Somewhere over the rainbow

Way up high

There’s a land that I heard of

Once in a lullaby

Somewhere over the rainbow

Skies are blue

And the dreams that you dare to dream

Really do come true

Someday I’ll wish upon a star

And wake up where the clouds are far behind me

Where troubles melt like lemon drops

Away above the chimney tops

That’s where you’ll find me….

That’s Dorothy singing–about five minutes into the film The Wizard of Oz. In her voice is her heart’s longing for home. Sing the song with her and does it not pull at our heartstrings as well? Do we not feel our own heart’s longing for home alongside hers? 

But we feel this longing most intensely under certain circumstances. The Wizard of Oz movie portrays Dorothy as never having known her biological parents. She is an orphan. I read this symbolically, as speaking to the cosmic orphan in all of us. The cosmic orphan who feels unprotected. The cosmic orphan who faces challenges that they’re completely unprepared for. 

The cosmic orphan who feels thrown into life. 

Who among us has never felt their inner cosmic orphan and the longing for home? 

But notice carefully how Dorothy sings about home–again, very early on in the movie: 

Home where the skies are blue.

Home away above the chimney tops.

Home where dreams come true. 

This is all categorically different from being thrown into a world of stormy complexity and cloudy plotlines that pre-existed you. Or, rather, when some tornado transports your house and you in it, and you crash into Munchkin Land, and you create an instant enemy in the Wicked Witch of the West because you accidentally killed her sister, the Wicked Witch of the East. 

Home, we just heard Dorothy say, is where dreams come true, but I would not call the crash-landing of the house on the Wicked Witch of the West as a dream coming true. When people speak of “dreams coming true,” usually what is meant is that something you have hoped for and wanted materializes. But Dorothy has just been thrown into conflict and it wasn’t of her choosing at all. 

Think, now, about some conflict you’ve been thrown into. Maybe a conflict with a colleague or an employer right now. Maybe a conflict with a parent you were born to, or a sibling. And so on. But there it is. You never wanted it. It’s not your dream. 

But now that it’s been forced upon you, you must figure it out. 

Something else happens to Dorothy when she’s thrown into Munchkin Land. She becomes an instant hero to the Munchkins. She has just destroyed their bitter enemy the Wicked Witch of the East. “Ding dong the witch is dead!”

They celebrate her like she’s the Second Coming. But this also is not “home.” Home is your heart’s desire. But Dorothy’s fame was not something desired. It was strictly accidental in nature. She was just in the right place at the right time. 

In the real world, for so many people, that’s exactly how it is with fame and fortune. To their utter amazement and dismay, they eventually realize that fame and fortune aren’t truly their true heart’s desire. Fame and fortune are not all that they’re cracked up to be. 

They just happened to be, like Dorothy, in the right place at the right time…

Dorothy, thrown into a strange new world, feels her homelessness intensely, and so do we. Kansas wasn’t home to her. Munchkin Land isn’t home to her. So where does she go from here? What does she do, beyond singing her heart’s longing? How does she envision her next steps in a way more practical than “somewhere over the rainbow”? 

I’m dressed as Glinda the Good Witch today (despite how frumpy I’m sure I look in this dress) because I want to underscore the value of her blessing upon Dorothy–Dorothy who is the cosmic orphan in us all. 

Glinda the Good Witch blesses Dorothy by pointing out the Yellow Brick Road path before her and encouraging her to walk it. It’s very important to get this part right. The Yellow Brick Road isn’t one way among many. The Yellow Brick Road doesn’t have a unique geography that’s not right here so you must travel to get to it somewhere else. The Yellow Brick Road is here–here and now–the path you are already on. Your feet are already upon it. It’s nothing but the path you’ve been thrown onto. But it becomes Yellow and Brick through an act of spiritual insight: when you understand, finally, that the only way out is through. 

The only way out is through. 

Follow the path you’ve been thrown on. Trust the path you’ve been thrown on. Because you’ve been thrown onto it, and all of a sudden you are embroiled in a world of conflicts and dramas that pre-existed you, the path you are on can feel like the exact opposite of home. Stormy, cloudy. But Glinda the Good Witch is blessing you. She is blessing you right now. This path, this path you are already on, is the way home. The only way out is through. 

And here are your fellow travelers. The Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion. The Wicked Witch. We are not a perfect people. 

The Scarecrows among us feel like we lack brains, but that’s because we were wounded. We have brains, but we can’t feel them right now. That’s what trauma means. 

The Tin Mans among us feel like we lack heart, but that’s because we were wounded. We do have hearts, but we can’t feel them right now. That’s what trauma means.

The Cowardly Lions among us feel like we lack courage, but that’s because we were wounded. We do have courage, but we can’t feel it right now. That’s what trauma means.

Even the Wicked Witches. They too have their stories, which the recent book Wicked and the stage play of the same name tell. 

We are all together, so perfectly imperfect, on the Yellow Brick Road path to home. And, you know, it is part of our culture’s design to believe that there are experts who can give us silver bullet solutions. There are experts, and there are the places where the experts congregate. So the movie gives us The Emerald City, and it gives us the Wizard of Oz.

