Perhaps this life is about remembering who you really are.  Walking like Hansel and Gretel into the dark forest, dropping bread crumbs to find your way home.  Trauma changes the fairy tale a bit, sending in the wolves to eat the bread crumbs so we can't find them when we look for them. 

Yet, the path out of the darkness remains.   The path has always been there, it  has been obscured, hidden, gotten completely covered over.  But it's there. 

My father had always wanted to walk the Camino de Compostela in Spain.  The Camino is one of the oldest Christian pilgrimages and my father had learned about it in the 1950's when he was living in France.  Having wanted to make the journey,life intervened:   my father met my mother, had five kids, and lived a very full life.   
 

Many years later, almost fifty years later, my mother had died, my father was 84 and he remembered his dream.  My sister and I offered to go with him. 

Ah, I digress, you think.  What does this have to do with Hansel and Gretel and trauma?

The Camino had fallen into disrepair over all these centuries.  People who walked the Camino had a difficult time finding their way.  The path, even today, can be pretty treacherous.  Thank God someone decided to help guide these pilgrims along the way.  This someone went out walking the Camino with a box of spray paint and marked the path: this is the way.  Now this way.  Take this right.  (The picture above shows one of the arrow on a brick in the wall.)

Those arrows, like the bread crumbs in Hansel and Gretel's story, guided our journey.  On the Camino we walked only the last 100 k's  (which still took seven days).  But those arrows painted by an unknown hand, some with drip marks not tidied up guided our journey, marked the path, and brought us to the goal, Santiago de Compestolo. 

As I enter mid-life and remember and recommit to my path I realize that I am like those Camino arrows, those bread crumbs dropped by Hansel and Gretel.   Part of what I am called to do is to point out the signposts on the journey of healing from trauma. I want to support people to find their way through the dark and horror, to help people listen to themselves, to hear thier own knowing.  

We all get lost at various times in our lives.  We feel stuck and can often feel terribly alone.  Yet, we aren't.  You aren't. 

What I want is to create a resilient community of people who understand the dark and foreboding world of trauma, who have lived the chaos but are willing to serve as helping hands, as guides along the way.  You are not alone. The path is there.  You can find your way to safety, sanctity, care, kindness, possibility.