Trust Your Compass

"Your inner knowing is your only true compass." ~ Joy Page

When was the last time you were hiking or traveling in a place unfamiliar and you didn't trust your compass? Unless you are standing at one of Mother Earth's magnetic poles where I understand a compass can do some funky things depending on how you're holding it - I wouldn't know, the farthest north I've ever traveled is Köln, Germany - you probably trust your compass is indicating the directions, N S E W, correctly, and proceed accordingly.

The compass in its simplicity is a tool to be trusted, not ignored, left behind or dismissed as an unnecessary accessory for journeys to parts unknown. Some are damn near indestructible unless the user purposely takes an axe or hammer to the compass for some crazy reason or if god forbid he or she lends the the compass to another which to me would be akin to loaning (read relinquishing) your grill or smoker to someone.

Digression alert - that, my friends, to be clear, is just NOT done.

Yet the compass is not perfect. The compass is flawed. By its very nature it leads us away from true north to the magnetic north. The magnetic poles are elusive targets, moving from time to time in response to magnetic changes to the Earth's core.

You'll never find Santa using your compass, but you'll get close. For this reason the compass is in its own counter intuitive construct is a freeing instrument. Following the direction provided by a compass will never get you THERE, or even THERE. Once near the destination it is up to the explorer to discern the pathway to where there is.  And that is the magic of the journey.

Do you see where I'm going with this? If not, you'd better start from the beginning. I can't make it any clearer!

As parents of children who have lost their way through addiction it may seem as if The Addiction crushed our compasses with an axe and a hammer. We certainly doubted ourselves in those first few months or years as we wrestled with our sanity amid the muck and tar of the abyss into which we had crawled with our babies. This is exactly why it was so important to start moving toward a better path, no matter the direction. The mission was to emerge, to find the upwards trail way out of the cloud forest to the light, to the meadow, hillsides and vistas we knew The Universe had in mind for each of us.

The direction was not important. The goal was to get on it and keep moving.

And as we began to emerge from the darkness our compasses began to reemerge - resilient things those compasses. As we felt our internal compass become stronger, forces from without and within made us doubt this truth. Spouses, friends, The Addiction, our addicted children and sometimes even their siblings conspired to gaslight us into believing our thoughts and feelings were not true or real.

We've been through too much to have our intuitions invalidated. We have come out of our self-inflicted isolation more self aware than ever, more certain that the path ahead is leading us to a new destination filled with love and laughter for ourselves and our children. With each step along our journey we receive validation we are moving in the right direction as long as we do keep moving. Our hearts know this to be true. We can feel it. Our hearts are inextricably linked to our internal compasses.

Our internal compass may not get us exactly THERE immediately but we're getting pretty damn close. Trust it. It's a wondrous adventure!

. . . keep coming back

"In this world you have a soul for a compass and a heart for a pair of wings." ~ Mary Chapin Carpenter