Metaphors, or "Back from Pittsburgh"

We spent a long weekend in Pittsburgh attending the APCA conference, and meeting a lot of wonderful people. It was a very enlightening experience, and I talked to people who had been performing at colleges for longer than I've been alive, people who graduated from Berklee, people who went to circus school in England, and just some nice folks.

After we were done, we did an afternoon performance at a Borders store, and talked to an interesting couple named "My" and "River".

Here is a link to River's blog.

I try to learn from people I meet in many different circumstances. I think it's easy to dismiss people and their ideas when they use different language to describe their thoughts; so I make an effort to think more deeply about what they are saying, and to understand the metaphors they use.

We all use metaphors. Language is metaphor.

But sometimes we pick our culture, and pick our metaphors, and other types of metaphors aren't allowed to enter in. While I don't use certain types of metaphors in my speech or thought, it does not mean that I cannot recognize those metaphors as being valuable in other people's thoughts.

In whatever frame of reference we hold, we tend to take our metaphors as literal, and other people's metaphors as figurative. But everything we think or talk about is a metaphor.

"A rising star in American politics", "A brilliant man", "A scientific revolution", "Coming down with a cold", "Having a fever", etc, etc...

Just some thoughts.

-micah