The Way Appears When You Let It

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

"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 say, accelerators (of the social, cultural, political, economical, environmental, and manmade kind), causing this civilisational equivalent of a Thelma & Louise-style nosedive into a canyon of death and destruction. Unless you've been 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.

When I first started learning about them, I went from complete and utter shock and into solution-finding mode pretty bloody fast. Like many a human mind, mine loathes uncertainty and possible future pain of any sort – not to mention the idea of careening off a cliff — so, this all seemed rather alarming and important to name, talk about, figure out and fix as soon as possible. Morally imperative, even, to try and shake each other awake by whatever means and channels we have available; to make ourselves very aware of what’s coming before the moment of impact so's we might have time to turn this Thunderbird around.

My strategy, my way of spreading awareness, was to raw-nerd the hell out of whatever hard research I could get my mitts on – never mind the cost to my mental health – bundle all the problems and threads and through-lines into a neat (albeit verbose) little bow, and break the news to readers amidst the stories, philosophies, and spiritual wisdom within this book that would catch them and convert their horror into hope. And with this hope, we could all quickly move our asses and make better shit happen before it's too late.

Neat expectation...if this were at all a neat-and-not-batshit-chaotic set of circumstances, all the more so to try and summarise.

If this weren't already unfolding so fast and beyond reasonable belief that even experts and journalists who have been predicting this for years can't contain their shock and grief.

If civilisational collapse – or the metacrisis 2 – weren't literally characterised by its impossibility to comprehend, even by said experts and journalists.

I realise, only now, there was little point in my trying to make sense of it all, much less waste so much time attempting to communicate my findings. This is not a niche topic anymore; people are already finding out fast, through their own lived experiences. The actual experts are being proven right (though not without enduring the public crucible). Meanwhile, in trying to become one, I've buried myself in 150,000+ words of notes and research that are disorientating and exhausting to behold as the metacrisis itself. I'm lost, wondering what to do with it all and where to go next, mentally locked into a proper rat-king-complexity-doom-tangle – fittingly like what our civilisation as a whole is experiencing right now.

I got lost because I went left. (A concept that will make more sense later on; for now, know that left = left-brained.) In doing so, killed off all the fun and authenticity in what I was once so enthralled about creating. My writing reeked of needless complication and heady insecurity that both failed to demonstrate my "expertise" and left me (and probably readers) in more of a confused and neurotic place than where we started. Which – when it comes to navigating a collapsing world, or even a non-collapsing world – tends to make matters worse.

Much worse.

While I still believe it is, at times, important for us to identify and understand the devils we’re dealing with, to 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 mounting evidence suggests that stopping the collapse is no longer possible — and, spiritually speaking, it might be time for a spectacular death of old, corrupt, broken systems and beliefs 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.

And that only comes from the heart. Not the head.

We can, as Thelma and Louise did, face impending "death" (maybe literal, maybe figurative) and destruction with radical displays of love, with courageous defiance against our perpetrators and the unprecendented, deceptive, and dismepowering circumstances that bring all of us to this come-to-Jesus moment in history.

And perhaps somehow, amazingly...hit a softer landing together.

In such challenging and overwhelming times, I'm getting that it’s not only much more enjoyable and adventurous, but vital, 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 still not seeing clear highways out of the emerging hellscape that is our burning, drowning, despairing, industrialism-pillaged, hyper-commodified world.

Some in the collapse space don’t recommend we waste time laying out the pathologies at all, for doing so is too tail-chasing and leaves us exhausted by pointless squabbling over details and distractions (which 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 fruitless, exasperating day of completely failing to take their advice – I dumbly shifted my focus below my neck, wondering if my oft-forgotten heart might have an idea for an easier (and dare I dream, 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. 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, miraculously – stick the landing.

And so...to story.

Because while I have been 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 has been an 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, mental 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 fallen into place as they did without this struggle — owing to a wildly auspicious encounter with someone who would not have crossed my path if not for the gruelling sequences of 2024 — for which I am (now) eternally grateful...and simultaneously devastated. For 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 that, 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 made happen with my heart and soul, which kept me vibrantly alive and purposeful 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 sweet 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 the shoreline — well walked by all the lovers — that will wash away with the next big wave, clinging to security that does not exist and trying to ignore the call of the wild outer waters that beg me to wrap myself in Selkie skin 6 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 union 7; 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, 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 (in quotation marks because I 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.

My 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 Seinfeld 8) “pushing against the wind in soft, muddy ground with a wheelbarrow full of bricks.”

My re-return message to the divine that is 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, what better direction to walk, than where Coelho himself began by walking? The man whose book is the muse behind mine – whose life is a metaphysical, parallel pilgrimage to that which he writes, and to those like me whom he guides? From a place where, it just so happens, my soul had already yearned me toward a long time ago for reasons I could not explain?

It all makes sense — brain-explodingly so. Even more since following an unexpected recommendation to book a session with an astrocartography/akashic records reader 10...who, among many things, told me I was once a travelling storyteller in Europe; that I’m an old 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 favourable planetary line going through the heart of Santiago de Compostela – the final checkpoint along the trail. 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 – and what changes people, and humankind, can make.”

In other words: Use this experience to figure out my role in the world, how I could be helping, where I should be putting my energy and all that; then translate my lived experience – my awareness and advocacy of these questions – 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...to me, the truth in this reading 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, nor from different angles before. I kept talking myself out of it, or applying a realistic (read: limiting) lens on 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 with 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 if 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.