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We get lost. It is a given. It’s almost built right into the story of our lives.

I’ve struggled A LOT with this feeling of being lost or behind or somehow completely off track. At times in the past I’ve really felt desperate for some guidance—searching as if I could find my answers in someone or something “out there”. I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of late night internet searches, sought external advice, looked to gurus and diviners all as a way to try to find some sort of guidance or direction.

But nothing that anyone or anything else said could ever provide the answers I really needed to hear. For those kinds of answers we’ve got to go to the source.

Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “The land knows you, even when you are lost.” Over the past few years this quote has brought me so much comfort. The ability to exhale.

That the land knows me is a knowing felt in my bones and in the core of my being—but one that my frightened brain sometimes has a hard time surrendering to. There has been at times a great battle happening within me between my brain and my heart, between control and trust, between fear and love, between what society would tell me I should do and where my deep connection with the land and my own intuition guides me.

I’ve come to find that I only feel lost by contrast and comparison to where I’ve been told I should be.

To remember that the land knows me, is to remember that I am born of this earth. Just like the plants know how to grow and turn sunlight into food, my being knows how to grow and how to find my way, and how to turn traumas into medicine. My feet know how to walk gently upon this land, to make relationships with relatives all around. And my heart knows how to see her own answers reflected back to us in those relatives, in the land herself. My heart knows we are never lost—we are just sometimes patiently awaiting our brains to be ready to hear the answers that lie within.

You are not a total failure to feel lost. In a way, perhaps you are even right on track to be questioning and questing.

Something remarkable happens when we are lost, like truly lost. When we’re so lost that we toss out the map we had been following, we finally get out of our heads and into our gut. We find what we’ve really been longing for—our intuition, and our connection with the sacred.

When we get lost, we begin creating our own map and, eventually, we find our way. It’s in the getting lost that we can then find ourselves. 

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Looking Back to Go Forward

Making a Map of Your Life

It has taught me a great deal to look back at the map of my life and see where I’ve “gotten lost”. I started to realize that in each place I had felt lost there was actually a cairn signaling for me to take a new direction. And every single cairn on this path has led me exactly to this point, where I am here—right on time, in just the right place. When I look back, I can see that something greater has been placing those cairns all along, and that each and every one of them was there precisely when I needed it.

If you want to find out a lot about yourself, try mapping out your life. Map it on paper, or try mapping it on the land.

What has your trail been like?

Where have the major hills and valleys been?

What is the significance of the turns you’ve taken?

How have you found your way to the cairns on your path?