The Way Appears When You Let It
How to get lost and find your way back into your own story...through story.
I confess: I grappled hard with this chapter of my book serialisation. It’s a jaw-breaking mouthful and I’m honestly still not entirely happy with it...but life is happening at a rather fast pace, and I wanna move along with it. Perfection is the enemy of good, after all, and there is so much more to grapple with!
If said grapplings intrigue you, feel free to catch up on past and future chapters via the Table of Contents. 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.
“The very thing you’re best at
Is the thing that hurts the most
But you need your rotten heart
Your dazzling pain like diamond rings
You need to go to war
To find material to sing.”
— Florence + the Machine (King)
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born:
Now is the time of monsters.”
— Antonio Gramsci (thank you
for alerting me to this quote!)“I am not going to give you a destination.
I can only give you a direction —
awake, throbbing with life,
unknown, always surprising, unpredictable.
I’m not going to give you a map.
I can give you only a great passion to discover.”
— Osho
But first...about that humanity careening off the cliff I casually mentioned last chapter. Because I can’t just leave that one (cliff-) hanging.
There are many, let’s just say, accelerators (of the social, cultural, political, economical, and environmental kind), causing this civilisational equivalent of a Thelma & Louise-style nosedive into a canyon of death and destruction. Unless you are living under a particularly cosy rock, intentionally disconnecting from social and broadcast media (good on you), or caught in a deeply cloistered filter bubble — you probably have at least a vague idea of what I’m referring to.
In my mind — which loathes uncertainty and possible future pain of any sort, and y’know, probably isn’t too cool with the idea of careening off a cliff — they all seem rather alarming and important to name, talk about, figure out and fix as soon as possible. It seems, to me, morally imperative to try and shake each other awake through whatever means and channels we have available; make ourselves very aware of what’s coming before the moment of impact so’s we might have time to turn this Thunderbird around.
So that is what I have endeavoured to do, by sheer force of will and urgency. I have been raw-nerding the realm of civilisational complexity/collapse for many months, traversing its countless problems and tangents and side-topics-that-might-be-useful-to-talk-about-later, weaving threads and through-lines I planned to find my way back with and then pull together in a tidy little bow. My three-step intention being: take the gnarliest, jump-scariest knowledge I could find; layer and wrap it up more attractively; present as a gift to readers, who would not be able to resist shaking it up and taking a look inside...and then, just maybe, absorb the potency of its pleas and feel inspired to respond in their own way. Which could, collectively, snowball into action.
Et voilà. We’re all on the same page and now we can quickly move our asses and make better shit happen, yes?
Neat expectation...if this were at all a neat-and-not-batshit-chaotic set of circumstances — all the more so to try and summarise1. Instead, I’ve got myself caught in a depleting, multi-directional tug-of-war with 150,000+ words of notes and research (so far); ideas and theories about our future that are intellectually challenging, existentially conflicting, and maddeningly difficult to fathom as they are fatally entangled with one another; and cautionary doubt over how much of it to relay here. (It’s a spicy set of topics, and I don’t want to scare anybody off. Nor do I want us to stay asleep during the descent and wake up at the bottom of a dystopian hellhole.)
It’s a proper rat-king complexity doom-tangle — fittingly indicative of what our civilisation as a whole is experiencing right now. A metacrisis2, if you’ve not heard the term before.
I’ve come at this conundrum not entirely unlike Lee Krasner3 painting at nighttime amid relentless insomnia: cramming much into a constrained space, with ambitiously broad and emotive strokes in all directions, brimming with fiery urgency and straining for something just out of reach, something far bigger than me...nevertheless, in all my attempts, winding up with a picture that is fractured, utterly confusing, and of an inevitably limited spectrum. A passionate hack-job.
Krasner’s limitation stemmed from the necessity of shrinking her colour palette under cover of darkness; mine from the fact that, despite much diligent research and deeply willing myself to understand and communicate it all at once...I still, simply, just don’t know enough to paint the full mural. Probably never will. I can be as tenacious and straight-A student about this as I know how (and goddamn, if the overwrought nature of everything you’ve read so far hasn’t let you know, I will continue to be), but my feeble attempts to “know it all” won’t make the world’s problems go away, or become any more possible to understand and control (thereby, in theory, controlling my fear around them).
