This is an attempt at a phemonological response to the French film, "Home."

It was written for my Introduction to Western Philosophy class, in 2011.

The movie begins. The darkness turned into water and dolphins, and we wait for something awe inspiring. We hold onto what has been told to us about the movie with our thoughts, as we expect to be heavily influenced. The mind is readying for it, in hopes to link together hidden metaphors and feel scholarly. However, the movie begins. In trying to be perceptive to oneself, in order to then write of this movie, we must be aware of ourselves being aware. To this, we note how we take in the landscape of the world’s image as it appears on screen. Anyone who has watched the Discovery Channel, or Animal Planet, often enough has seen beautiful images like these. They make you take a breath, though not a gasp, and the eyes relax. There is no focusing on a word, a dot, or something extraneous. At hand, we have our world, the awes of its nature, the whole thing. It’s easy to lose ourselves, as the movie begins.

By losing ourselves, I do not mean a loss of person, or in total a loss of awareness. It feels more like the loss of the focus we started with, which we were focused on ourselves. Mountains, forests, waterfalls, deserts, and plains bring our consciousness with them. We are, in effect, there. The roar of the falls consumes our hearing, interrupted by only the squawk of a bird. Taken away by our imagination, we transcend into this other world. We hang on every word of the narrator, a calm voice of a storyteller.

A mind grows restless of the feeling of expansion, the feeling of taking ourselves and imagining the reality of being somewhere else through seeing and hearing the setting. We are shown trees, an epitome of natural perfection in plants. A feeling of looking at a high authority glazes over the mind, but at the core our attention is looking for point. Flooded with color, a history of the careful balance of Earth is awesome, but it’s something the scientific view already has a grasp of. It grows old.

Humans come into existence. We are us. We are gathered with the storyteller in a unity of our humanity. We conquer the world. We make amazing achievements. Few, if any of us, have tilled soil by bare hand, but we take credit for our ancestors. We make us proud of ourselves, our history, as we speak of the old. We, then, are imbued with a stronger power, which we learn to control. We discover fire.

The roar of the billowing column of flame is a rumbling of terrible might. The orange rises over trees, and the analytical part of the mind finds literary technique. Heat from an old campfire comes to mind, the time you got too close and your forehead and cheeks turned pink. A slight burning without pain, but nonetheless felt warmth. You realize that the huge fire is not burning the tree, which is lush and green, nowhere close to dry and charred. We can relate to the plant, but we know if we stood too close, especially to a larger fire such as seen, we logically deduct that we would have burned. Remembering global warming, and the precursor knowledge, we know that the plant indeed catches fire. Its future is grim. We begin to anticipate the terribleness that follows, the wake of destruction caused by our species, our ancestors, and us.

The narrator says an important word: oil. It is the emphasis of our thoughts as we are told of the powers of oil. We remember the fire as we see machines which assist our labor. We take all of this and apply it to our lives. I think of Wal-Mart, of Shop Rite. These systems of near no manual labor, in comparison to machine. Would we be willing to give this up? It is easy to see what comes next. The terrors of the truth arise in our minds. The depression calls for weariness. My mind wants to shut down, and close, but the images have taken me to them with all of my empathy.

One in four people of this world exist like we did before machines. One in five face hunger. These facts sink into the mind, wracking our imaginations to relate to these people. We want to bring them here, but as soon as we think of this we realize that we cannot take them here, because here depends on their suffering. Our brows lower slightly, and the eyes become hard with anger. How can we exist without realizing this? We know we have seen these things before, each and every image a large scale pain for us to contemplate. We have joined humanity. We are human. We have entered the whole of the world, and now we can’t leave. Our bodies cannot shutdown now, we cannot sleep.

Juxtapose this with the animals we lock up in mass cages for our food. Our people are in similar shape. Now we are not just human, we are animals. I have not eaten meat since this movie. I cannot. I have been there, with mindful empathy.

I’ve entered myself. I have concluded that We have not done enough for our world, our Home. I must do something now. I stare onto the screen, but the screen’s images of masses in poverty, pain, and suffering are little compared to the sense of reality in my mind. I am simply bashed with more information, more persuasion, and I can see it. I am not in a room. I am not sitting down. I am not watching a movie. I am in the backroom of my thoughts and emotions, with a background of the images burned into my vision. However, I am not fighting for humanity in my mind. Humanity seems to have been broken. I am seeking balance between rich and poor, between carbon and oxygen, between our destruction and the Earth’s rejuvenation.

The whale waves its flipper goodbye, and rolls in the water. It is majestic, it is a creature. More than a creature, it is waving goodbye, and it is our fault. It is the friend that leaves, when we know it’s the last time you’ll see each other.

The polar bear runs onto the little ice it has, and looks at us. We make eye contact, and it waves its paws, trying to get attention. My mind enters the scene, and I am on a helicopter. He is waving for help, for he is stranded by uncontrollable means. We fly away, without Him.

I want to jump from the helicopter. I want to go home.

The rest of the movie, the words, the hope, is lost on me. I am lost trying to get home, but home is ignorant. Home is not ignorance, but it is daunting. In my mind, in my held back tears, I am ready to save our Home, my Home, even if I don’t know how.

In the end, I realize this assignment, and I realize I lost myself to the movie more than watching myself, but in my memory I can write what I felt and thought. In that, I can find reflection, and be aware of what I was aware to.