The Elephant Oracle
You walk up to a house you think you know… It seems familiar, anyway. Its exterior is inviting and cozy, drenched in the late afternoon sun. The front doorknob gleams golden in the light. You can’t explain it, but somehow you know you must open the door and go inside. What is inside is important to you right here, right now.
You twist the doorknob calling out “Hello?” to see if anyone is inside. There’s no answer but you see a sunny room down the hall and make your way toward it. You go to enter an elephant energy stands on the sofa, weighing down the cushions, taking up most of the space, looking like it just came in the window itself.
You two stare at each other for a moment before you realize what you’ve found: You’re face-to-face with the elephant in the room. And it’s wearing a name tag. It’s ready for you to name it.
You have found the Elephant Oracle, and it has a story to share with you today.
The Elephant Oracle says:
An unnamed thing is abstract, amorphous, unknown, and unquantifiable… precisely because it could be anything. When you don’t know something’s name or you refuse to name it - especially a worry, a problem, a toxicity, an unhealthy situation, and/or emotional rot - it will always seem bigger, badder, and scarier than it is.
But since you’re here, you may already know that. Maybe you’re one of the ones who’s not afraid to walk right up to whatever it is, take it in a little, and introduce yourself.
Most people are TERRIFIED the amorphous, unknown, unnamed thing they can sense is mucking up their emotional well-being. They’re scared to find out what it might be. Because they’ve never been brave enough to look straight at it, in their minds it could be anything. It could be way more than they can handle. It could crush them. There’s no limit to how scary the thing is when your imagination is allowed to run wild with it.
So, they avoid it, that elephant in the room. They call it by cuter names they know don’t fit. They spend YEARS letting it stomp on their couch cushions and live inside their minds rent free and take up negative space. They don’t know how to put their arms around it, where to look it the eye, what to do with their hands. So they don’t try. They’d rather let it squeeze them out of their own spaces and take all the air in the room than face it.
So the problem, concern, worry, corruption, toxicity, or general emotional rot carries on. For decades. For lifetimes. For generations, even. The whole time, if anyone would look at it directly and name it for what it is, the spell - the curse - of it would be broken.
A name sets parameters, gives boundaries and dimensions. It reveals things at their proper, true selves. Not everything your mind could possibly imagine. To name something correctly, you have to look at it directly. You have to see the size and shape of it. And then - only then - you can know how to deal with it.
Once you name something, you come to know it on a personal level. And when you know something on a personal level, you can address it. You can tell it to get off your couch. Not: That’s a big, scary tusked elephant ready to eat me. Instead: Oh that’s George. He looks angry but we know him. He comes around sometimes. Go away, George.
Something in your life today is asking you this: to name it, to address it, to look it right in the face and acknowledge its presence. Whatever it is, it’s not trying to destroy your nice things, your good times, or your life. It just wants your attention.
The elephant in the room wants - it WANTS - for you to name it and to know it and to deal with the mess it’s been making.
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About the Oracles
Bailey Lewis - the voice behind and creator of Found Oracles - is an award-winning writer, multimedia storyteller, and owner of Bailey Sends Word Story Studio.
Visit the Bailey Sends Word Story Studio site for more stories steeped in modern mythos - work exploring intuition, mystical encounters in the everyday, and how the stories we tell ourselves create our reality.