Prologue Pt. III

The last of three(!) parts. Phew, we made it, and I'm honoured you have taken the time to cross this desert with me. You're a legend along my own Personal Legend.

If you missed my introduction that lays out why you might want to sit through all of this and where we’re headed, feel free to catch up here. Navigate past and future chapters via the Table of Contents, including part one and two of this prologue. Note that I will pepper my prose with occasional subscribe or comment buttons — I want reader input! So I invite you to stick around and journey with me; share some tea and stories. Thank you for being here.

---

Looking closer, I realised there were much deeper reasons for my coming into The Alchemist waiting to be unearthed. Gosh, so many.

When I first began mentally translating this experience into the concept of a book, I merely intended to use it as the launching pad for a compilation of crazy travel narratives. There are a lot I have never written about in detail, and only exist as yarns I’ve shared with certain interested friends, emails to my mother, and strangers on dating apps for whom I was trying to sound cool. I liked the idea of copying them all down while I can still retrace what scraps remain (thanks to the memory-eviscerating combination of tech-era overload and not nearly enough journalling while on the road) — while simultaneously justifying my unconventional life choices.

Until recently, I genuinely thought my travels were the most interesting and noteworthy thing about me. Their retelling seemed to capture people’s attention in intimidating social situations I might not have survived otherwise, and kept them listening in a way that greatly placated my recognition-starved inner child. And every now and then, someone would tell me I inspired them. I got comments like, “You’re the only person I know that really grabs life by the horns.” Which I lived for, of course, and interpreted as praise; for my bravery, my spontaneity, my smarts as a solo female traveller, my capacity to take on as much chaos as could find me and tenacity to just keep moving and never stop experiencing. (To quote Bojack Horseman again: “Don’t stop dancing ’til the curtains fall.”)

One of the rare images I have of me gallivanting around the world when I still had fuel in the tank, figuratively speaking. Northeast Thailand, 2014.

The way I once saw it: my gift I had to give this world — accompanied by high-brow, travel lit-worthy words — was an image of a girl who found her treasure, over and over again out in the great big hair-raising world, sticking it to all the people who ever regarded her as weak or small or scared. And maybe, that image would rally other dispirited people into realising they too could be big and brave and better than they were ever conditioned away from believing; worthy of being and belonging everywhere.

We desperately need more of the earthy integrity, peace, and “stubborn gladness¹” that comes from having a deep-rooted sense of one’s belonging and worth in the world...and here I was, running in frenzied circles in attempt to cultivate it.

Anyone with an ounce of awareness of human psychology could have told me that maybe this wasn’t the healthiest mantra to be branding myself with. The depth of my burns, how fatally I’d attached my sense of self-worth to external circumstances (as I did with the documentary project) were not yet clear. So I persisted, while ignoring the twittering canaries in the proverbial coal mine that I was encroaching on a massive collapse — in both my internal and external worlds.

Cue burnout. Cue the resulting collapse of my creative business. Cue many months of mental and physical debilitation that filled my brain with fog, my body with lead, and my kitchen floor with floods of confused tears due to monthly full moon emotional meltdowns.

As a high-functioning, busy and active person, this was a bitch. I couldn’t work, I could barely exercise — or for that matter, remember to do simple things like feed myself, shower, or brush my teeth — and I couldn’t string enough coherent words or sentences together to start making sense of what was happening to me.

I felt dumb, debilitated, and wholly useless, like my entire being was bound by an invisible straitjacket. I had never experienced anything like it. I couldn’t distract myself or escape from it. And it lasted for close to a whole year.

I hated it.

Yet, I truly believe it was necessary (and might indeed have been the only thing) to render me inert for long enough to take a good look at some really hard stuff I needed to see.

There were times I could relate heavily to Sophie Hatter as she faced the impending, spectacular wreckage of Howl’s castle. Anyone else seen Howl’s Moving Castle and know what I mean?

Since I first intentionally sat down with all of this, I started peeling away at layers thinking each one would lead into the core, the heart of why this creation started coming into being — and why it might prove relevant to any of you — only to touch on something yet more profound, and dig up more bountiful buried treasures of wisdom and truth.

