A large part of my journey towards knowing who I am and accepting that along with all the seeming craziness it contains, was Google. Google was not only my friend, but it became apparent that it’s my magic friend.
I tossed around the idea jokingly with a friend, once, that maybe there is a god of Google who is controlling my search results. Or that maybe there’s a divination-by-Google. Or that Google was trolling me again.
The process goes like this: I have a dream, or a vision, or a hunch about something. For example, I once had a series of dreams of a tiny island with this stone gateway that beautifully framed a fiery sunset… and not much else. That little island wound up being the place I got myself astrally stranded on for a couple of weeks. It wound up being the island I met Ariadne on.
So, I began to wonder: could such a place actually exist? Go to Google, and get this result:
To show what I mean about there not being a whole lot else on the island, here’s a zoomed out shot:
“Why, yes,” Mr. Google replies. “There is indeed a tiny little island with not much else on it but a remaining stone gate. Oh, and guess what? That island? It may be called Naxos now, but it was once called Dia, and just so happens to be where Ariadne was abandoned on by Theseus and found by Dionysus”.
This back and forth, push and pull, has become a beautiful – and often frustrating, overwhelming, and emotional – dance. UPG? Do research, get it confirmed. Not to say that UPG is somehow lesser if it cannot be transformed by research, but that’s how my story has unfolded so far.
Until about a year ago, when suddenly I hit a wall. Google was not yielding any new results. I wasn’t sure where to go or what to do with the information I had gathered. I had fallow periods before, but they were always just long enough to catch my breath: a day here or there, a week if I was extremely fortunate. I had lost the Google-Fu.
But things work in mysterious ways. The other night, I was trying to find a quote for a project that I had read once by Nietzsche: “A labyrinthine man never seeks the truth, but always, only, his Ariadne.”
Instead of finding that quote, I found a slew of webpages talking about a dithyramb I had never stumbled upon before, and a couple of books on the matter. The poem is called Ariadne’s Lament, and while the entire thing has caught my eye and I’m still working on processing it, the last stanza is what stood out the most:
Dionysus:
Be clever, Ariadne!…
You have little ears; you have my ears:
Put a clever word in them! —
Must one not first hate oneself, in order to love oneself?…
I am your labyrinth…
My partner and I have often talked about how our experience-research dance feels guided by something, or someone. I usually think of it as the Universe, pushing me along – sometimes gently, sometimes hard enough I break bones. Suddenly, new information appears that wasn’t there before. Websites that are now coming up on the front page even though they are years old, and never appeared before despite using the same search terms.
If I’m not ready for the information, it’s as if it doesn’t exist. On a logical level, it feels impossible. But on a more emotional level, it fits, and somehow makes me feel a little less alone.
Nietzsche’s dithyramb? If I had happened upon that even just a couple of weeks ago, I would have taken it a completely different way than I took it the other night. I would have taken it as validation that I should continue down a path of self-loathing. (I know, that’s not what it’s saying at all, but I’m good at seeing what I want to see).
But it came at a very good time for me, and I took it as validation that I’m on the right path. It stirred something inside me, and that feels like a lead, something to follow – a sense of direction that’s been sorely missing in the spiritual aspect of my life for the bulk of this year.
Google has become this metaphor, now. That there is some guiding hand, just beyond vision. That something can seem so incredibly finite, when it’s actually nearer infinite. That there are some walls you can’t throw yourself over, without a hand up.
Reconstructing the Labyrinth 