And the fact remains that said metacrisis is characterised by its impossibility to fully comprehend, even by the actual experts (which I most definitely am not).
So how the heck could I think I stand a chance at laying it all out flat?
And...is it even truly necessary to do so before making better shit happen for ourselves?
Through each detangling, hypothesis-defining attempt, this book writing process that brought me so much joy became...not so fun. It suddenly reeked of needless complication; the same kind of left-brained, heady, authoritative, and ultimately insecure overstatement of intellectual omniscience — like, I see the whole situation and get how it works, so aren’t I clever and here’s my brilliant pitch on how to fix things — that got humanity into this mess. See? Still doing it4 — all head and no heart.
While I still believe it is, at times, important for us to identify and better understand the devils we’re dealing with — so we can make wiser choices within our control — I now realise it’s going to take a heck of a lot more than elaborate mental gymnastics to hit the brakes and slow the dive into the canyon.
Even though there is mounting evidence that stopping it altogether is no longer possible — and, spiritually speaking, the time might be ripe for a spectacular collapse of old, corrupt, broken systems that don’t serve us — we sure as hell still have time to tend to our fear and resulting treatment of one another on the way down.
We can (as Thelma and Louise did) face impending death and destruction with a radical display of love, with courageous defiance against our perpetrators and violent, confusing circumstances that brought us to this point. And perhaps somehow, amazingly...hit a softer landing together.
Plus, I realised it’s much more enjoyable and adventurous to dwell on what could be created instead of what needs to be fixed; the potentials instead of the pathologies. There are already enough articles, books, and podcasts discussing the latter at length. We have all the high-tech and -ticket resources and “solutions” to said pathologies we could hope for, and yet, we’re not seeing clear highways out of the emerging hellscape that is our burning, drowning, despairing, industrialism-pillaged, hyper-commodified world.
Some don’t bother recommending we lay out the pathologies at all, for doing so is too tail-chasing and time-consuming, and leaves us exhausted by pointless squabbling over details and distractions. (This certainly played out internally for me.)
As I once read somewhere on the socials, in one of its rare pockets of brilliance: When a venomous snake bites you, you don’t spend your remaining life force chasing it down and asking why it did it; you seek immediate medical attention.
Environmentalist David Suzuki analogises that we’re in a car hurtling toward a brick wall and everyone’s arguing over where to sit. I’ve heard journalist Sarah Wilson refer to the over-theorising and solution-selling of our current worldly situation as “intellectual dick swinging” and rearranging deck chairs on the bow of the sinking Titanic. Collapse theorist Meg Wheatley advises not getting tangled up in the what and why, and instead “cut straight to the spiritual reckoning required to lead on an island of sanity.”
Noted.
Thus, after one particularly exasperating day of trying (and failing) to clamber atop the countless, constellating ways our societies are eating themselves alive — my overloaded brain like Sisyphus5 straight-up cursing and letting the boulder roll down the hill before he even reached the top — I dumbly shifted my focus below my neck, wondering if my heart might have an idea for an easier (and more enjoyable) way forward.
Remembering the wisdom of the boy and the chance passing of information at the Pyramids, I flopped onto my bed, picked my copy of The Alchemist off my bedside table, and flicked through its pages.
Sure enough, I found more buried treasure, an answer in a place I hadn’t looked before: the author’s introduction, which I must have skimmed over in previous reads, presumably for the purpose of finding it now and having it make all the more sense to me. A single paragraph put me back onto the path of flow, reaffirmed by Coelho himself that the cure for too much complication and mental melee is, simply…story.
“I re-read The Alchemist regularly and every time I do I experience the same sensations I felt when I wrote it. And here is what I feel. I feel happiness, because it is all of me, and all of you simultaneously. I feel happiness, too, because I know I can never be alone. Wherever I go, people understand me. They understand my soul. This continues to give me hope.
