When I was sixteen, I sat cross-legged on my bedroom floor, meditating on the rune PERTHRO—the rune of mystery, the “dice cup” that holds fate. I was working through the concepts of Orlog and Hamingja, those Old Norse concepts of destiny and personal power, trying to understand what it meant that life sometimes feels fated and other times feels entirely within our control. I was asking a brazen question for a teenager, and I was given a simple answer: Life is a lot like orienteering.

My vision that evening showed me something that helped me navigate those early awakening years: we carry (at least) two maps that mark the terrain of our life and show the pathways we are able to walk. There’s the map(s) our ego creates—built from trauma, from other people’s expectations, from survival strategies that once kept us safe. And buried underneath that overlay, there’s the true topography of our soul, the actual landscape we’re meant to walk that becomes visible through our peak experiences, patience, and love.