Keeping Metaphor and Inspiration Alive
Down in Baja, at the Modern Elder Academy, metaphors and waking dreams spread like wildfire. They’re in sunrises and sunsets, turtles and sticks, guacamole, margaritas, and frijoles. They’re in the dirt, water, and air—all buried into the skin like DNA. It’s an easy place to talk in metaphor—to describe the world in a way that isn’t literally true…where one thing always seems to be symbolic of something else.
It's the poetry that happens when you start to wake up and see the world as it could be.
Of course, the challenge with any transformative experience is that eventually you have to come home and take out the trash. Metaphors disappear, and life becomes exactly what you see. Now, if you were cynical, you could say it's easy to be a wisdom-seeking poet in paradise (as if a lounge chair and a few strolling whales is all it takes to unravel the mysteries of one’s life). The truth is, it's up to each of us to remind ourselves that the world isn’t magical in one place and not in another. Regardless of where we live, the universe is the same miraculous and poetic puzzle waiting to reveal itself. We just have to find and connect the scattered pieces. And when we do, metaphor and poetry will come back to us, pointing us to the life we’re meant to live.