When I read about clashes around the world — political clashes, economic clashes, cultural clashes — I am reminded that it is within our power to build a bridge to be crossed. Even if my neighbour doesn’t understand my religion or understand my politics, he can understand my story. If he can understand my story, then he’s never too far from me. It is always within my power to build a bridge. There is always a chance for reconciliation, a chance that one day he and I will sit around a table together and put an end to our history of clashes. And on this day, he will tell me his story and I will tell him mine.”
It all comes back to story; to writing one’s story with their own hand to be exchanged with others, forever learning and listening.
To the simplicity of moral and soul connection.
And to embracing the differences that make us interesting and beautiful.
These ring truer and and clearer than the endless rhetoric, the false promises of the solution economy, the what and why and who’s at fault of it all that bequeaths illusory control (and often leads to paralysis).
This reality is what gets us unstuck; allows us to face up, hold hands, and hold on tight as we nosedive into canyons of the unknown, surrendering our familiar worlds and corrupt structures behind us into clouds of dust...and maybe, amazingly, hit softer landings together.
And so...to story.
Because while I have been busy driving myself half-insane — and, since The Alchemist came into my life, I have been blessed with an abundant daisy chain of related synchronicities that never seem to stop — there is a kind of undercurrent, an understory slowly taking shape here, garbed with pieces of both my personal life and Coelho’s mystical world. One in which I am gently, unwittingly, invited to take a leaf or two out of his (literal) book, drop the ropes in my one-woman tug-of-war, and let the power of allegory speak instead.
Like many people’s, my 2024 experience was a brutal beast to grapple with. Its cruelly kind, paradoxical nature determined I would, from one of destiny’s outstretched hands, finally and feebly grasp its subtle and hard-won gifts — while witnessing, with a sweep of her other hand, the annihilation of all that led to my receiving them. Indeed, the pieces of this book would not have started falling into place as they did — owing to a wildly auspicious encounter with a human I would not have met if not for the gruelling sequences of 2024 that brought me to her — without this struggle, for which I am (now) eternally grateful...and simultaneously devastated.
I count my blessings, cradle this overflowing creative cup, while walking across the smoking rubble of familiar worlds and structures that previously sustained me.
A steady job which, in the space of a few months, bolstered my income from below-poverty-line levels to somewhere really quite comfortable.
My photography business that I bootstrapped with my heart and soul, and kept me vibrantly alive during covid.
The suburban house in a mediocre location that I bitched about to no end, which nevertheless held me through relentless cycles of nervous breakdown and burnout.
The subsequent, more alternative and less mediocre dwellings that, for a brief and beautiful time, offered dreams of greener pastures (which browned and died soon after setting foot on them).
And...my relationship; once a sturdy, healing force beyond my capacity to imagine, slowly picked apart by the many hungry shadows we disturbed from their hiding places. He and I had fallen into a mirage of one another hard and fast, thirsty for the smooth liquid salvation of love — and were hydrated for a time, though tasted salt and sand with every mouthful; as one of my early journal entries shows.
“Right now, my meaning is in the people I’m sharing space with — two in particular. My partner...and me. Both of us have been single-as-fuck for a long time, and being spontaneously flung together in the way that we were has dug up deep internal stuff in the manner of a dog digging up old bones in the yard. None of us knew the bones were there until the smelly things were being dropped into our laps. And now we’ve both had to learn how to deal with them together; we’d learned all we could independently. We were both finally ready — me at 33, him at 36 — to have mirrors held up to our dankest, gnarliest old bones; our figurative skeletons we’d so cunningly tried to bury in the backyard ourselves.”
Let me tell you: Two years of holding up mirrors makes one’s arms incredibly tired. Two years of bone-deep scrutiny — of turning oneself inside-out and raw in the name of vulnerability — makes two people incredibly tired with one another. We were not necromancers; we were emotionally inept humans, doing our absolute best, and spilling milk and tears all over the shop.
Our tender soul connection was not, in the end, strong enough to withstand the category-five hurricane that ripped up the roots of some deeply entrenched secrets following a shared plant medicine ceremony — nor the harsh reflections of a life lived in too-close proximity with slapdash, falling-apart fences for boundaries.
