Welcome to my blog,
This semester in "Who am I", we've been thinking about what makes us unique and how can we relate to others. We started to research the Ojibwe people. Once we started researching them, we started to look into things that make their people unique. We went on several FEs to dig deeper into risk, doubts, and dreams, from learning Ju-Jitsu to talking to a personal financial planner. We learned not only, physical safety, but also learned financial safety. We also learned about the “Freud theory” which is comprised of three parts. The id generally works unknowingly according to the pleasure principle. The ego operates according to the reality principle within the conscious area. A super-ego that functions on the basis of moral principles at all levels. According to the “Great spider story”, dreamcatcher gets rid of bad dreams and allows good thoughts in our heads only when we are asleep. The little hope in the middle of the dream catcher is where good dreams come. The bad, and scary dreams disappear with the sunshine. For this project, I created a dream catcher.
My dream catcher has a very deep and personal connection to me. The colors symbolize the holy trinity and the divinity of the Roman Catholic Church. The middle, though you cannot see it, is empty. It's there to leave room for improvement. It's there to show that, when you find faith in religion, you can still have much-needed room for improvement. The colors of the dream catcher represent so many things. All of which are very dear to me as a devout Christian & having Catholic beliefs. These colors help me understand the time of the “season” it is. From Lent to Easter the colors represent as follows:
White & Gold represent the birth and eventual rebirth of Christ.
Red represents the color of blood and, therefore, of martyrdom.
Purple, worn during the Advent and Lent seasons, purple reflects sorrow and suffering. Sorrow as the faithful awaits the arrival of the Savior and suffering to mark Jesus Christ's suffering in the desert (Lent) for 40 days.
Pink, a special color worn only twice, represents a time of joy amid a period of penance and prayer.
Green represents the hope of Christ's resurrection.
Blue is the symbol of the Virgin Mary.
Black used in Masses for the dead as a sign of mourning.
The colors also have a deeper meaning to them. Red, was my nephew's favorite color before his untimely death. Green, my mother as well as my grandmother's favorite color. We started this semester learning about Desecrates and the surrealist movement. During this time, Descartes had the knowledge or perception that as humans, we were born with the ability to have higher consciousness and knowledge ordained by god. The surrealism movement had the idea that it aimed to revolutionize the human experience. It balances the rational vision of life with the unconscious, dream-driven vision. Artists of the surrealist movement, discover the magic and bizarre beauty in unexpected, mysterious ways of overlooked and unconventional.
Lastly, the Ojibwe tradition of putting the feathers on the dream catcher, they are hanging from the lower sides of the circle serves an important purpose. They help the trapped dreams from the web glide gently down to the person sleeping below. I did not include this in my dream catcher because we cannot accurately depict the Ojibwe tradition because, we have to appreciate, and not appropriate it. We are not them, and we are not them, and we have no intentions of being them. Their culture is unique to them but what can I as a student do to keep their culture alive, but also respect it for what it is.
Explaining the reason behind it is a little, well it’s quite long. From the feelings of torture to the feelings of being alone. I’ve long dealt with a lot of issues pertaining to me feeling like I had to do this all alone. With regards to the tradition, I cannot make this part of the dream catcher. From what we read and learned about this specific part of the tradition, these are meant to be a sort of, place where all of the negative energy slides down, away from the individual whose dream catcher it is. Now if I were to do this, it would've been the same beads from what I used in the center of the dream catcher, the colors represent what's dear to me. The purple for the times of mourning, the black for the sign of mourning.
I part with saying this, everything that we as people on this rock we call earth, live using other people's inventions, and so many traditions that we use have been passed down and taken from other people's cultures. The dream catcher has been violated and changed by people who have no true meaning of the dream catcher nor the inner beauty of it.
It has been greatly changed. There are a lot of people who look for the inner beauty of it as the real tradition of the Ojibwe people. I've learned to question things, take risks but still keep myself safe. I've learned to doubt things, but still keep an open mind, maybe sooner or later I’ll be ready to let go of quite a few things,
Thank you for reading my blog.
Sincerely,
LGJ
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