Once upon a time… a much younger MT (who had not yet learned the wisdom of wearing a bag on her head) found herself on a rather poorly marked spiritual path. She was a bit afraid of being lost, and thought she’d rather like a few landmarks and maybe a map (not to mention a few less brambles), so she ought out others who were on a similar path.

But when she found them, the Others didn’t offer her a map. They didn’t have a compass either, and worse, they didn’t really appear to be *doing* much of anything.

They just sort of milled around, muttering about moss and north and trees. When she approached them, they shocked her by turning to her for their own direction and guidance! She did her best to help where she could, until …

Well…

A few of the Others began referring to her as their “spiritual leader,” which gave her a case of the blithering-wonkers. (If you don’t know what the blithering-wonkers are, I can’t really enlighten you. I can only assure you that they’re very blithering, and quite wonkers.)

Ok, enough with the cutesy third person references and parenthetical comments. I’ll be serious.

Maybe. Well, at least I’ll drop the third person speak. Anyway, the point is… I really didn’t like being called a “spiritual leader”.

Images of airports, flowers, and red Kool-Aid floated through my head. My ego was horrified rather than flattered by the prospect of “followers,” and I had no intention of playing guru-ess, much less taking the responsibility for other people’s spiritual goof ups onto my shoulders.

I was… distressed.

Ok, to be honest?

I threw a temper-tantrum-hissy-fit about it. I made my position clear: I was not their leader, I was not their teacher, and I wished they’d stop leaving the impression that I was. After all.. spiritual leaders don’t go around throwing temper-tantrum hissy fits, do they? It didn’t seem right.

But one woman in particular wouldn’t drop it. She she started bleating, loudly, that I *was* the leader, and she was going to follow, and I’d damn well better get used to it!

One minute, I was blundering along a bramble filled path, and the next, I was being shoved into a leadership role by a bossy, self-declared sheep. It was disrespectful, it was disturbing, and it was triggering some pretty major fears of responsibility and failure.

I fretted and fussed until my guts were in a knot and beyond, until well after 3 am or so. (Back then,, my preferred form of devotional prayer was the ritualized twisting and knotting of internal organs. In case you’re wondering? I don’t recommend it.)

Eventually, I drifted into a strange sort of pseudo-sleep by reading a grocery-store-bargain-paperback. A supporting character in the novel was a stereotypical Hasidic Jew. He sleuthed through the chapters in orthodox clothing (hat, underwear and all), liberal sprinklings of Yiddish accenting his conversations, then he sleuthed into my dreams.

“Oy, vey!!” came the voice in my head. “Always the nervous khalere! (nervous wreck)”

A face appeared, nodding back and forth as if to say Tsk, Tsk, the movements accentuated by the traditional wide brimmed hat.

“Do not be such a meshugeneh!(madwoman) Lead like a GOAT!”

At the word “goat”, the face POPPED out of existence, only to be replaced by an image of a carousel goat, as sharp as if it had been plucked from a stock photo service.

I can still see the goat in my head, carved in intricate detail, each curve of his curly coat gleaming, a blue ribbon and gold bell around his neck. Slowly, one corner of the image began to curl, and it was handed to me out of my dream, as if it were a page torn from a book.

The voice rang out again, “Gai shoyn, gai ! (now don’t be silly, scram!)” The dream vanished with an audible *BANG* and I was wide awake.

“Lead like a goat!! Of course!”

Comforted, I tucked the image of the bellwether deeply into my mind, snuggled back into my pillows, and drifted into a deep sleep.

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MindTWEAK: < insert chupacabra joke of your choice. >

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