Where Do We Turn Now?

Stories can help us find our way

These past few days, I’ve been caught in a web of reflection — stirred by grief, confusion, and longing for a deeper sense of meaning. The headline many are still waking up to: Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on September 10th at an event at Utah Valley University.

In school, my 14-year old and her classmates watched the video of his gruesome death. And she keeps talking about his kids: how they were there, watching him bleed out.

In this moment — as in many moments — I’m seeing how stories, archetypes, and the inner work we do through myth and metaphor matter more than ever. Because when someone like Kirk, a public figure who embodied conflict and 'otherness,' is suddenly gone, we’re forced to look, to reckon: What do we do with death, with loss? With the violence that erupts when pathways of power, belonging, exclusion, identity, and fear collide?

What I keep returning to, especially now, is the map that I’ve become obsessed with: The Heroine’s Journey. Not because it has all the answers. But because it offers something essential: a path through transformation that is not about conquest, but about healing; not about exclusion, but about integration; not about denying shadow, but transforming it.

In the wake of Kirk’s death, we see so clearly the cost of voices unheard, the cost of belonging defined by “otherness,” the danger of the stories we accept and the ones we deny. What if we treated this as a call — not to more conflict, not to more blame — but to deeper things: authenticity, inner truth, the reconciliation of light and shadow. What if we asked whether the paths we walk actually serve life, or whether they perpetuate entrapments (of ideology, fear, identity)

The Heroine’s Journey teaches that liberation begins within: that the path from captivity to freedom is almost always first an inside job. It honors vulnerability, relationship, connection. It reminds us that after grief or shock, after the rupture, there is a renewal — if we are willing to do the inner work. And that journey matters not only for our own healing, but for our communities, our culture, our future.

I’m more convinced than ever that we need stories of healing, of courage that isn’t loud but deeply rooted; of transformation that isn’t linear, but circular, relational, grounded. Stories that say: “Yes, the world is suffering. Yes, we’ve been complicit. Yes, something new is calling us — if we choose it.”