These discoveries, and the space between them, are slowly piecing together to become something of a Coelho-esque journey in itself, each stage showing me a great deal about what it means to be alive and human today against a backdrop of some really quite troubling stuff going on in our world. Matters I have been losing sleep over, redrafting my life plans around, really questioning whether there will be much left to make plans for in a future that feels increasingly terrifying and desolate and full of destruction. (More on this later.) Maybe you have been too.

It’s been a wild time...honestly so much so I’ve been driving myself a little mad with it all. Tumbling down rabbit holes, retreating from the world, refraining from sharing too much of myself, and my findings, with others. I’ve seriously wondered whether I should, whether anything I have to say could make any damn bit of difference, whether it would all come across as a bit too much.

Despite how badly I had been scorched and feeling like there wasn’t much left of me to give — or maybe there wasn’t a whole lot left to give for — something continued to flicker and burn from within, telling me there was more to this. To keep trusting. To keep digging.

(Again, if you don’t want to entertain partial spoilers, perhaps skim past the next couple of paragraphs.)

Slowly and painstakingly rebuilding myself post-burnout, I kept coming back to recent lessons from The Alchemist; the boy returning home in tatters, asking the “old sorcerer” in the sky if he could have been spared from his suffering, learning he could never have encountered the beauty of the Pyramids without enduring said suffering — and ultimately finding his treasure back where he started.

In the way the boy dug for gold and jewels beneath sands and sycamores, I dug deep inside myself to remember the real me and my worth beneath my external conquests. I was pulled into a cage wrestle with my really quite belligerent fear of “coming home” in both the physical and metaphorical sense:

E.g., Honouring my new, lesser productive limits and settling into a (much) slower, more spacious and familiar place within myself.

Learning to love Lauren-as-she-is, even (especially) when she wasn’t striving for something or setting off on cool adventures or creating wicked art for people — and in some instances, was crumpled in a snotty heap on the floor.

Accepting the displeasing life circumstances that pushed me back, yet again, into the boring-ass Brisbane suburbia I thought I had escaped from for good — that which had, somewhat by default, become my literal “home base” of 16 years in between travels; the respawn point I reluctantly wound up whenever I hit rock bottom and exhausted my escape options; the loathsome mediocrity that, I have to admit, did well to nurture me back to health and financial freedom, the many different times and ways I have needed it.

And so on...all of which finally ground into my thick skull the uncompromisable importance of finding the treasure back where we started; of unearthing a true richness within us beneath all we have built on the outside to supposedly make ourselves more accomplished, impressive, and “better”.

Not only for building a sturdy, un-fuck-with-able inner foundation, detached from external glory and gratification — but for helping us truly appreciate where we’ve come from, what we have, and where we’re headed...while mastering necessary lessons along the way that help us move through our future pursuits less harmfully. (More on this later also.)

I practised patience. I was beaten around by my own fighting. I let myself be defeated, crushed by the crumbling of my own bullshit, many times over.

Eventually, the evidence of my healing began to reveal itself. Another unbelievable chance encounter — yet again, made possible only through the exasperating life circumstances that led me to that point, a la receiving The Alchemist — placed the final block atop my mental Jenga stack that toppled the whole thing into a completely new sequence.

I resumed a regular writing practise for the first time in years. A whole bunch of scattered ideas I had for this speculative writing project suddenly began to connect and intertwine like a mycelium network. The gift from the curly-haired man in North Queensland — which already rearranged my DNA in a certain way where I couldn’t be the same — managed to rearrange me for a second time.

It was time for a re-read; for Coelho, the boy, and the alchemist to make an unwitting, humbled student of me once more. And in the process, bequeathing littler, though no less valuable, treasures I unintentionally skipped the first time around because I was focused on getting to the final pages.

These little answers to my big questions — nestled alongside glittering nuggets of wisdom from philosophers, thought leaders, spiritual teachers, scientists, journalists, poets, artists, and many more — will make up the following chapters. My intention here is to not to instruct (that would I imply I know what the hell I’m doing), but gently offer my own figurative treasures as I dig them up — for wealth should be shared, and never hoarded.

