%20BB.png)
The Cowboy’s Road of Return
Every summer of my childhood entailed a road trip. Packed into a car with family and a paper map, we spent hours on the open road, stopping to explore small Texas towns before reaching our destination. The country roads rolled on and on, winding between miles of prairie grass fields resting beneath an expansive, clear blue sky.
I didn’t realize how remarkable the sky was until I saw it through others’ eyes. Archetypal psychologist James Hillman wrote that “the external limitlessness of Dallas [Texas] is what strikes one first on arrival from Switzerland … And the immense relentless sky so opened out” (City and Soul, 285). For Hillman, the external landscape is interconnected with the internal psychological one. Limitlessness, as Hillman describes it, is a feature not only of the land but of the psyche. And with a landscape so open, the soul seems to expand to meet it.
The vastness of the Southwestern terrain calls to wandering hearts, and country music often captures the allure of these wide open spaces. George Strait’s “Amarillo by Morning,” released in 1983, does exactly this, telling the story of a cowboy driving through the Southwest on the rodeo circuit. Riding in the rodeo has been difficult, but Strait’s cowboy appears to be seasoned by the journey rather than defeated. He carries a calm resolve, the quiet wisdom of a man who knows he is exactly where he needs to be.
The cowboy archetype
Strait himself competed in team roping, so he sings as someone with authority gained from experience. The epitome of a cowboy, Strait achieved musical success that led to his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2006. Conjuring images of cowboys and the escapades of love and loss, his songs are forthright, with a depth that stirs the soul. The music itself seems to carry the expansive horizon of the Southwest.
The word “cowboy” comes from vaquero, meaning “cow worker,” a term for cattle herders in Mexico as early as the 1500s. The attire so well-known today, such as spurs, chaps, and hats, grew out of the needs of the terrain and the work at hand. While often romanticized, the archetype has a practicality and simplicity; the work drives the action.
As an archetype, the cowboy is often presented as a lone wolf wandering expanses of terrain, perhaps a remnant of the distances traversed in early cattle drives. Typically a person of few words, the cowboy speaks sparingly, finding that communication is better served through action or restraint from action. Difficulty is a fundamental quality of the landscape and the archetype. Life isn’t easy, and it isn’t meant to be. And yet there is a beauty in the struggle, as if the essence of being alive is found in the things that are hard.
Strait’s songs tell stories in the lineage of singing cowboys such as Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and later Western ballads sung by Marty Robbins and Michael Martin Murphey. Some of these stories echo tall tales that emerged around campfires on cattle drives, while others speak to the shared human experience of our need for relationship and its inevitable passing. At times playful but more often haunting, the songs connect to the landscape as if it were a character in its own right.
The hero rides away
The classic cowboy, seen through the lens of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, is a hero who struggles to return from the adventure. In the Hero’s Journey, the hero’s final task is to bring the wisdom gained from the journey back to the community. As Campbell puts it, the hero “re-enter[s] with his boon the long-forgotten atmosphere where men who are fractions imagine themselves to be complete” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 186). The hero’s return may renew the wasteland, bring a healing elixir, or grant a new power to liberate the community. The final challenge, however, is to share the hard-won boon with others.
The cowboy may successfully traverse the adventure, and perhaps the community benefits from the wisdom gleaned, but in the end, he rides away. This tension between the freedom of the open road and the yearning for connection is at the heart of many cowboy songs.
“Amarillo by Morning” follows this pattern in sound as well as story. Like the cowboy archetype itself, Strait’s vocals are steady and straightforward. The arrangement is simple, with an unhurried tempo that feels like miles of highway passing by. A mournful, lyrical fiddle sets a lonesome, expansive mood much like the Texas landscape. It is a song to play on long drives, as it captures the sense of the open road. Emotion shines through the music itself.
In the song, the cowboy travels alone on a Texas highway to his next rodeo, and the journey takes center stage. We know where he has been and where he is going, and that he travels light: “Everything that I got / Is just what I’ve got on.” Still, he hopes for a win at the upcoming rodeo that will carry him to the next.
The cowboy’s drive isn’t desperation but rather calm determination. This figure isn’t an upstart striving for stardom and success, but a cowboy who has been on the circuit long enough to know its trials. As the song tells us, “They took my saddle in Houston / Broke my leg in Santa Fe / Lost my wife and a girlfriend / Somewhere along the way.” He’s been through it. Like the knight Parzival wandering through the Forest Adventurous in the Arthurian legends, he has been initiated by every trial on the rodeo circuit.
