982.
But I digress. As a young college grad with an obsolete degree (philosophy and religion), I left Montana to go West. I rolled like beach ball down the West Coast — from Seattle where I lost myself in the University bookstore, to Eugene, Oregon where I searched for my sexual identity on the banks of the McKenzie River, to Berkeley where I saw myself torn in two. There was the me that longed to be an activist, taking graduate classes in journalism and working part-time for a radical feminist newspaper called Plexus. Then there was the part of me that had to pay the bills. I worked as a tech editor for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, for which I was paid decently, but I, in turn, paid a price with my soul. LLL designs nuclear warheads, among other things. I worked there Monday thru Friday. On Saturdays, I’d often be outside the gates, protesting. Ironically, working at the lab would lead to one of the most profound mystical experiences of my life. Wait - actually, two! But I’ll tell ya later.
Eventually I found myself again in the middle: my heart was not in tech writing or in journalism, but in spinning a story — I was always a story teller. I wanted to write, first fiction — a love affair with Virginia Woolf in my 20s ignited my pen — and then, screen stories started to captivate me. I loved how images could tell stories, and learned that a picture holds WAY more than a thousand words.
While living in Berkeley, I enrolled in a screenwriting course with the screenwriting guru of that time, Syd Field, and set off for Tinseltown with my sparkly script, sure I would dazzle the dazzlers. Ha. I climbed around on that Hollywood jungle gym for a few years - but kept my day jobs. Many day jobs. The prospect of “getting to the top” in Hollywood felt weirdly threatening to me, kind of like I felt as a kid on the jungle gym at recess. I’d climb precipitously high, but was leery about perching on the bars at the top. There was so little structure to hold you and so much gravity grabbing at your ankles.
After a period of hanging on by my fingernails, I landed in the motion picture division at Universal Pictures — specifically motion picture marketing. This was the mid-90s — and the hits kept on coming. Schindler’s List. Apollo 13. Babe. Liar, Liar. I was so lucky to find myself sitting every Monday morning at a literal round table of fellow executives, during what we still consider the Camelot Period. (David Sameth was our King Arthur.) At this roundtable, your title didn’t matter, nor your department. Your voice did. Your ideas did. A custodian’s ideas could have contributed to this creative circle. I’m so fortunate to have found the company of these incredibly creative humans, and though we’ve all moved on, many of us still share the roundtable.
I had a Deep Truth delivered to me during that time in the studio system: What we see is what we get. Or better put, what we see is who we become. In those years, I discovered what it meant to market to the lowest common denominator. Everyone worked hard, brilliantly, devotedly — with little time for personal life. But in the end, so much genius ended up on the “cutting room floor” as they used to say. When our Camelot-period ended, I could be heard muttering down the hallways “We’re just striving towards mediocrity.” By that point, my days there were numbered. It’s of note that during that decade, the nation’s collective intelligence took a giant nosedive.
I could see that Hollywood was arguably the greatest single influence on human society — all eyes were on Hollywood, at a global level. I got curious about the mechanics of this phenomenon, and what could be done. I decided I needed to move from marketing to production, and to write my ass off. I wanted to create stories that could bring humans to life, to inspire us to discover more of our own capacity, and to come together in a shared human experience. Without being cheesy. But how?
Incidentally or coincidentally, while employed at Universal, something compelled me to gather strange skills. I must have been looking for my how. I got licensed as a birth doula, I became certified as a mediator, and I went to massage school. In massage school, my curiosity was piqued by a healing system called Qigong (chee-gung). A friend said she knew of two Qigong teachers, one very classic, and one very out of the box. Guess which I chose?
Qigong: magical, mysterious, but also — science-y!
The “out of the box” Qigong instructor is Chris Fernie, founder of the Institute for Internal Transformation (IIT). I love this practice, and his system specifically, because there’s no spiritual dogma whatsoever. I am so done with dogma. In this practice, I found what church was sorely lacking for me — an actual practice of direct experience, and not blind lip service to a belief system.
Chris’ background is engineer-y, and his system builds from the ground up: from body mechanics to soft tissue to breath to the energetic system, which can take you to infinity and beyond. Basically the practice reactivates the internal design inherent in every human body, which is linked to your own source of meaning. It’s enabled me to bring myself to life, and wake up parts of my brain and body that would likely have been neglected and gone dormant in a “normal” life of a Westerner. We have forfeited so much of the intelligence of our own internal technology to external technologies.
I’m always trying to nail down the science behind the magic in my life. One time I was in Denver at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science with my kids. They had a thermographic imaging device — I used it to test my ability to use my mind to move the heat in the center of my body to my hands. It worked! I also discovered I had grown taller, at an age where people start losing height! This was obviously a very small study, but it was significant to me.
After 25 years of practicing and teaching this particular system of Qigong (no two are alike), I swear I’d be dead several times over without it. I’ve infused this practice into my whole life — including my relationships with the important screens in my life — television, computer and phones.
To Infinity and Back
I’ve longed to bring all the elements of my life together into something resembling a piece of art — less like graffiti, more like Magritte. This blog is part of my answer to “But how?” The other part of my answer is my company Mirror House Media, for which I’ve created several brilliant shows with other brilliant people. As the shows shows seek out their perfect screen homes, this blog will be a great way to make media experiences — and life experience in general — more meaningful. Here my profession, my passions, and my peculiarity can meld into something I hope can be helpful to other humans.
With every blog post, I plan to include some fun things you can try out from my own practice — I call them Qi Tips, because it’s kinda cute. These may not qualify as “Qigong” in the classical sense. They might be a way to play with your own perceptual architecture — your way of seeing and being. They can apply to any part of your life, but I’ve designed them with screen time in mind. Our eyes are so often engaged with our screens, so I figure rather than becoming their captives, we can use them as mirrors for knowing ourselves.
A Question
If your life were a movie or TV series, what would your tagline be? Maybe you have different taglines for different seasons. And please, dare to share!
Qi-Tips
Stand in front of a mirror. Look at you.
What are your first thoughts, feelings, impressions? Notice where your eyes gravitate. Do you have any predictable habits when you look in the mirror?
Focus on just your nose. Now widen your gaze to receive the whole image contained in the mirror. Repeat changing focus a few times.
What changes in you as you change states of vision? Take note of as many sensations as possible: breathing, muscle tension, emotion, opinion.
Now become the mirror. Hold everything you see as if you were the mirror, without reaction. The mirror holds everything in its view unconditionally.
How does this change your sensations, thoughts, feelings?
Next time you’re in front of a screen, try becoming the mirror.
See you in the Looking Glass
We’ll have more fun with these as we venture deeper into the mirror of this “we blog.” Thanks for hopping on my personal magic carpet ride — I would love to hear your experiences in the comments section!
For more information on my work, go to www.mirrorhousemedia.com
For more information on Chris Fernie and the IIT, go to www.internaltransformation.com