Because if you’re a Big Question Asker like me, and been paying close enough attention, you might be witnessing the state of our world and moving through a whole heap of big feels right now. Overwhelm, fear, anger, apathy, guilt, sadness, despair, confusion, exhaustion, just to name a few — maybe all and more on an average weekday.

Seeing it all, feeling it all, you might be (as I did) wanting to take some kind of human responsibility and say something, do something...but it’s all a bit too much, and you wonder whether anything you say or do can make any damn bit of difference.

You might be (as I am) tempted to clam up, numb out, not bother, just grab what pleasures you can while there is still time, in denial or bargaining until the cows come home. You might be losing your way, on the verge of giving up. Or, you might be full of hope that the climate scientists, the tech giants, governments, billionaire philanthropists, David Attenborough, Elon Musk, whoever — will step in clean up our collective mess before it’s too late.

I get you. I really do. Everything feels way too frigging complicated and we’re only one silly person trying to remember what day the bins go out amidst the thick of it all.

The thing is...respectfully, we are not only one person. We absolutely can make a difference. We absolutely must (at least try to) make a difference. And there is no one coming to save us from ourselves — but ourselves.

And, you know — perhaps the awe-inspiring power of nature.

No pressure. Thankfully though, as refreshing my soul with simple truths from The Alchemist — among other bravely straightforward ideas by kindred Big Question Askers — has taught me (or helped me remember):

It’s the littler, often reassuringly simpler ways of seeing and tackling problems that really count. When they start to intertwine and are faithfully embodied by enough people, they become Big Answers.

And (cue collective exhale of relief), they generally ask so much less of us, of both effort and suffering, than all this bloody complication does. In the words of Bill Mollison, co-founder of permaculture: “Though the problems of the world seem increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.”²

I live, and have lived, in search of as many of these spiritual, philosophical, artistic, and occasionally scientific (for credibility!) salves as possible, to help prepare my perpetually anxious self for not just surviving, but (dare I say) thriving in the unchartered global circumstances I’m painfully aware are gaining fast ground on us. Or, at the very least — cut through the confusion, and learn to live meaningfully and authentically in the face of massive impending loss; in ways that strengthen us against the industrialist, ideological, cultural and political (among countless more) forces that lure us away from our true selves and swiftly destroy the only home we have ever known in this lifetime.

And at this stage along the path of my Personal Legend (a concept you will soon read much about), I am feeling called to share these salves with you — should they, by divinely brilliant chance³, help you back onto the path of yours.

Make no mistake: humanity is headed for some hard stuff. In fact, we have already begun the civilisational, economical, and environmental equivalent of careening off a cliff at high speed⁴. This pilgrimage is going to be a hard one.

Like I said at the beginning: We must be willing to cross deserts in their many metaphorical forms.

Likewise: We must become brave enough to pursue our heart’s desires against any obstacle or external force…and to always choose Love.

Finally — and perhaps most importantly of all — we must return to the treasure buried within all of us, in the sacristies of our hearts, like our lives depend on it...because, well, they kinda do.

In the words of the boy:

“It is we who nourish the Soul of the World, and the world we live in will be either better or worse, depending on whether we become better or worse.”

---

If you stuck with this whole mammoth introduction — well done you. I’m really glad you’re here and to share the following chapters with you. Let’s make ourselves, and the world, better together.

1. As coined by the elusive American poet Jack Gilbert in his work, A Brief for the Defense.

2. According to David Holmgren (its other co-founder): “Permaculture could be described as a design system for resilient living and land use based on universal ethics and ecological design principles...is a global movement of individuals, groups and networks working to create the world we want, by providing for our needs and organising our lives in harmony with nature.”

3. As were the circumstances of my coming into The Alchemist and the basis of this book. As were those of my life and learning coming together as it has so far.

4. If you’re unaware of this...sorry to ruin your day. That probably escalated a bit fast. Take some deep breaths, cry, scoff, or punch a pillow if you have to — and then keep on reading for further resources and commiseration from just some of our beautiful, good, and true kin.