WHAT DO YOU DO?
By Lian Brook-Tyler
I remember growing up, I used to be asked *that* question…
“What do you want to do when you grow up?”
It probably happened much less often to me than to most children because #hippylife but it would still occur when I ventured out into the world of mounting mortgages and shiny new cars, in which it seemed that children were meant to have their life plan all figured out from the age of six, maybe so they can be ready to do what’s needed to get the mortgage and car.
When I was asked this question, my mind would flail from one corridor of my psyche to another… from the divine archetypes of Dungeons & Dragons and the books of fantasy, myths and legends that I devoured, to the deep magical bond I had with the natural world and especially animals, to the plays, paintings and stories that flowed through me in way that could only be described as ‘prolific’, to my gnosis that there were worlds that existed that were just as real as this material one.
And then I would say whatever seemed like the most acceptable answer, usually: vet, psychologist, actor or writer, secretly knowing that none of them held the true story but intuitively knowing that “The love child of Jung and Mary Poppins, with a sprinkling of Snow White.” Wouldn’t quite cut it.
Let’s fast forward to today, in the last 24 hours, I have been in the following conversations with clients:
🌟Advising one on how to preserve a hawk wing, in full reverence to Hawk and the initiation it’s inviting her into.
🌟Celebrating a million dollar money miracle with another (people with her kind of myth will need to learn to handle the enormous energy of hundreds of thousands, millions and sometimes even billions, from truth and love… which is one of the most challenging initiations of all).
🌟Speaking to another about the intricate details of her evolving client avatar, which is a rabbit hole of more archetypes and their specific gold and shadows than most people will ever need to be aware of.
🌟Speaking to another about using the I Ching as a portal to the wisdom of archetypes and “life as change”.
The archetypes these people have come to embody in this lifetime include Empress, Witch, Oracle and Shaman. You might be able to guess which are which, but also know that each of them are also a blend of other powerful archetypes channelled through their unique fractal of universal consciousness.
I had to live into *that* question to know the answer, and it’s captured in these very typical conversations from a very typical day of “doing what I do”.
But I’m not any closer to knowing how to neatly sum that up in a way that even slightly elucidates what it really entails. I still can’t provide an answer in a nice, acceptable, easily understood way to the adult dinner party version of the childhood one, my most dreaded question of “What do you do?”
And finally, I’m all good with that.
If you don’t know how to honestly answer that question either, however old or actualised you are, perhaps it’s because you’re on the path of doing what you uniquely came here to do, and there’s no generic term for that, by its very nature.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. “
Rainer Maria Rilke
For some of us “What do you do?” Is a question that is answered by living it, and even then, the answer takes place upon unsayable ground.
My love and blessings as you unfold your own myth.
❤️
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