Life has worn him, but it has also burnished him. He seems to have found the wisdom that gives him a sense of contentment. We learn this in the song’s emotional climax: “I ain’t got a dime / But what I got is mine / I ain’t rich / But Lord, I’m free.” The boon gained in the journey is freedom, the cowboy’s most cherished possession.
The boon gained in the journey is freedom, the cowboy’s most cherished possession.
Divine significance in the daily task
It may seem that the cowboy is unable to return from the journey, since wandering is the essence of the archetype. Yet to me, “Amarillo by Morning” tells a different story.
The open road is itself a home. And the return from the journey is not only about changing the world; it’s also about holding a “cosmic standpoint in the face of an immediate earthly pain or joy” (Hero, 192). The workings of the universe have been revealed in the journey, and with this insight, the daily task takes on divine significance. As Campbell states, “Powerful is this insight, calm and free in action, elated that through his hand should flow the grace of [the divine], the hero is the conscious vehicle of the terrible, wonderful Law, whether his work be that of butcher, jockey, or king” (Hero, 206). Sometimes the hero returns to the same life as before, the same job and the same circumstances, but with a perspective transformed by the journey.
Strait’s cowboy seems to know something about the divine significance imbued in the world around him. He carries an inner knowing that, even in a wearisome world, the universal life force breaks through into the mundane when one follows the call of the soul.
Perhaps this was always the invitation of the road trip adventure. The steady rhythm of the open road lets one’s imagination wander across endless fields beneath an immense sky, and in that openness there is an opportunity for the soul to expand. Like Strait’s cowboy, we always arrive somewhere familiar, yet something within us has unfurled along the way, allowing us to perceive glimpses of the divine significance in our own daily lives.
MythBlast authored by:
Stephanie Zajchowski, PhD, is a mythologist specializing in the intersection of myth, religion, and women's studies. She serves as the Director of Operations for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, where her background in corporate communications, operations, and instructional design informs her work. Stephanie is a contributing author to Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide, a regular contributor to the JCF MythBlast essay series, and teaches online courses in mythology through Roundtable, the 92nd Street Y's online learning platform, and at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Stephanie co-founded the Fates and Graces, a mythic community where she spent seven years hosting conferences, webinars, and workshops for readers and writers engaging with myth in their own lives and work. Ever in search of the deeper narratives that shape the human experience, she shares her work at stephaniezajchowski.com.
This MythBlast was inspired by the Return stage of the hero's journey and The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Now Streaming on Spotify—Explore the MythBlast Playlist
Latest Podcast
Joseph Goldstein is one of the pioneering figures in bringing Buddhist meditation and insight practice to the West. A cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Barre, Massachusetts, Joseph has studied and practiced meditation since 1967 under the guidance of teachers from India, Burma, and Tibet. He has led insight meditation retreats around the world and is the author of numerous books, including Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, A Heart Full of Peace, One Dharma, Insight Meditation, and The Experience of Insight. He has also coauthored books with Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield. In this conversation, Joseph reflects on the unexpected beginnings of his own path - from his first encounters with Buddhism as a young Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand to years of intensive study and practice in Asia - and on what insight meditation can reveal about the nature of mind, suffering, and impermanence. He shares the Buddhist teaching that “things are always becoming otherwise,” and offers a striking way of understanding dukkha, or suffering, as “the inevitability of unwanted experience.” We also explore the life of the Buddha through Joseph Campbell’s understanding of the Hero’s Journey. Joseph reflects on the power of myth to “universalize the particular,” allowing the Buddha’s ancient story to become a map for our own lives. Together, we discuss renunciation, conditioning, the figure of Mara, and Campbell’s memorable description of the Buddha beneath the Bodhi tree: “And the mind of the Great Being was not moved.” The conversation ultimately turns toward the fruits of practice in everyday life: the difference between craving and wholesome aspiration, the importance of generosity, and the relationship between wisdom and compassion. Joseph shares one simple question that has become a guiding principle in his own life: “How can I help?” It is a conversation about awakening, myth, the stories and habits that shape us, and the possibility of meeting life with greater clarity, steadiness, compassion, and freedom.
This Week's Highlights
"The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there accomplishes his adventure, or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned, or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder zone. Nevertheless — and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol — the two kingdoms are actually one."
-- Joseph Campbell
