Let us Meet at the Crossroads

Take a journey with me to one of the most infamous crossroads in music history. Situate yourself inside a dusty bar in the middle of nowhere.  On stage, legendary musician Robert Johnson conjures the raw soul of the Blues.  The time is timeless.  But for Johnson, he’s steeped in the sweltering, deeply religious Jim Crow South during the Great Migration northward.  He’s crooning on about his Cross Road Blues.

Johnson, considered the grandfather of Blues music, began his career being laughed off stages.  After disappearing for some time, and rumored to have taken his desperation to the crossroads, he re-emerged playing the guitar unlike anyone ever had before.  

The rest is music history shrouded in mystery and folklore, with some threads weaving in Hoodoo practices to explain how Johnson became a musical savant.  He is considered the first of the infamous “27 Club”, artists who suffered tragic deaths at the prime of their careers, aged 27.  

Did he sell his soul at the crossroads in a deal with the devil? Was it to master the guitar, or was it to become a legend?

It's appropriate that we start our exploration of the Crossroads with the Blues. The musical genre was born out of messy happenstance, where ideologies, culture, and personal identities collide. Rooted in instruments of African origin and carried by an enslaved people, this elemental musical language spread and evolved across centuries. Eventually, the Blues wove itself into the soul of American popular music and, by extension, reshaped musical styles globally.  

Yoruba philosopher and author Bayo Akomolafe, PhD writes: "The crossroads is not the place that lies ahead, a one-time occurrence. All roads are crossroads; every highway a junction of intra-sections."  So how do we meet it?

The Age of Knowledge has brought with it an unavoidable reckoning: much of what we have been told about history, right and wrong, and “the way the world works” has been filtered through an agenda. This “universal” agenda, it turns out, discriminates.  The rules are made by whoever holds the power.

The dominant worldview is based on duality.  Good/evil, right/wrong, go/stay.  The unknown is labeled as bad.  But there is another way.  Duality doesn’t stick at the crossroads because it's always colliding into something new.

In Robert Johnson’s time, the disorderly new music scene coming from the juke joints of the South was rubbing up against deeply institutionalized conservative values of the day, both social and religious.  Inside the jukes was a moral grey area between paradigms, where “right” and “wrong” were blurred.  

That ambiguity is unsettling if you crave certainty.  To compensate, alternative and artistic sensibilities have been systematically 'othered' since the dawn of colonization. Supernatural correlations to 'Devil's Music' grew directly from this racist fear.

The crossroads mythology isn’t exclusively the Devil’s domain, however.  Èsù, a deity in the Yorùbá tradition, is a trickster figure not unlike Loki from Norse mythology or Hecate, the Greek Goddess of crossroads.  All three are nuanced, ancient forces that got flattened into symbols of evil by dominant cultural narratives.  Neither good nor evil, Èsù presides over transitions and liminal spaces. As guardian of the crossroads, he “breaks the binaries with which we see the world and opens up a third way," writes Akomolafe. 

I’ve written about Liminal Spaces and the creativity that thrives there before.  Liminal space is where assumptions of the familiar are challenged.  When you're uncomfortable, you get curious about alternatives.  Sometimes it takes discomfort, a trickster’s "trick," to crack open your creativity. 

Being cracked open like that can go either way, and any way.  That’s why danger looms at the crossroads.  It's populated by scary people living on the fringes: those who've lost their footing, and those who were never built for solid ground to begin with.  Artists are cast here alongside everyone else that the mainstream has pushed aside.

You don’t find many juke joints these days, but we do have dive bars.  People escape to the bar when they are in transition, crossing life thresholds.  They might be lost, lonely, or desperate. Some go for celebration.  At the bar, the good and the bad meet and make deals over drinks.  (Ask me sometime about the satanist who went hunting for prey where I was bartending on Easter Day).  Some nights get written off and forgotten — bar rules.  

Artists can go to the bar to find their authentic path outside of convention.  They seek community and often find sanctuary.  When they have to make tough decisions about their dreams, artists can even find salvation at the bar. Since it’s a moral grey area, anything is possible here.

It’s all messy happenstance: bars, the Blues, creativity.  We're still fundamentally at Robert Johnson's crossroads. But it's not limited to the human experience. It's happening to our planet. So above, so below.  What happens on the macro shapes the micro, and the micro manifests the macro.

Any way you look at it, the world is changing.  With it, we’re also learning how to reconnect, grieve, and heal.  Here are three voices tracking this moment:

Vision Keeper of the Center for Sacred Studies, Grandmother Joyti Ma, believes Mother Earth is in the birthing process of a new consciousness. (The Radical Wisdom Conference, 2026)  Many people believe we are experiencing Earth’s 6th mass extinction event, this time caused by humans. 

