Follow Your Own Path

There will always be guides along the way but the path you follow has to be your own. Your own star shines above it with absolute radiance. A true guide will never tell you to follow a different path - they will give you the understanding you need to follow your own. So many followers and believers cram into ships and railway carriages to follow the way their master has gone - then find that he is not there when they arrive. This is their own failing. The master will always be at a different point.

The followers and believers will lose sight of you if you take your own path. There is something magical or mercurial about going where your feet have to go. As if the feet themselves sprout wings. Hermes himself was a guide. He leads you to the underworld but you pay your own coin to cross the river. Each journey across is a separate one - no one is crammed together.

Others along the way will catch sight of you: those who are also following their own paths. What gives inspiration? The sight of someone religiously following a prescribed way - however exalted - or a glimpse of a person who has gone off into the thickets and briars of the unknown because their feet told them to do so? This person wears the flash of color, the red coat of the journeyman who makes his mistakes because his passion for the path is greater.

At the end of the day those who follow their own path arrive at the same destination: the far shore of the great river to Erebus. But they carry their own lamp now - they see in the dark. For others the upside-down torch of Hermes is the last light they will see.

Path

Let me not describe a path as mine

which has been laid out by another,

sanctified by their feet walking it

and followed by believers ever since.

Even though I see myself as small

beside them, unqualified to question,

foolish not to speak as they have spoken,

to learn as they have taught and teach again.

But let the path be mine which my own feet

cry out to follow, though they take me past

those same believers losing sight of me.

And let me honor those who say this path

was true - we know because you follow it

as we will follow ours and won't lose sight.

Jay

©landar 2011. All rights reserved

(Image: Hermes as psychopomp)