Prologue: My Exit 9 decision in one dream, one poem, and one song

"We must be willing to get rid of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."* –Joseph Campbell.

First a dream:
I am at an airport desperate to catch a plane—to an unknown destination. I see that it’s already on the tarmac! I feel so far away from it—how will I get to the gate in time? I’m running through jelly, the terminal halls expand before like a telescope in reverse, lines of passengers are blocking my way, I see the plane starting to taxi away from the gate just as I get there—I’m yelling and banging on the window yelling WAIT!! Don’t go! Come back! I’m coming! The plane ignores my pleas. I’m panicking. It was so important that I get on that plane, but why? In my waking hours, I knew my unconscious was trying to tell me something, but I didn’t know what.

I was having recurring dreams that involved missing planes or trains. Sometimes the theme was carried out in dreams in which I had a baby to care for, but I couldn’t find it, or I was unwittingly neglecting it—in both of these dreams—the train/plane ones and the baby ones—I was panic-stricken because as hard I tried, I wasn’t able to accomplish what was so important to me—whether it was catching that plane, or feeding that baby.

Then a poem:
As I grappled over the next months with these dreams and a slowly growing unidentifiable discontent, my ever-intuitive and sometimes telepathic son sent me “The Journey” by Mary Oliver, which I taped to my office wall where I could see it daily.

The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.
—Mary Oliver

At that point I started to actively “listen with the ear of my heart”—a wonderful phrase from the Rule of St. Benedict, which essentially means to give equal footing to your brain and the inner voices of your deepest self. According to Clare Condon, SGS: “Listening with the ear of the heart can be a scary experience because it can call me to radical change, to a transformation of my limited human perspective. This is not simply a change in my opinion or even in my ideological stance, but a much deeper change in my attitude, a real change in my way of being and doing.”¹

Finally a song:

Goodbye, yellow brick road
Where the dogs of society howl
You won’t find me in the penthouse
I’m going back to my plow

Back to the howling old owl in the woods
Back to the horny-back toad
Oh, I finally decided my future lies
Beyond the yellow brick road
—Elton John/Bernie Taupin, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” (1973)

“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” is the refrain that I found myself singing in my head exactly at the point at which my physical self was still on the highway, but my inner self was checked out. As is true with many decisions, by the time you think YOU are making the decision, your heart is running ahead, pulling you along.  

Think about any one of your major decisions. It might have been a marriage--or a divorce; it might have been a career change. At the point at which you determined that you finally made THE decision, were you really deciding then? Or had your heart already bought the ticket?  Weren’t you just rubber stamping the decision that had already been made by your deepest self? Was it a decision, or just a yielding to what you had to do?

Sometimes a decision is nothing more than acceptance-in-action.

What transformational life experience have you had? What is your Exit 9? Please share in the comments.

*NOTE: Some memes I’ve seen for this quote say “We must be willing to let go of the life we’ve lived so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.” But here is the full, more powerful quote:

“We must be willing to get rid of
the life we’ve planned, so as to have
the life that is waiting for us.

The old skin has to be shed
before the new one can come.

If we fix on the old, we get stuck.
When we hang onto any form,
we are in danger of putrefaction.

Hell is life drying up.”
― Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

More about Joseph Campbell can be found in..
His seminal book: The Hero With A Thousand Faces [Substack: Why no underline option??]
Campbell, Joseph, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, First Edition, 1949; Second Edition 1968

Great video: “Finding Joe” [Video] https://findingjoethemovie.com: Explores the mythology of the Hero’s Journey and how it relates to our culture today.

---

Thank you for reading! Next week’s topic will be on the first of the 9 Mile Markers: From Attachments, To Awareness, To Awe. Please feel free to take the poll below, or to drop comments on your thoughts about this post. What could I have done better in this post?

1. Clare Condon SGS, “Listening With the Ear of Your Heart,” The Good Oil, Sisters of the Good Samaritan, Order of Saint Benedict, Published September 2014, https://www.goodsams.org.au/article/listening-with-the-ear-of-the-heart/, Accessed March 11, 2024.