Maps in the Darkness

I have loved Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” since the first time I heard it in class at my convent school.  It drew me to college in New England, where I, too, walked through yellow woods looking for my path.  It accompanied me through the many years when I made the choice to spend my time with people most of society didn’t think about at all, much less care about, in my work as a journalist.  Frost was one of the poets who made me realize how very much words matter, and how powerfully formative are those times in youth when someone or something reveals a truth that has lived within us, unawares, until that point.

Our recent journal workshop theme was “maps in the darkness.”  Imagining Mary and Joseph wending their way to Bethlehem, the Wise Men reading their star charts, I offered the idea that sometimes in life we end up pursuing paths that aren’t our true paths — circumstances and mistakes sending us off into lives we eventually realize aren’t right for us.  Or, they are okay, but need a slight adjustment.

Prayer is helpful in these passes, but something else is as well — spending quality time with one’s past, particularly with the untrod paths through leaves that we didn’t choose, despite their invitation.  Going back in memory and tracing those occasions when a poem, or a teacher, a mentor or a relative saw us more clearly than we saw ourselves, and fired in us an aspiration or a dream, may open a doorway that yet awaits its fulfillment in us.

Our workshop group did this exercise with sheets of blank paper and colored pencils — there is something about shifting out of our rote ways of list-making and writing that frees the imagination.  It is an exercise easily continued for days, in free moments here and there.  I’ll share one image of such a life map.

 

In these days, we can be so distracted by the Circus Maximus of dysfunction in our world that we lose touch with these vulnerable and precious insights.  Give yourself the sanctuary of an hour today or this weekend to return to your own yellow or snowy woods, and the new/old paths that you might take going forward.

Three daily practices will help prepare you:

1. Train yourself to recognize the tawdry that crosses your screens every minute, and choose not to get hooked.
2. Expose yourself to at least one serious bit of beauty each day — a painting, a flowering Christmas cactus, a mother walking her baby in the park.
3. Sharpen your sensitivity to the vulnerable “others” in our midst.  They are never hard to find.

Blessings on your Sunday of Advent Joy.

Kathleen