Sociosomnia: 🦅 A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

I almost can’t even call A Wizard of Earthsea (book) sociosomnia because the symbolism is so overt: this wonderful book is about confronting our shadow. It speaks to the terror and life-destruction of being hunted by the impacts of our mistakes, until we learn to face them, and hunt them instead. Insert parallels to interpersonal meditation here(!). But the obviousness of the allegory doesn’t keep it from being deep and full of insightful gems. Take this one, which speaks to a beautiful paradox of maturation, that as we claim more autonomy we use it to choose a deeper surrender:

“And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do . . .”.

This quote speaks to part of what makes it so scary to evolve beyond Teal/Self-Authoring into a stage often fittingly called "The Magician" 🧙‍♀️— 'doing wholly what we must do' feels like we’re sacrificing our hard-earned freedom from all the pressures of society. Yet the ‘must’ comes from somewhere far more meaningful than cultural expectations, and it’s missives are sourced from the inside. Plus you can’t sacrifice something that was never there in the first place…

With love, Jordan