Collective trauma pioneer Thomas Hübl, PhD, holds an ecological worldview that people are not only offspring of the Earth but embodiments of it. The Earth breathes through us.  By that logic, Hübl recently explained that conflict and war are earthly infections, and right now we're in an inflammation. The root cause is the harm humanity has inflicted through industry, urban development, and climate change. (Expanded States of Consciousness World Summit, 2026) 

Author Gabor Maté, MD, recently spoke about how traumatized leaders at the top trigger trauma responses in civilians. (When Healing Doesn’t Travel Straight: Trauma, Politics & Agency in Times of Trouble, 2025) It's hard to deny that collectively, we are on edge.  

It seems personal beliefs are increasingly at odds with cultural narratives. We're scrutinizing the past and interrogating the future.  Technology keeps us more connected than ever, but it’s brushing up against our capacity to be engaged.  

This manifests as interrupted sleep, or what Buddhists call 'monkey brain,' a mind that won't quiet. Some people absorb it through the vibrations of pain, anger, and fear around them. Some see it in violent images, while others hear it in the news: discord, disconnect, rigid power. You can feel it in the seasons themselves, destabilized by climate change. And for some, there is simply a knowing; an intuitive anxiety smells trouble brewing beneath what is spoken.  Every sense attacked. 

Surely there must be an ideology that will lead us forward, out of the chaos of transition…  At least, that’s the narrative we’ve been taught from the dominant worldview.

There is inherent vulnerability at the crossroads.  When you’re vulnerable, you tend to cling to narratives that promise to support you.  Was that Robert Johnson’s deal?  It’s uncomfortable to sit in uncertainty without reaching for direction, and the devil knows that. 

This is a plight artists know intimately. Many artists are incompatible with their industry's prescribed development process. Even 'What's your next project?' can be triggering. The artist's path is not always linear.

There is real opportunity in the liminal space.  I’ve been here for a long time.  The talent is honest and raw at the crossroads, and artists make great company.  That’s Robert Johnson on the stage now!  Transition is worth honoring…as transition.  

Living 'gig' to 'gig' hijacks transition time. Constantly chasing and executing the next project leaves no space for rest. That's when doing nothing becomes triggering for so many. As a result, artists trade the uncertainty of 'gigging' for the safety of 'stability.' This bypasses the discomfort of transition. Stability serves the artistic spirit better as a baseline, however, not a destination.

Every time I try to skip the turmoil of transition, my ego steals the wheel…and crashes the car!  This is a self-perpetuating pattern for artists. The moment we get in our own heads, the wheels come off.  Every sense attacked.  That's where my previous blog, 10 Tools for Managing Your Ego, comes in handy. My personal go-to is dropping into the body, out of my head, and back into flow.

A changing world calls for a reframe. That’s how a healthy ecosystem evolves, through composting experience and allowing something new to blossom. Balance straddles both worlds: one foot planted in the familiar and the other kicking off into the unknown. This is the way of the Tao.  

The Tao, most often translated as 'the path' or the middle way, could also be considered a crossroads of sorts.  It’s where duality merges into one path and balance is found. I explore this deeply in my Sustainability Cycle framework. 

Learning to navigate systems that weren't designed for artists cannot be done by design.  It must be intuitive.  The crossroads offers space to lean into oneself. My work equips the artist with tools so that when they find themselves here, they’re better able to make choices that sustain their creativity. 

Consider an artist's perspective. When Grammy-winning singer and cultural historian Rhiannon Giddens curates, she's drawn to “people who are standing in crossroads, [who] represent a strong tradition but [are] also interested in other traditions and where they meet.”  She honors the origins of the instruments she plays, while still owning the full complexity of her own heritage.  Hear her reflect on this journey in this clip.  

Conclusions are a casualty of flattening duality, so this may not feel like an ending.  The devil stands ready to make that deal, but you don’t need Hoodoo to get what you want.  If you're in transition, sit and stay awhile. Inspiration lives at the crossroads, and it's in that liminal space where creativity, growth, and healing become possible.

The slide of that guitar can transport you from Blues to Metal, folk to funk, wherever you choose to take it.  I’ll see you at the crossroads.

"[W]hat it means to meet at the crossroads...is to live as if we live with and through others...it is to notice that every straight line is haunted by intersecting liminal trajectories, and that continuity is indebted to those places where bodies bump into other bodies. It is to heed the voice of Harriet Tubman, to get off the highway and wade in the waters, to treat with some hospitality the things that cross us."

-Bayo Akomolafe

Emileena is writing a book on artist development called ANOTHER WAY. If you are looking for development, consider Emileena's coaching.

Original Artwork by Dave Law, freelance visual artist and illustrator. For more, please visit www.davelawart.com.