When I was quite small, in all the stories I ate, I knew exactly where the crossroads lay. The moment when the Trickster spills his riddled challenge, when the Crone offers her rigorous medicine. The moment when the Seeker stands in balance between ordinary past and unimagined future, and decides to take that next fateful step. The door through which the Seeker journeys to revelation after trial that he is a Hidden Prince, she a Magic Princess. The bowl in which the epic ingredients of any life (a mere mortal, a long walk away from home, a perfectly impossible task) catalyze into the stuff of myth and truth.
I looked everywhere for these doors, when I was quite small. I was disappointed at first that they were not obvious. That opportunities for adventure and transformation were not offered by every stranger I met, that riddle-solving and medicine-accepting were not taught in school. I adventured in the front yard and learned what I could from story books, and waited.
When I was a little taller I learned a secret. The crossroads are not only for heroines; they are everywhere, and we carry their doors within us. These can be opened, and cannot be closed again. Some we must open, and some we may choose to open. We must choose with care. If we pass through these doors without intention, if we pass the crossroads without wide-open eyes, a sense of moment, a sense of self-defining -- we will not hear the riddle, not receive the medicine. I stopped looking so hard for my own doors as began to feel them rising in me, to feel the Seeker awakening.
Growing tall, I found those doors and met at those crossroads all the riddles and medicine of growing up. In my first menses, first loves, religious taste-testing, teenage cutting, first sex, psychedelic exploration, world travels, self-identifying, I have seen the landmarks which herald the crossroads and showed me the directions of paths into my future. I have stood at these crossroads again and again, and chosen my next steps with as much presence and grace as I could find. I have tried to keep my eyes and heart open, and my feet on the path shining before me. At some point, having reached my full height, I realized my bowl was full also of lessons learned and boundaries crossed. I felt the need to seek transform into the need know. I stopped feeling for doors to open, stopped to use the tools I'd gathered, and deepen my eyes and widen my heart.
Now, I know I am again standing at the crossroads. I recognize this open landscape, this sensation of the familiar and precious falling away, this rising eagerness for the next step on the path. I know I am seeking again. But I cannot see my way. The heralds of this crossroads have been heartbreak and doubt, confusion and clouds across my eyes and heart. I think the door in front of me will take me far from knowing and what I have built, far into being, and seeing, and feeling. This door has a threshold made of fear and love, and I do not know it's name. And I remember the seeking secret I had forgotten in my years of knowing -- that to step through the open door is to step into faith, into unknowing with trust. That every Seeker starts out simple, that revelation begins in clouds. My bowl has been filled and I have eaten, my bowl has been emptied and scoured clean again.
