Finding Your Way

We only have to look down to see we’re already standing on the path. The Yellow Brick Road waits at our feet. It was already there, always there. But we need to take note, become aware of the path and clear about direction. We greatly help our journey as we clarify who are our helpers, recognize the signs and face the challenges. The journey always begins with the strangest of inconsequential occurrences: a letter, a tidbit of news, a change of the TV channel, or maybe a night of passion that yields a child. Somehow the world shifts or changes, our trajectory slightly altered, yielding unexpected results and seemingly chance meetings later. Major events can happen, too. Disasters like floods and earthquakes can reorient our lives. The event we Americans call 9/11 altered the assumptions and life stories of many. Fathers and mothers have gone off to war; children have been raised in a household where the family has made major sacrifices in the service of our country. These events can change the basic suppositions that are opposite of the day before they happened. So, there’s a story told in my family of when I was a boy, we were seeing the Disney movie Pollyanna and we were all sitting in the theater balcony. In the high drama of the climax of the movie, a little boy comes looking for his friend Pollyanna. Not knowing she has fallen from their climbing tree and broken her back, he wanders through the yard calling her name, “Pollyanna, Pollyanna,” to no response. The audience is passionately involved, we know that she cannot come out to play with him. From under the fateful tree and below her window he again calls out for his friend with a lyrical and expectant call, “Pollyanna!” From the balcony of the Capital Theater, I joined him, “Pollyanna!” I made my clear childish plea for our friend to come out and play. I was in the story. An apparent tragedy had happened and I was enjoined in the struggle, the great and painful struggle for salvation. Expectation and suffering, living in the same place. I have a special piece of me named Pollyanna. I at least want that to be a part of my purpose and place. Pollyanna hoped, challenged and led friends and foes to see their challenges in a different way. Many have gone before to bring hope and light and direction to the struggle. Pollyanna, a courageous optimist whose favorite game was the ‘glad game’ brought light and lightness to those around her. My internal Pollyanna wants to bring some awareness or even direction to your journey. You may sometimes use the colloquial term “current situation.” Situation would suggest a static, identifiable, or finite moment. ‘Situ,’ roughly translated, means essentially ‘where it sits.’ But we use the adjective “current” with it, knowing that honestly, the moment is fluid, dynamic, or electric. So I would suggest that even as we stand in a static place, a “current situation,” we still are in a mobile and dynamic moment, one full of energy and possibility. My suggestion is that there are maps or formulas to help us negotiate the current, understand the moment, learn from the past, be in the present and even imagine and create our future. Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world. (Hero with a Thousand Faces, J Campbell, 25) Many have made the way plain. And yet we each must enter the forest at a point of our own choosing. This was the wisdom of the Knights of the Round Table; none would follow another’s path. Their integrity and courage required them to engage their own journey, their own way. We each can stand in one place, looking back and looking forward in a truly unique liminal moment, and choose where the next footfall will land. All too often we look for direction from the outside. But that can never be the right way. It would have to be someone else’s way. Somehow we must sense or intuit the inner wisdom of our own light, our own nature and name. A wisdom beyond ourselves as it is connected to others. A wisdom founded on our own place or plan. We will explore Campbell’s monomyth, the great examination of the Hero’s Journey found in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. His monomyth suggests that all stories are one story. The details may shift slightly; different characters or episodes may be highlighted. But the stories will ring true. There we will find the common themes of our bio-psycho-social and spiritual existence. As Ariadne gave Theseus a thread to survive the labyrinth, so Campbell provides the map that will guide our journey. According to Campbell, Centuries of husbandry, decades of diligent culling, the work of numerous hearts and hands, have gone into the hackling, sorting and spinning of this tightly twisted yarn. (Hero with a Thousand Faces, J Campbell, p24) We are familiar with the double meaning of ‘yarn.’ Yarn being a story, a tale to be told, but also the yarn that would tie the package together, we could also think of the yarn as a guide rope, the touch point of balance that steadies our steps across the razor’s edge. At the lake where we retreat, there are islands. One of the islands has a long log as a crossing to an island. It would be a treacherous and significant feat of balance were it not for the rope that is strung beside the log.