The Crossroads of Becoming

Follin’s Journey, Part 2 — The Fool’s Journey In This Modern World

Every story that ends on a mountain begins with a single step.

Hers began the morning after the gate, with the village still close enough behind her that she could hear the bells if she chose to listen… she did not choose to listen. The path bent away from the rooftops within the first hour, and somewhere in that hour, Follin could not say exactly when something inside her changed.

Her change was not a thought and it was not a decision. It was something older as if her body, the moment it crossed the threshold of the village, began remembering a name it had not been allowed to be said out loud.

In the old tongue, Follin meant wolf cub. Strength. Loyalty. Alertness. A young creature already carrying everything she would need to become. The village had translated her name differently, they called her Follin meant as the fool, the village has always translated names they could not quite contain. They had spoken her name softly all her life, the way you speak to a child who is not expected to grow into anything dangerous.

But here, alone on the path, with no one’s voice in her ears but her own, Follin began to unveil her true name and whom she is meant to become.

Her shoulders moved differently as she walked. Her breath became deeper. Her eyes tracked the edges of the trees the way her body had always wanted to and never been allowed to. There was a focus in her now that the village would have called intensity, would have called too much. It was not too much… it was finally enough.

She had not become someone new. She had simply stepped out of the place that kept her from being herself.

Her companion is Yara her dog who has walked steady beside her.

Yara was not told to come nor was she asked. She had simply stood at the gate that morning when Follin shouldered her backpack, and had walked out into the unknown beside her without a sound because Yara had always been the one who came. Loyal in the way only the steady-hearted could understand: not loud, not anxious, just there.

Follin named her dog Yara, which in the old tongue, meant small butterfly.Anyone who had ever watched her would have understood why. There was something about Yara that belonged to transformation, something quiet and patient and faithful to becoming. She did not need to know where the path led. She only needed to walk it with the one she loved.

A wolf cub and a small butterfly, walking the morning together.

Follin reached down and rested her hand on Yara’s head. Yara leaned into the touch without breaking stride. That was enough.

By early afternoon, the doubts began and they came the way doubts always come. Softly, reasonably, dressed as good sense. What if I get lost? What if I’m not strong enough for this? What if I’ve made a mistake I cannot undo? Each one sounded like wisdom. Each one sounded like a friend… but were they? Was it a voice of reason, a voice of protection or was it the voice that wanted to keep her small?

The village’s voice.

She kept walking, fighting the voices she had been conditioned to play in her head. The voice that tries to call you back is not always cruel. Sometimes the voice speaks gently. Sometimes it sounds like the people who love you and sometimes the voice sounds like you but that voice’s job is always the same. Its job is to make you turn around.

Follin did not turn around.

The wolf cub in her was beginning to catch a scent not of any particular place, but of herself. The self she had not been allowed to know and that scent was pulling her forward the way no village voice ever could.

The path met itself near the end of the afternoon.

She came around a low shoulder of a rock and did a complete stop as she took a deep sigh of breath… there it was, the place where one road became two.

The first path lay open before her, smooth, well-trodden and lit, easy to see. She could see far down its length. It gently bent away through soft hills and peaceful country, and even from here she could tell exactly what walking it would feel like. Familiar. Predictable. Safe in the particular way the village had been safe.

The second path was dark and overgrown. Roots crossed it, thick and ancient, raised up from the earth as if they had been guarding the path for a long time. The road appeared dimmed and uncertain. Follin could only see a few paces in, and then the path bent and disappeared into shadow.

She stood for a long time at the crossroad known as the In-Between and what felt like a held breath of the world, a space between, neither village or wilderness. It was a place she did not know the word for it yet, but her body did. Even though she could not yet name it, something about that crossroad felt held as if she was not quite as alone as she had felt at the village gate.

You see, the lighted path was the village. She understood that as soon as she let herself follow it, honestly it would not punish her nor betray her. It would simply, quietly, deliver her back to her safety, her comfort zone, to the same woman she had been before she left. So by taking the easy path with beautiful lit scenery is no different than choosing to go back to the village, her path would not be different and her outcome would be the same as if she stayed. Unchanged. Untested. Un-Becomed.

The second path she could not see at all and that was how she knew it was hers.

Yara waited patiently for her move. She did not pull toward either path. She did not whine or shift or ask. She simply stood at Follin’s side, looking up at her, the way someone looks at the person they trust to know.

Follin took a deep breath. Then she stepped onto the path of the unknown. Yara followed without a sound.

The ground changed beneath her almost at once. Looser stones. Climbing roots. The air grew greener, denser, alive and different from any air she had known. Within minutes she had to brace against a low branch to keep her footing, and within an hour she was breathing the kind of breath that comes only from a body being asked of.

She slipped, once. She caught herself.

She slipped again. She caught herself faster.

Each time her body learned something her mind had not yet named. She was not as fragile as the village had told her she was. She was not as helpless as she had been taught to believe. The path was hard, yes, but hard was not the same as wrong. No one had ever told her that. No one had ever distinguished those two things for her. She was learning the difference now, with her own legs, with her own breath, with her own small butterfly walking quiet beside her.

Follin’s focus, the wolf cub’s focus was sharpening into something else now.

Hunger.

Not for food, not for rest, not for any easy thing. Hunger to find herself. Hunger to know what she was made of. Hunger for the woman she had always been underneath the smallness the village had asked of her.

She had walked her whole life. She had only just begun to climb.

By the time the trees thinned and the path leveled, the sun was setting somewhere behind her, and she had not looked back once.

She found a clearing as the night began to settle. A stream ran soft beside an old tree whose roots spread wide as if to hold the world steady. Follin slipped off her backpack and lowered herself against the trunk. Yara curled at her feet and was asleep almost before she settled.

Follin did not sleep yet.

She pulled her grandmother’s journal from her backpack, the worn leather one, pressed into her hands the morning she left and opened it to the first page. The last of the daylight was gone now, but the rising moon gave her enough.

She wrote:

Day One.

I came to a place where one road became two. The easier one was the village wearing a different face. The harder one, I could not see where it led. I chose the one I could not see.

She paused to listened to the stream. Watched the first stars appear through the gap in the trees, one by one, as if someone on the other side of the darkness were lighting candles just for her.

She wrote again, more slowly:

I am learning something I was never taught: that the path that frightens me is not the one that will hurt me. The one that will hurt me is the one that asks me to stay the same.

She paused once more. The wolf cub in her was awake now, fully awake, and she could feel her own pulse the way she had not felt it in years. She wrote one more line, smaller, almost a whisper on the page:

They named me one thing. I am another. I am only beginning to know what.

She closed the journal and rested her hand on the cover for a long moment. Then she lay down on her side, pulled her cloak around her shoulders, and let her hand fall into the warm fur of the small butterfly sleeping at her side.

She did not feel afraid. She did not feel triumphant either. She felt chosen by herself, by her own breath, by the woman she was finally allowing herself to become. She knew, in that moment, that this was a kind of strength no one could give her and no one could take away.

Sleep begins to find her now, soft as the stream beside her. Above her, through the gap in the trees, the moon kept its watch.

Somewhere far ahead, beyond the ridge, something was waiting for her. She could not see it yet but the wolf cub in her was already listening and though she could not have said why, she sensed that something magical was coming to meet her in the morning.

Chapter 2 is on its way.

~ Inger Purifory