It does so rather cynically, I must say. The Emerald City is a mass of neon-striped skyscrapers. It is a parody of the noisy, industrialized cities of the 1930s which was the decade in which the movie came out. 

As for the Wizard. He’s just a fast-talking showman who hides behind a curtain waggling levers

using mechanical trickery to project images that make his subjects afraid and ensures their loyalty. 

I’m sure you know of a few real-life Wizards who work in exactly this way.

The situation is not always this bad, though. I say this just to inject some balance into a movie that came out in 1939 when fascist dictators were stomping around Europe, and the movie wanted to say something about that. There are indeed some genuine Emerald Cities out there and some genuine Wizards. Yet it is a timeless teaching that others’ answers to spiritual questions can never become one’s own answers. One must always earn one’s own answers. One’s own answers must be authentic and true to personal experience and conscience. We may find ourselves inspired by wise ones. We may seek wise ones out where they congregate in their Emerald Cities, and we should. But this is meant to prime the pump only, to expand our limited imaginations, to replace ignorance with knowledge, to inspire our inner Wise Ones to show themselves and speak out. 

The Wizard of Oz movie, I understand, is the most seen film in all of movie history. Film critics regularly rank it as one of the greatest films of all time. So I’m assuming that there is familiarity with this movie among us today. The Wizard sends Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion on a quest to secure the Wicked Witch of the West’s broom and return to the Emerald City with it. They go; they are captured by the frightening Flying Monkeys; they are taken to the Wicked Witch’s castle; stuff happens; the Witch sets fire to the Scarecrow; Dorothy throws a bucket of water on him to extinguish the fire and accidentally splashes the Witch, causing her to melt away. 

One again, the movie is making a point. From the beginning to the end of our lives, we will be thrown into situations not of our choosing, not of our desire, and we must cope as best as we can. This includes situations in which we achieve success, but it was really more luck than anything else. Maybe it was unearned privilege that clinched things for us. 

Maybe. 

Yet again and again we must remember Glinda the Good Witch’s blessing of the Yellow Brick Road path of life. Our efforts to cope with whatever comes our way, with whatever quests we are put on: this is the journey of life, and it is in itself transformative. That’s the main point. 

It reminds me of the old story of the spiritual seeker who believes he is empty of wisdom and must go on a pilgrimage to meet a Wise One who lives high upon a mountain top. He must climb all the way up to speak with the Wise One who, presumably, will fill his emptiness up with enlightenment. But what happens is that the climb to the top is filled with adversity, and this is the real teacher. By the time the seeker reaches the top, he already knows what the Wise One was going to say. Enlightenment was already his all along, but he needed challenging experiences to unleash his inner light. 

“We travel,” said Hellen Keller, “not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.” “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” 

There is indeed a Wizard in all our lives, and it is the Yellow Brick Road path we are already on, and if we trust it, if we accept it in faith, if we give it our all, if we try our best, we shall end up transformed. 

In the end, the fake Wizard gives tokens to confirm that the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion have the qualities which they thought they lacked. The Wizard gives the Tin Man a testimonial to his kindness, which is a heart-shaped clock. The Scarecrow gets a college diploma–he becomes a Doctor of Thinkology. The Lion gets a medal for meritorious conduct–The Triple Cross–and he becomes the newest member of the Legion of Courage. Ok…. But the fact is, each of these characters demonstrated that they already had what they thought they lacked, and they did this in action, when pressed by adversity, when challenged by difficulty. The Wizard’s tokens are sweet but completely unnecessary. 

Like the song we just heard: Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man that he didn’t already have.

It is the Yellow Brick Road path–the path we are already on–that is the true Wizard. The path that Glinda the Good Witch blesses at the beginning of the movie, and then at movie’s end, she states one of the biggest spiritual paradoxes that exists. Dorothy always had the power to return home. But she had to find out for herself. The Yellow Brick Road journey–all the troubles encountered, all the friendships made, all the delights and discoveries too–were all needed to help her recognize the power she always already had. 

And so it is with us. 

In the end, the Wizard of Oz teaches: There is really only one thing to practice acceptance towards, and that is the entirety of one’s life. All the terrible moments of childhood, youth, and adulthood. All the good parts as well. Everything that has gone into making us into the people we are. Everything you’ve been thrown into, good or bad. Everything we’ve been thrown into. We were thrown into Covid together. We are thrown into such a perilous yet hopeful moment in politics right now. This is our Yellow Brick Road. Acceptance is about acknowledging the power of what this has brought and will bring into our lives and trusting that it is the way to our Destiny. Not that individual moments of suffering and injustice are ever OK–but that they all serve a larger design, and every wound can be a source of wisdom. 

Everything works to reveal that we, in a mystic sense, are always already home. 

That the universe is home. 

That West Shore is our Blue Boat Home. 

That these companions: home. 

Not somewhere over the rainbow, but here. 

The skies don’t always have to be blue. 

It doesn’t have to be away above the chimney tops.

Home is right here. 

Here: Home.

Home: here.