After the Wilderness

Our passage through the Wilderness may involve action worthy of the next John Wick movie. We may survive IEDs in Afghanistan, divorces in Reno, stretches in Joliet or in a cubicle at Facebook. We may find ourselves brawling in bars in Ibiza, pursuing lovers across the Pampas in Argentina. We may wake up with strange tattoos, or beside even stranger bed-mates. Entire decades can go missing during our Wilderness Passage.

Keanu Reeves in “John Wick 4”

But when we finally turn the corner—when we reach our All Is Lost Moment, followed by our Epiphanal Moment—all that adventure shifts.

It goes inside.

Our life becomes, now, about the work—the work we’ve been running away from all that time in the wilderness.

Dalton Trumbo wrote his best stuff in the bathtub. Churchill the same. Marcel Proust barely got out of bed. Even Hunter Thompson, mythology aside, took his orange juice straight when he settled down at the keyboard.

Me? The odometer on my ’65 Chevy van ticked over the six-digit mark so many times I can’t remember them all. That was during my hero’s journey. 

Now on my Artist’s Journey I barely drive to the grocery store. 

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