“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” - George Harrison
-Sunghwa Kim
Listen while you read. Find the “You Are Here” Playlist here.
There comes a time in everyone’s life when one gets the overwhelming sense that they are lost. And that lost feeling might be one of anxiety—the fear-state that comes after the idea but before the action. In which case, “feel the fear and do it anyway,” has been our motto around here. But it might just be that you are “truly” lost, as in, you do not know where to go, or what to do next. It isn’t so much fear that’s keeping you from journeying toward a potential outcome, as it is not knowing what it is you want in the first place.
“In the middle of the road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.” -Dante Alighieri, “The Divine Comedy”
We only feel lost when we have diverted from the well worn path of the mundane. We are never lost in the corner store, our living rooms, or in our daily commute to work. We get lost when we enter new realms, cross distinct borders into lands unknown, and reach for something outside of what’s common.
And this seems to me to be the compulsion of the soul: to find and refine our way through the world. Even more broadly than our individual yearning, there appears to be a native inclination within all things to expand at one point or another during their life cycle. Manifested in our human lives, this natural bias toward growth leads us to our edges and beyond, and even prompts the inflation of our once limited goals. It is as if we are led by our own phantom desire into further becoming ourselves.
-Sean Mundy, Cycles
In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered why you always lived like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plentitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
–John O’Donohue, For A New Beginning
Many of us resist the call to follow. Some for a time, some forever. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. And there is nothing wrong with those who resist. The resistance itself could be a response to trauma of some kind, developed out of a felt need for security. But the work is to learn how to trust oneself and one’s tools again in the vast wilderness of becoming.
It occurs to me that even when we are “lost,” we are actually on a path–our path. The poet and lecturer David Whyte says we only know when we are on our path, when the path itself dissolves as we walk. It’s simultaneously a lovely and yet anxiety inducing image.
In my mind’s eye, I see myself navigating through a forest. I’m in an undergrowth of ferns that give way temporarily to my forward steps. But when I look back, I see no trail behind me. There is only the green quiet of the wild. I feel nervousness, doubt over my direction, yet understand that to “go back” is not an answer either. There’s a certain element of trust that keeps me moving forward.
“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.” - Carl Jung
-Tom Friedman, Untitled, 1996
“At the same time as you’re setting out on a radical new path,” says Whyte, “you are going to enter the black contemplative splendors of self doubt.”
I suppose this is what is meant by the term trailblazing. We are, in fact, doing just that as we age, mature and develop into one-of-a-kind beings. Our feeling lost is likely a sign that we are exactly where we ought to be, in the middle of processing a personal evolution. There is an element within us, dragging its heels across the doorsill, as well as the aspect that pushes us on, chasing the new horizon. This is where we are when we move through those “contemplative splendors of self doubt.” Smack dab in the middle of a seismic change…
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
–David Wagoner, Lost
“The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you.” The final lines of Wagoner’s above poem are incredibly potent and remind me of the painter, Paul Cézanne, known for his incredible landscapes. He would take a great deal of time to study his subject, committing over 80 works to Mount Saint Victoria alone. He claimed to be able to “see fragrances,” and has been quoted as saying, “the landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.” This ability to be a channel for the environment stems from his deep presence in which, his ego set aside, Cézanne could not “capture” a subject, so much as he could translate it.
-Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire. (2 of more than 80 works dedicated to this same mountain)
Cézanne’s intentionality and patience reminds me of a story from John Perkins’ book, “Touching the Jaguar,” in which John, who regularly leads groups to learn from indigenous nations of South and Central America, met with the Kogi nation. The Kogi live in the mountains of Colombia, and during a visit with them, Kogi shamans, known as Mamos, told John about their peoples' resilience to endure wave after wave of colonization…
“We’ve been colonized many times. Long ago, the Spanish conquistadors invaded us. Our ancestors fought them, but bows and arrows were no match for their weapons. They ripped apart the earth looking for gold, and they tried to make us Catholics. We said ‘goodbye’ to our beautiful ancestral lands, along the Caribbean Sea, and climbed higher into the mountains.”
“Years later, the coffee and marijuana farmers arrived. At first, we tried to live with them, but they cut the forests, planted their bushes, poisoned the land with chemicals, and demanded that we change our ways, work on their farms. So, we moved higher. Then the cocaine drug lords, the police, the military, the guerillas, and the CIA came. There was constant shooting. We retreated all the way up to the land of the glaciers.”
“We understood that we’d been driven high into the mountains to learn, to hear the sad song of the melting glaciers. It was an opportunity for us to develop an even deeper connection with the earth.”
The Mamos went on to explain how their shamanic training required living in caves for several years. When asked how they managed to survive, let alone acclimate to these new ways of living, the Mamos replied, “We [learned] to listen to the earth. When we listen, she speaks. Then we act.”
-Studio Corposano, Paris. 1939.
The stories above, and even Wagoner’s poem, speak to a required need for stillness when lost. It’s a stillness that philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues is quickly evaporating in our wider culture:
“We owe the cultural achievements of humanity to deep, contemplative attention. Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyper-attention.”
Han goes on to say in his book, “The Burnout Society,” that our hyper-attention creates a low tolerance for boredom and “does not admit the profound idleness that benefits the creative process.”
The philosopher, Walter Benjamin, agrees. He once described boredom as a “dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” Han continues, saying that, “a purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available.” In the realms of psychology, this means that we are destined to repeat our patterns unconsciously until we have taken time and allowed deep attention to interrupt these speeding cycles. In that way, the mechanism that makes us “lost,” is in fact our desire to be found, and fast.
-Gustave Moreau, The Dream of an Inhabitant of Mongolia
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