Lost in Sagebrush

I just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s classic novel American Gods earlier this week, and it got me thinking about journeys. In the novel, Shadow Moon, our stalwart(ish) protagonist has just been released from prison, and he has a plan: move back to Eagle Point, kiss his wife, and live happily (quietly) ever after. Now, this is the beginning of a lengthy novel, so you know from the get go that things quickly go awry for Shadow, and he falls in with an unexpected crew in the form of some wayward gods of the Norse, African, and Egyptian persuasion. 

Shadow goes along with their scheme to regain their power because he has nothing better to do than to ride along and see where the road may take him, much as he has his entire life it seems. On this journey it is revealed that he is not really living, not taking in the meaning the his life, and doing far too much of what other people want rather than thinking about whether that is what *he* actually wants. Hmm. 

Far be it from me to fall into the over-used adage of “fear of missing out”, but Shadow’s (and our) revelation has something deeper going on than simple FOMO. Shadow might be taking the journey, but what is he getting out of it? He’s sure not particularly interested in the outcome and Wednesday’s joke about him becoming King of America holds no ground, so why is he even bothering to walk the road? For that matter: has Gaiman (through his magic-ladden world) revealed something integral about human nature - that we’re all walking the same roads, towards many of the same goals, but are we asking the right questions of ourselves and of the world along the way?

I would argue that a lot of us aren’t. It’s all too easy to fall into the same patterns of behaviour and ultimate life goals that we’ve been raised with since birth and see endlessly mimicked by society around us: grow up, get a job, start a family, make our mark on the world, ad nauseum until death do us part. But, a lot of us never ask why - mostly because it’s easier not to. If we question too much we end up breaking our relationships and our lives, because most people don’t want to hear the questions being asked, much less contemplate whether making a change and taking a side road is an actual option. 

In fairytales, too, (our childhood guides into the ways of the world) we are told not to stray from the path lest the will-o-the-wisps and goblin market lead us astray into the paths of ever-hungry wolves. Keep to the highways and byways through the woods, and only stop at Grandmother’s house before returning safely home. Even in the stories where the rejected child sets out from home to quest for a better life, they set foot to well-trodden path, walked by millions of unrequited souls before, in the hopes that they will find the (practically expected) glory, riches, or satisfaction. 

What many of these fairytales seem to miss, and what Gaiman hints at, is the fact that some of us are far more than simple questing rejects: by living through life’s challenges we have become wolves. Maybe not in the traditional sense of fur-covered beings, but of wild things that cannot be contained by the walls of civilization and who cannot look on humanity as a simple living organism. Beings that need to run free along the natural paths of the forest, led by pure instinct and internal fire alone. Wolves that howl not just at the moon, but for the sheer joy of freedom and of Self. Like Shadow Moon, we must occasionally run (or maybe saunter, since who’s rushing towards the End) alongside the earthly gods and sacrifice what we thought we held dear to find the way forward through the mists and out the other side of the forests. Along the way we have seen too much of the other side to go back to the paths that came before, and maybe it is in that discovery we find the spark that keeps us questing for ever-new paths and states of being. That spark which keeps us howling at our own Moons.