This week was a deep dive through pathways upon the vehicle of mythopoetic metaphor and symbol. The tool of metaphor proved to be a difficult lens to play a conversation through and I found myself pulling participants up too much and trying to shift them into the exercise more completely.
When using a dynamic like the creative play of metaphor, we create another dimension and overlay the consensual understanding of reality with myth and symbol that are more aligned with what we experience through our dreams, imagination and creativity. If we do not fully commit to the exercise and stand with one foot in consensual linear reality and one in the imaginary realm of symbol and metaphor we can dilute the power of the exercise. It is of course difficult to fully commit to the imaginary creative realm but in this week’s two conversations every human did their best and we created a rich pool of insights, bringing us to the edge of the highway where the mysterious forest begins.
There were multiple moments throughout the discussion where we found ourselves on the edge of understanding a greater pattern or universal understanding. Although the insights remained relatively obscure, the seeds had been planted and without doubt most humans that attended the discussion will have this jam singing in their souls for weeks to come.
Our beautiful country, Australia, is home to many man made paths; highways, streets, footpaths, etc, yet this space only represents a small part of the whole. Is this symbolic of the directions and trajectories that we walk in life? Paths that are set out for us, well worn, walked, driven highways with private property on either side preventing us from exploring the pathless. What happens when we stray from these highways laid before us? What happens when we throw our hats over the wall of the motorway sound barriers?
We played with the idea of dropping everything and just going walkabout. Being lead by the culmination of your senses and the impulses of your intuition, whilst practicing a story of trust. Trust that you will be fed, that you will find a bed. The world opens up as everywhere becomes your home, your room, every being becomes your family and mother earth is discovered to be full to the brim of abundance.
The only thing in the way of this reality is a disempowering story, the one we tell ourselves of the homeless, the wandering vagrants, purposeless, broken, lost, addicted, deranged, etc. In India there is a different narrative, one in which has a tradition to look after those who choose the path of the ascetic, the sadhu; individuals who choose a spiritual path without material possessions.
These individuals are respected, admired and even sort out for spiritual guidance. There is a place for them within society and they are even given a voice.
What if there was a tradition of spiritual wandering in Australia, there has been within our indigenous culture known by westernised Australia as ‘going walkabout’. Walking out into the bush to be held and taught by the soft and sometimes firm and disciplinary mother nature.
My mum described a situation in which she noticed the horse that she was riding would be restless and anxious walking out in the cleared and open paddock, while wandering through the untouched bush she was calm. Using this experience as a symbolic representation of our own anxiety proved to be intriguing and informative. Perhaps we have cleared our internal nature and sit within an open desolated landscape stimulating continual anxiety and restlessness.
How do we repopulate our internal landscape?
Walking through nature, breathing in micro organisms physically repopulates our microbiome, our internal ecosystem. Walking pathlessly we train our listening, our own observation of our nature, our intuition, our internal direction finding compass. This internal devastated landscape still has life within it and soon enough we have begun to regenerate our life giving internal nature.
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