A Wake-Up Call

Imagine waking one morning to this billboard-like statement pasted between your eyebrows, with bold letters in a black box just like the one above:

“You Have the Responsibility to Realize Your Dreams, Not Just for Getting By.”

I experienced this lucid dream some 14 years ago, and it was this VISION, this direct admonition of my spiritual and personal responsibility to pursue my greatest Life Dream, that has ultimately conducted me down a long and winding pathway ever since that morning to find out what that Dream IS, and to Follow it through.

Some few months after waking to this dream command, while wondering what topic to conduct research about for a university sabbatical, I woke to an auditory dream message just as clear as the sign above, that simply stated:

“LIFE PATHS”

And so, I embarked on research to develop a way to help people graphically be able to MAP their LIFE PATHS. One thing has led to another, so that now, 13 years down the road, I have gradually, step by step, with interview research then articles, then workshops and classes, then a published academic book and article, then more classes and individual coaching, manifested much already of my own Dream by developing the LIFE MAPS PROCESS. Over the past six years, in addition to the academic book (The ‘Life Map’ as a Cognitive Structure Underlying Behavior–A New Tool for Psychological Understanding; Mellen Press, 2010), I have come to understand what my original dream directive was really about: a self-help personal growth and development book that would allow anybody (e.g.,You) to apply the LIFE MAPS PROCESS directly;  so that anyone can

“LIVE YOUR DREAM, NOW!”

The book, called LIFE PATHS, with its companion self-help Handbook (The Life Maps Portfolio Handbook) now exists. I have completed a major edit and a wonderful agent will begin marketing LIFE PATHS later this summer. (Of course, I won’t put the cart before the horse; there is much work yet ahead before this can be released, but at least it is on a track headed potentially in the right direction.)

I realized quite awhile ago that my original dream impetus, the signpost I woke to that sent me on this quest to realize MY Dream, was intended equally for YOU; that is, for everyone!

So, please consider taking this to Heart:

YOU HAVE THE RESPONSIBILITY

TO REALIZE YOUR DREAMS;

NOT JUST FOR GETTING BY.

Today’s post initiates the next phase for sharing the Life Maps Process with all who might wish to benefit from it. This process is framed as a Rites of Passage adventure, with three stages of Life Mapping and Reflection; Life Path Exploration (via Descent and Re-Emergence); and Future Life Dream Projection and Manifestation.  The 80+ creative techniques and activities which the Handbook provides that include journalling, active imagination, “Archetype dialogue”, dreamwork, collage making, vision questing, action planning, Mandala envisioning, and Totemic grounding will guide you as the reader/ life mapper through a tried and true adventure of self-discovery, realization, and attainment of Your Dream.

For the next six months in this blog, I will gradually introduce several life mapping sorts of creative modalities. I invite you to try them out for yourself. While they are but a sampling of the full toolkit that will become available with LIFE PATHS, the Tuesday posts will from here on provide a series of life mapping opportunities designed as a processual series of steps that will allow you to sample the Life Maps Process. This Process allows you to review and reflect on your recurring Life Themes, to see your Life Story as composed of meaningful Life Chapters, and to Meet & Greet your own “mythic archetypal cast” of unconscious “Archeme Allies”.

So, WELCOME to Better Endings for LIFE PATHS; especially, your own!

The format for our weekly blog (see Weekly Topics menu) will from here forth include a presentation of concepts and principles for the Weekly Topic on Sundays, then a Life Mapping activity on Tuesdays offered for you to practice, and discussion of feedback from you and my sharing of case stories and other considerations around the weekly topic on Fridays.

I certainly invite you to practice any or all of the life mapping opportunities that will be presented here. Although this may involve a very personal process of self-discovery, I welcome your insights, questions and feedback, either publicly as Comments and Stories of your own (which I will share), or privately (see Contact menu).

