The Walls Within
What a Bowl of Soup and The Sword in the Stone Ignited
Long before Parsley Sword had a name, there was a bowl of soup I refused to eat.
I was about four years old. It was Sunday lunchtime and floating on the surface of my soup were small green herbs I wanted nothing to do with.
My father was a gifted storyteller. He seemed to understand early on that stories and metaphors could reach me in a way instructions rarely do. So instead of telling me once again to eat my soup, he began to tell me a story.
There was a young boy who lived on a farm and longed to see the world, but he was still too small and too weak to set off on his own. His grandmother grew a very special herb in her garden — the king’s herb — and every day she added a little of it to his food so that he would grow strong.
And he did. The boy grew up, ventured out into the world, faced challenges and overcame obstacles. There were moments when he felt lost and alone. Until one day, he pulled a sword from a stone and became king.
I was completely captivated. Then my father revealed, with a smile, that the very same king’s herb was floating in my soup. I ate it without hesitation.
Nothing about the parsley itself had changed. But its meaning had. A moment earlier, it had been something unwanted and insignificant. Now it represented strength, courage and adventure.
I could not have explained it at four, but that small moment contained an idea that would stay with me for much of my life:
The way we see something can change what becomes possible.
My father’s story was his own version of the legend of King Arthur. It quickly became one of my favorites.
The first portal
A few years later, when I was six, my father took me to the cinema for the first time. I remember that first visit less as a sequence of facts than as a sequence of sensations. We entered the cinema lobby, and the smell of popcorn and melted butter reached me. I got a large cup of popcorn, and we walked into what felt like an enormous auditorium. I sank into a red, soft, plush seat. I remember the fabric beneath me. The sense of safety it gave me. The smell in the air. The taste of popcorn. The huge white screen in front of me and the question of what might soon appear on it. Then the lights slowly went down. Music filled the room. And the first image appeared. The film was Disney’s The Sword in the Stone — the story my father had already brought to life at our kitchen table. I was completely absorbed, almost trance-like, as I followed Arthur and Merlin into a world of learning, transformation and discovery.
I left the cinema with one new belief: Anything is possible.
And I kept going back. I went to the cinema as often as I could, slipping into all kinds of roles — from Luke Skywalker and Yoda to Bastian and Falkor, Marty McFly and Doc. I travelled around the world, into different galaxies and back to the future again. Those characters allowed me to encounter, experience and learn things that, as a little girl on my own, I never could have.
I like how philosopher Colin McGinn describes the difference between watching a film on television and seeing one in the cinema. A film on television is something we look at — an object in the room, like any other. A cinema screen is something we look into, more like a window or a portal: another world, held at a safe distance, until we allow ourselves to enter it.
I had been stepping through that portal since I was six.
I simply had no language for what I was doing there.
As I grew older, films helped me look at difficult situations from another angle, find orientation when I felt stuck and sometimes gather the courage to try something I might not have tried on my own.
Certain stories seemed to lend me strength until I could recognize some version of it in myself.
For a long time, this remained intuitive.
A character inspired me.
A line stayed with me.
A scene changed the way I saw something.
A language for what I had been seeing all along
Years later, while studying psychology and completing further training, I began looking at films much more systematically.
I studied protagonists, their beliefs, values, behaviors and strategies. I became interested not only in what a person did, but in the inner resources that made those actions possible.
During this work, I discovered Ryan M. Niemiec and Danny Wedding’s Positive Psychology at the Movies.
It was one of those moments when someone gives words to something you have known for years without knowing how to name it.
Positive psychology asks what helps people function well, grow and navigate adversity. One of its best-known frameworks, the VIA Classification, describes 24 character strengths — qualities such as curiosity, bravery, perseverance and hope.
Niemiec and Wedding even offer criteria for what makes a film a positive psychology film — in essence, a real strength, honestly shown, meeting a real difficulty.
Suddenly, I had a way to look more closely at what heroes and heroines were actually doing.
And a new question emerged:
What might their strengths and choices reveal about us?
From screen to life
That is the story Parsley Sword grew from, even though it took me years to give it a name.
Films and series can be more than entertainment. They can help us recognize strengths, see a difficult situation from another angle, borrow perspective when our own feels narrow and discover possibilities we had stopped seeing.
But the most interesting moment comes after recognition:
What will you do with what you have seen?
Parsley Sword is an invitation to watch differently.
To look beyond plot and entertainment. To notice the characters, choices, strengths and moments that stay with you. And then to translate what you notice into reflection and, where it feels useful, into action.
A story may not change the walls around us, but it can change what we believe is possible beyond them.
That is the movement at the heart of Parsley Sword:
Watch. Apply. Become.
Not because every film contains an answer. And not because a fictional hero should tell us how to live. Stories are more interesting than that.
So are we.
A hero may show us courage when ours feels out of reach. A character may reveal a strength we have overlooked in ourselves. A story may raise a question we have been avoiding or make visible a possibility we had stopped considering.
Every hero leaves clues.
The more interesting question is what their story reveals about our own character — and what we choose to do next.
My father changed the meaning of parsley through a simple story. Disney’s The Sword in the Stone later sparked a passion that opened an entirely new world to me. Years later, psychology gave me a language for something I had already been doing intuitively all along.
Parsley Sword is what grew from all three.
P.S. “It’s up to you how far you go. If you don’t try, you’ll never know.”
— Merlin to Arthur, The Sword in the Stone (Disney, 1963)
What might become possible if you stopped waiting to feel ready and simply took the first small step?Sources and further reading
McGinn, C. (2005). The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact. Pantheon Books.
Niemiec, R. M., & Wedding, D. (2014). Positive Psychology at the Movies: Using Films to Build Character Strengths and Well-Being (2nd ed.). Hogrefe Publishing.
Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. Oxford University Press / American Psychological Association.
The Sword in the Stone (1963). Directed by Wolfgang Reitherman. Story by Bill Peet. Walt Disney Productions.
VIA Institute on Character. The 24 character strengths. viacharacter.org
White, T. H. (1938). The Sword in the Stone. Collins. Later revised as the first book of The Once and Future King (1958).
About Parsley sword
Parsley Sword sits at the intersection of film, positive psychology and personal growth. I use the films and characters that already mean something to you, the scenes you return to, the lines you remember, as a way into reflection rather than another list of things to fix about yourself. This isn't therapy and it isn't a review site. It comes from positive psychology, from looking at what already works in you and building from there, not from diagnosing what's wrong. Watch, apply, become, that's the whole idea. You watch a film, you take one strength or one question from it, and you carry it into your own life. Every hero leaves clues. This is where you go looking for yours.