The inevitable ebb and flow of things saw us braid together with rusted heartstrings, taught us much, and now tears us apart to, once again, venture along separate paths. At least for a while.
Because sometimes hearts become too heavy to carry someone else’s as well as your own. Sometimes we must hand back the baggage we have adopted — having failed to see, through our naivety, when our help turned into hurt — to gather that which will fortify us for the lone road ahead.
Like the Fool in a deck of tarot cards (which, of course, has flipped out at me a few times this new year already), I now find myself at the edge of a precipice, staring into the canyon. One foot poised to drop into a vista of the space-between all certain things; both thrilled and alarmed.
In some ways, I’m tensing up and feel tempted to brace against the wave of vertigo that is surely soon to follow; the soles of my feet throb like I am flesh-remembering falling 365-feet after jumping from a bridge in Victoria Falls ten years ago. In some moments, my brain screams at me (like it did mid-free-fall): Stop this, stop falling, turn around, grab on, go back — BIG MISTAKE!
I have dreamed of looking out over this ledge for so long, feeling the ground fall away from me, tumbling into the universal net of support I (mostly) trust by now will catch me...and yet, have to suppress the urge to reach for his familiar hand. Wrap my arms around his sturdy, tree trunk torso and hold on for dear life. Absorb the warmth of his skin for just a little longer, in anticipation of a potentially long, cold, and lonely wind coming to blow me away.
Forgive all wrongdoings and wounded trust. Retract our closing statements. Stay close to a shoreline — well walked by all the lovers — that will wash away with the next big wave, clinging to security that does not truly exist and trying to ignore the call of the wild outer waters that beg me to wrap myself in Selkie skin6 and merge with the great beyond.
Here (and there) I am. Unable to stay, unwilling to leave — so goes the song title in my favourite Titanic soundtrack. Oh my Gaia…if only I could write to you how hearing this soundtrack in my head right now makes me feel.
It’s...as though I am hearing the return message from the divine that fills me with grief and draws me towards union7; one half of a hopeful, astounded, unimaginably all-encompassing love yet unrealised.
As though I am regarding with fresh eyes any chains I thought were holding me back, and discovering they are made of loosely woven linen.
As though I am remembering something — somewhere — deeply cherished that doubt and dutifulness taught me to forget; somewhere both out there and incredibly close, so close I feel its gentle touch on my shoulder that gives me chills.
It makes me recall myself at my most untethered by the cumbersome physics and heartbreaking limitations of our three-dimensional world — at my most unashamedly free — and imagine she is waiting for me on the road ahead; smiling with the deepest recognition, with a gaze and wicked glint in her eye that says, You’re coming, right?
That same recognition comes rushing back whenever I return to my writing practise, or I play an old beloved song, or a plane takes flight, or a sudden silence falls, or I am filling my cup with stories from those around the world — each time I pick up my copy of The Alchemist to find an answer to a difficult life question — and relaxes my inner knots.
It knows. She knows. A call of the wild rings at her like a Pavlovian bell, and she salivates at the thought of a wide-open field or a stupefying cliff’s edge or a watery, sun-drenched horizon. She — I — can no longer ignore it. I hear it hourly...and I must go to it.
Coelho knew as well.
Before he wrote The Alchemist, Coelho heard his own call to follow a trail in search of treasure. This pilgrim’s trail — known as the Camino de Santiago, the Camino Way, and other names — just so happens to be one I heard about on my travels around ten years ago now, and became instantly captivated.
I could not tell you why I immediately knew this was a path I would need to walk one day...until, honestly, about a week ago.
Not long after reading the author’s introduction about story, I worked a “sleepover” shift at my job (though could not sleep a wink), and passed the time by frantically searching online for anything that could intrigue or inspire or pacify me. The Camino Way randomly came to mind, and in my research, I discovered the title of a book called The Pilgrimage — written by, of course, Paulo Coelho about his experiences walking the trail some thirty-odd years ago, which led to his returning to writing; and to writing, in just two weeks, his most famous masterpiece that is The Alchemist. These books have been described as essential companions to one another, so I have no idea how the other escaped my attention until that sleep-deprived night.