This morning Synchronicity presented herself in the form of a relevant image and quote from Confucius, by Theresa of Soulgatherings (link below):

Re-blogged with permission from Theresa

(Soulgatherings.wordpress.com)

To put the world right in order,
we must first put the nation in order;
to put the nation in order,
we must first put the family in order;
to put the family in order,
we must first cultivate our personal life;
to cultivate our personal life,
we must first set our hearts right.

~ Confucius ~

Better Endings to Your Life Path!!! – Linda

James Joyce’s “Eveline” Re-Visioned

If you can apply Better Endings to a story you identify with, this is in fact allowing you to envision and to begin to manifest that transfrmative change in your own life!

Here’s my own Best of Better Endings story from December 15, 2013:

I wrote my Masters thesis in Linguistics about James Joyce’s short story “Eveline”, from his Dubliners book. Eveline is a young Irish woman in 1914 Ireland. Her mother has died several years prior to the action of the story. Eveline has taken care of her father and brothers ever since. But now a sailor from another country, Frank, has romanced Eveline and he wants to take her away with him, to Buenos Aires.

“She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.”

So James Joyce’s story of “Eveline” opens. The question Joyce poses with this opening Dubliners story is simple: Will Eveline leave family, Church and nationality to go away with the sailor to another land? Buenos Aires–”good” or fresh “air”–contrasts with the “dusty” air of Eveline’s home and world. There is hardly ever a question in the story really of whether Eveline will leave; to Joyce, she can not. By the end, when the final time for her to decide arrives with the boat on which Frank has bought them passage, we see Eveline in a state of near paralysis, like a frightened animal:

“She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her.

She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her hand and she knew that he was speaking to her, saying something about the passage over and over again. The station was full of soldiers with brown baggages. Through the wide doors of the sheds she caught a glimpse of the black mass of the boat, lying in beside the quay wall, with illumined portholes. She answered nothing. She felt her cheek pale and cold and, out of a maze of distress, she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty. The boat blew a long mournful whistle into the mist. If she went, tomorrow she would be on the sea with Frank, steaming towards Buenos Ayres. Their passage had been booked. Could she still draw back after all he had done for her? Her distress awoke a nausea in her body and she kept moving her lips in silent fervent prayer.

A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand:

“Come!”

All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.

“Come!”

No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish.

“Eveline! Evvy!”

He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.”

My re-vision of “Eveline” transpires in contemporary Ireland, where 62% of the population is urbanized and globalization offers many options to the youth for emigration and jobs.

“Eveline” Revisited:

Eve stood at the railing of the Odyssey’s prow; straining to find Frank in the harbor crowd as the boat’s powerful engines pulled it away from the shore. Why had he not come? She felt deeply into the pocket of her windbreaker, palming the passage stub, a misty rain in the morning air obscuring her view of all that she was leaving: her father, the rocky countryside, the steeple of the church she had attended since baptism. Her woven purse was secure in her pocket, with all the money she had saved from weekly allowances over the last thirteen years. She covered her head with the windbreaker’s hood and tied it so only her eyes were exposed. She turned away from the rail and climbed down from the bow into the passenger deck. Ten or twelve tourists peered out the windows, happy to be safe and dry. Eveline, drenched from her watch above, gazed out an open window from her pew seat. East was her direction now. Her very life was about to begin.

——————————–

What story would you choose to re-vision with a Better Ending? Why this story and not another? I chose “Eveline” because her inability to leave, her bondage to family, church and nationality, has stayed with me through the years as a cautionary tale. I have a strong aversion to any bonds that do not serve fulfillment for all concerned; therefore, in my projection, Eve departs.

I invite your Comments. Which stories might you wish to revise and why?

• Eveline (catemariephotographyblog.wordpress.com)
• Thursday Poem (3quarksdaily.com)
• “Eveline” and “In a Station of the Metro” (engl2523.wordpress.com)
• James Joyce’s Dublin Captured in Vintage Photos from 1897 to 1904(openculture.com)