Your Own Back Yard – Michael Gillan Maxwell

This Guest Post  is from Lawrence Kessenich. Lawrence’s most recent Chapbook is titled “Strange News” by Puddinghouse Publications

Spiritual Direction
No one gets lost anymore. If they don’t
have GPS, they have a MapQuest printout,
thick blue line indelibly marking the way.
Lacking those, there is the inevitable
cell phone link to someone with a better

sense of direction. No one gets lost anymore.
They may not know who they are, but,
by God, they know where they are. Even if
it’s nowhere in particular, they can
tell you exactly how far it is from here.

Even if they’ve no idea what they’ll do there,
they can tell you—to the minute—how long
it will take to arrive. No one gets lost
anymore. Travel is predictable as
California weather, and as unrelated

to life’s vicissitudes. We all get lost,
lose our way in love, career or spiritual
seeking. There is no GPS to calmly
guide us down the side roads of the
human heart, no MapQuest for career paths,

no guru on speed dial to direct us through
the dark night of the soul. We need to
practice getting lost again, learn to meander
and cope with uncertainty, to trust

dead reckoning to get us from here to there,

from where we are to where we want to be.

Lawrence Kessenich 2011