I corrected this lapse of awareness by ordering a copy of the book immediately...and realised, before even reading it, that I had found my way back into my own story. A way of transcending all the complication that got me bogged down at the beginning of this chapter, turning my writing process into the mental equivalent of (to quote Jerry Seinfeld8) “pushing against the wind in soft, muddy ground with a wheelbarrow full of bricks.” A return message to the divine that’s calling me into union, to the call of the wild coming at me from all directions that had me eager, but unsure, of which direction to walk.
As in my Personal Legend, so in my writing practise: I did not know where to begin...so where better to begin, to walk, than where Coelho — the man whose book is the muse behind my book; whose life is a metaphysical, parallel pilgrimage to that which he writes, and to those, like me, whom he guides — himself began through walking? A place where, it just so happens, my soul had yearned me towards a long time ago for reasons I could not explain?
It all makes sense — brain-explodingly so. Even more so now since I followed a recommendation from a friend9 into a session with an astute astrocartography/akashic records10 reader who, among many things, told me I was once a travelling storyteller in Europe; that I’m an old (olddd) soul with a penchant for pilgrimages and Earth’s leylines (and the ancient travellers and traders who followed them).
And regarding the Camino? I have a planetary line going directly through the heart of Santiago de Compostela. Said my reader of this:
“Whatever you do on the Camino Way represents that greater purpose of a human being. Meeting people along the way, gathering the shells, taking nature, taking time...what changes people, and humankind, can make.”
Using this experience for figuring out my role in the world, how I could be helping, where I should be putting my energy — then translating my lived experience of these questions, my awareness and advocating, into creative writing. (She quite literally showed me an oracle card she had pulled prior to our session with the words “creative writing” on it.11)
Regardless of how you (and sometimes, honestly, I) feel about the woo, and whether this all might be “real” or not: The truth I deduce from this reading is lies in where I was pointed toward what I kind of already knew (or merely guessed) in my heart. I just couldn’t see it so clearly, and from different angles, before. I kept talking myself out of it, or applying a realistic (read: limiting) lens to the situation before I could even entertain the dream.
In typical left-brain fashion, I have been letting my mind, my ego, my logic, my intellect, my fixation of only believing what can be seen and secured (all sides of the same dice, in the end) keep me close to the shoreline. Pull the rest of me — body, spirit, soul — back from the canyon. Deny my heart’s yearning toward the travelling storyteller and book writer and Personal Legend pursuer (before I knew what a Personal Legend was) I have long-known I’ve wanted to be, and resisted evidence to the contrary as often as I remembered that dreams are just as real as facts.
So.
“Here I am, between my flock and my treasure,” thought the boy called Santiago at the outset of his journey. “He had to choose between something he had become accustomed to and something he wanted to have.”
And so do I.
He is grateful for his sheep, how well he knows them and their value, the skills he has earned in his time as a shepherd, the lands he got to explore, the people he met and traded with. I am grateful for that which has sustained and rebuilt me over the past two years, which kept me safe and will be both deeply missed and fondly remembered — and let go of with some claw marks in them.
Yet, regardless of me and my controlling, that familiar, “safe” world is falling away to make space for my heart’s burning desire, one without a clear outcome: To travel to Spain and walk the Camino Way, in the spirit of a creator whose work has so inspired mine.
In the spirit of simplicity, gathering shells and stories, reclaiming time, honouring change and human potential, building bridges of love and understanding, carving a path of curiosity and meaning through the mundane. In the spirit of shedding, braving, and becoming.
In the spirit of each and every one of us learning, by doing, what we are uniquely here for: walking a lone road only by the light and grace of our true and tender hearts, following the omens and gratefully crossing paths with those of others when we’re so lucky.
There may be treasure at the end; there may simply be somewhere we can look back at where we came from, at what was loved, grieved, and left behind with greater appreciation and perspective.
