Stories are full of that dramatic moment. The one moment, that pause between the ending of everything that went before and the beginning of everything that comes after. The moment when they choose. In a drama we’re pretty sure they are going to choose the right way, be the hero or the anti-hero, choose to learn and transform, and everything is going to be all right. But there’s always that slight doubt which provides tension. In tragedies the choice doesn’t get made or they choose wrong or they choose right and things go sideways regardless. This turns the story into a car wreck we are helpless to stop watching. We see it as fate coming to bestow the hero or the protagonist with lessons they are meant to learn. Everything around the person conspires to make it so. And in stories this is literally the case because they are written by writers whose profession it is to create a universe which is conspiring against and for their protagonist.
However, if we’re not paying attention, we can come to the conclusion that only heroes have to make these types of choices and that the choices are easy because its fated. We’re fated to make the right one and have it work out or fated to have it be screwed up no matter what we choose. Both of which cause us to miss the point. Each of us is the protagonist of our own story and each of us will have at least one moment when we’re confronted with this choice. Standing on the banks of the river between who we have always been and the life we know how to lead and looking at the other side where we will become different, we are confronted with the choice. Who will you be? You can turn around and walk away, you can force your way forward ignoring every bit of your soul that calls you to reconsider, or you can put aside everything you thought you knew, swim across going with the flow, and come up on the other side clean, clear, and open to what comes next.
This is the role of the Morrigan, the ancient warrior goddess. She stands, not at the crossroads, not at the decision point of whether or not to go somewhere and where to go, but in the river of transformation. She washes the armor of the fallen and asks nothing more than that we choose. Choose ourselves over the expectations of others. Choose to be who we know we truly are. Choose to let go of right and wrong, of lesser evils and best practices, of all the judgments and applied structures, of what will raise us above it all. Life is here and now, its linear, it’s brief, and it’s hard, but it can be very, very good if we let it. Most of the time we don’t. But time and again we’ll find ourselves on the bank of that river looking across at the other side and we’ll hear that voice, neither persuasive nor dismissive. A simple statement posed to our soul: choose.