Seeking a Guide

Strangely enough, it’s possible to be seeking a guide without knowing you are: a nagging, slightly formless sense of something missing. An aimlessness that will not leave you, even if things in your life are going well. When things are not going well, a senseless frustration, the illogical and nonsensical belief that someone should be there, or that there should be direction from somewhere.

It’s those instincts, unable to be banished or quite ignored, that are telling.

For me, early on my journey, I had accepted years ago that I was simply not going to find anything. I weathered those feelings, those urges, as one does a sort of recurring illness. I had been on my own so long that I accepted there would be nothing and no one, no matter how hard I looked. All the normal places people find direction—from philosophy to the Abrahamic religions—had no staying power for me. I read reams of philosophy, and went to church after church. I even went and talked to the pagans, the Wiccans, the Satanists. There were fragments of something in each of those places, but none of them quite fit. And in every one of them, I saw more of the personalities of the people involved than I did any sort of divine intervention.

I have this to say of vodou: if you were seeking divine intervention, this is a place that sort of thing happens regularly.

If you feel those things, that sense of something missing or the need for a guidance that you can’t seem to give yourself, no matter how hard you try, you may be seeking a guide.

It’s an uncomfortable process, but that discomfort is motivating.