I quoted Osho at the beginning of this chapter. As per his wisdom, I do not know my destination — not really. I have been given a direction, and a great passion to discover, and little more. Coelho has provided signposts — brilliantly illuminating as they are — rather than an exact map...and this is wonderful.
Because ultimately: I must be the writer of my own way, my own experiences. My footprints have started to fit a little too snugly inside those of others, and I am ready to pivot. I am ready to feel enthused and enthralled — no longer bruised and brawled — by a life that is not my most boldly and authentically lived.
I am ready for the chills of the rugged ocean, the steep drop of the cliff, and the remembered-something’s gentle touch; to throb with life, to cloak myself in Selkie skin and be drawn into union with all of it. I am ready to, once again, come back as a grateful pilgrim and wild-eyed adventurer along the path of my own Personal Legend.
This is where I will be in the coming weeks and months, and what I will be madly preparing for...provided nothing disastrous or unexpected happens in the meantime. (Can never really know these days, can we?) There will be many sheep to herd; much coordination of the kind I generally cannot stand to do — though I equally cannot imagine a better payoff.
While I hustle to set off and make my dream come true...let us turn our gaze toward a humble shepherd in the fields of Andalusia who is soon to do the same.
Though here is one solid attempt at it. (Paid chapter from Sarah Wilson’s Substack serial about collapse; absolutely worth it.)
Name a breed of threat or crisis, and we are experiencing it right now — financial, climate, mental and physical health, housing, humanitarian, debt, democracy, AI, mass migration, unemployment, loneliness, and so on — seemingly all at once. Now referred to as the “meta”, “perma”, or “poly” crisis, the World Economic Forum describes it in their Global Risk Report from 2023 as, “a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part.” In short, our systems of global codependency and commerce have become so fatally entangled that we can’t tug on one limb without dislocating another — and the damages are now, apparently, beyond our clumsy skill to repair. More on this later.
World renowned artist Jackson Pollock’s estranged wife, a distinguished painter in her own right, whose style completely changed amid a period of time in which she was suffering from insomnia after Pollock’s alcohol-fuelled death. Her nighttime artistry rendered her once-kaleidoscopically colourful palette into shades of black, cream, and umber (for colour was difficult to work with in the dark), and — by virtue of taking up residence in the Long Island barn she once shared with Pollock, with much room to move about — her brushstroke style from restrained Cubist into an emotive, frenetic feat of athleticism, carving wide and ambitious arcs while holding the brush in her fist and hacking at the canvas, sometimes jumping up and down to hit particular spots. (So I don’t use the phrase “hack-job” disparagingly.)
And while I could simply go back and edit/rewrite this chapter for greater elegance and ease...I’ve decided to keep it as is. This way, readers can witness my grappling of the complexity vs. simplicity/head vs. heart journey unfolding in real time as I write (and attempt to embody its wisdom).
Of Homer’s Iliad, doomed to push a massive boulder up a hill over and over again for eternity.
Seductive creatures of Celtic/Norse mythology (among others) with the capacity to shapeshift and either live in the sea or on land by wearing or removing seal skin. Selkies can be tricked into marrying humans and staying forever on land — by someone stealing and hiding their skin — preventing them from returning to their ocean home. They are rarely happy in these forced marriages, as Selkies remember their wild nature and long to return, taking to escaping and leaving families behind if their skins are found.
Per Rumi’s Love Dogs.
In conversation with Tim Ferriss (episode #485).
Countless thank-yous, Chloe.
Astrocartography: a system of plotting one’s astrological chart across a world map, to better understand where one might be ideally located for various purposes and benefits. Akashic records: believed by Theosophists to be a non-physical (mental, spiritual) compendium of all universal events, thoughts, words, emotions, and intent ever to have occurred (and will occur) in the past, present, and future, for all life forms and entities — not just human. It’s a pretty out-there concept, and I was curious as hell to find out just how much of what I was told correlates with my interests, tendencies, and experiences in this lifetime. My reader was delightful and I felt incredibly validated by her findings. For anyone mildly curious or interested, her website is here.
She also told me to lean into any bread and potato cravings — that they’re good and grounding for me by virtue of my ancestry. I have never been so persuaded.