Working for a magazine, teaming up with a staff to create a unique publication each month, was an unfilled fantasy of mine. And here was The Sun, what my writing mentor calls The Atlantic of literary magazines, was looking for a managing editor. The Sun publishes some of the best writing today –personal essays, short fiction, poetry, and insightful interviews. To work for The Sun would have been a dream for me – to learn from some of the best, to contribute my own gifts to the process, to carve a space in this world to make a difference. But the job would have entailed a move to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It would have meant giving up everything I have in the Ohio River Valley and building a new life hundreds of miles away from all that is familiar. Did I really want to do that as I approached my sixth decade? No. But each month, the magazine appeared in my mail with the same message on the Letters to the Editor page: We are still looking.
Were they looking for me? My skill set matched their need? Did I really want to face my fears and move away? I consulted friends.
“Chapel Hill is a wonderful area!”
“What an opportunity!”
“What have you got to lose?”
A house that is paid for. A little business that supports me. Relationships that sustain me.
“I can’t do it,” I said.
And then my next issue of The Sun arrived: We are still looking.
“God, are you talking to me?” I asked. “Is this the job that will finally make everything in my life make sense? Is there someone I am to love in North Carolina?”
I decided to apply, just to learn more.
The publisher responded positively to my inquiry. While I wasn’t offered the job, I caught his attention. He invited me to share more of myself. He wrote of my coming to Chapel Hill for a visit. The way appeared to be opening before me.
But that was not the way the Invisible Map was pointing.
The Invisible Map is an image that came to me in 2013 while I was enrolled in the Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy as developed and led by Mary Pierce Brosmer, founder of Women Writing for (a) Change. Pierce Brosmer defines “the Feminine” in a Jungian sense, describing its qualities as an “energy of life and leadership available to both women and men, expressing values of transparency, hospitality, capacity to hold paradox, nurture-with-rigor, and a model of community which supports individual gifts but not at the expense of societal or planetary well-being.”1 The Conscious Feminine is an antidote to patriarchy and the oppression and destruction that it entails.
Halfway through the two-week residential program, I was lost. I felt disconnected from the other women enrolled with me. I felt like an outlier. And while I believed in the gifts that the Conscious Feminine brings to the world, I wasn’t sure what my own contribution could be. I wanted to do my part but did not know how. I wanted to be of service in a way that would not just feed my ego or create a toxic dependency.
I turned to my journal with these feelings and thoughts. One afternoon, after two pages of stream of consciousness ramblings, I wrote: “I am learning that there is a new map I am to follow. It’s invisible.”
I have been trying to follow the Invisible Map ever since.
Because of our culture, with all its shiny addictions, the map is hard to see. It is faint to the point of being invisible, as if it were written on water. It is real nonetheless and points to a knowing deep within.
We all have the Invisible Map inside of us, though we call it by different names. Some say it is intuition. Some call it a gut feeling. Some see it as a Divine calling. I name it the Invisible Map because it is about following a path, moving forward, even when the way is unclear.
Certainly, what I speak of is a type of intuition, a gift that is too often misunderstood or undervalued in this rational world. And I understand why someone would call it a gut feeling for those times when intuition manifests as a physical sensation in our bodies. Identifying it as a calling from the Divine is close to what I understand about my Invisible Map, but the Invisible Map does not ask for a response as much as it is asking, to borrow from artist and author Christine Valters Paintner, asking that its presence within be welcomed.2 The best way that I know to welcome this presence is to be quiet, wait, listen. I find that this practice often then offers a way forward, brings an understanding.
I once heard a chef talk about how he “rescues” a failed dinner. There is an impulse, he said, to “grab the answer” that he and other culinary experts have been taught or trained to do. But that may not be the best solution in all circumstances. Instead of responding automatically, he suggested hesitation, a waiting, even if it is only a minute to allow the correct fix to arise into consciousness. In other words, he gives himself time to access what intellect cannot grasp and that is his inner knowing, his own Invisible Map.
So, how did I respond to the publisher of The Sun? I went upstairs to my studio to sit in quiet. I was open to welcoming the presence of the Divine, but I wanted more. I wanted direction. It came in the form of a question: What about your writing?
What about my writing?
Time and energy to work on my creative writing projects has always been hard to come by – and there I was considering taking on what, no doubt, would be a demanding full-time job. And with that understanding, a deep knowing arose in me that could not have been more clear: I was not to take a job in North Carolina, but I was to make a move – inward. My Invisible Map was directing me on a journey to the heart. I did not know what that meant. I only knew I had to follow the path unfolding before me.
Certainly, the pandemic facilitated my undertaking this journey within, to uncover the work before me. And for that, I am grateful. The eyes that can read the Invisible Map are the same eyes that can see what is true, what is needed, what is mine to do.
FOR REFLECTION: Reflect on a time when you followed your own invisible map. Was it intentional or unintentional? What were the results?
1 Mary Pierce Brosmer, Women Writing for (a) Change: A Guide for Creative Transformation (Sorin Books, 2009).
2 Richard Rohr, Daily Meditations, https://cac.org/receiving-images-2021-0819/.
Images: Pixabay (top); Pixabay/Cloé Gérard.
Side bar image: Pixabay/Edar.
