It's interesting how a book can show us a crystal-clear picture of who we were, are, and maybe even will be. The Portuguese edition I have of A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living, edited by Diane K. Osbon, is dated 10/23/2003, when I was 37 years old. As I turned the pages of the book, I rediscovered a cute drawing of a bunny wrapped in little hearts made by my daughter, Laura, then five years old. I hold the book in my hands and I see the passages underlined in chapter 1, Living in the World. They are the passages where Campbell explains his perspective of the five levels of love, from servile to fraternal, the biological desire for procreation, identification with the other and, finally, the romance of the highest order, wherein there is a surrender to love itself. On my way into metanoia, evoked by living in the second half of life as Jung proposed, I was enchanted by the way Campbell talked about alchemical marriage. In marriage, he said, you are not sacrificing yourself for the sake of the other, but for the relationship. And I never forgot his amazement at couples who broke up after the children grew up. When their kids left the nest, they no longer had anything in common. Many of the clients who seek out a Jungian psychoanalyst are struggling with love relationship issues. It was interesting to see that much of what makes sense to me in this regard goes back to this and other texts by Campbell. He describes, on page 48, the big problem with marriages: can couples open themselves to compassion? There is very little room for compassion in the modern world, inside and outside the psychotherapist’s office, and Campbell's question still resonates strongly nowadays. However, nearly twenty years later when I reread his work for this brief essay,  my eyes were fixed on text not previously underlined, starting with the moment when the book itself was conceived, as the result of a one-month seminar for ten people in 1983 at Esalen. Campbell was 79 years old at the time, and I particularly appreciate the books, such as this one, that encapsulate worldviews and wisdom over the lifetime of great thinkers. Now when there is, for so many of us, less time ahead than there is behind, what caught my attention were the passages in which Campbell talks about aging and death, and one’s attitude toward it. Or as he puts it, “You go to your death singing.” (80) In italics, to help us deal with the idea, Diane points to a thought by Jung on the issue: “As a physician I am convinced that it is hygienic…to discover in death a goal toward which one can strive; and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.” Discover in death a goal toward which one can strive… with this injunction in mind, I reread Campbell's passage on page 84 carefully: In old age, your only relationship to the world is your begging bowl, which in our culture is your bank account. That’s what you’ve already earned, and it has to support this relatively carefree last stage of life.Since I am myself in that stage now, I can tell you that it is the best part of life. It’s properly called, in this wonderful language that we have, the “Golden Years.” It is a period when everything is coming up and flowering. It is very, very sweet. Golden Years... Campbell is talking about the sweetness of the final stretch, heading to the exit, as he himself called it, in a very different perspective from that practiced in contemporary society. But as he said, he was not a sociologist and was not interested in these everyday things but, instead, in the eternal ones: "The image of decline in old age is a bit deceptive”, he says, “because even though your energies are not those of early youth—that was the time of moving into the field of making all the big drives—now you are in the field, and this is the time of the opening flower, the real fulfillment, the bringing forth of what you have prepared yourself to bring forth. It is a wonderful moment. It is not a loss situation, as if you’re throwing off some-thing to go down. Not at all. It is a blooming. “It is a blooming.” “Golden years”. Now I understand what he means. It's about the individuation process Jung described. The image that comes to my mind when I read about aging in Campbell is that of a beautiful sunset, an intense phenomena made all the more so because we know it will soon be gone. A sunset, by the way, which illustrates the cover of the book in the Portuguese version. I close the book and internally thank Campbell once again. Well, well. His work continues to resonate with me, exercising its pedagogical function of guiding me along the way, just as I imagine it does in the lives of so many other people.

All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truthIs Change. God Is Change. This is the central verse of Earthseed, a religion promoted by the teenage protagonist of Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower. Lauren Oya Olamina claims she hasn’t invented Earthseed, but discovered it; whether or not people choose to believe in it is their own business. “Consider: Whether you're a human being, an insect, a microbe, or a stone, this verse is true.” It’s hard to think of a concept more slippery, more contentious or more fraught, than that of truth. The United States has reached a level of polarization around concrete concepts in science and human rights that’s hard to wrap one’s head around. A prolonged pandemic keeps us separated from our flesh-and-blood communities and kettles us into online spaces that, by design, make it easier to craft our own reality. Our immediate communities become more abstract, more rooted in ideology than mutual support and human interaction—precisely the opposite of what we need in a country of increasing violence, disinformation, and extremism. Anyone who picks up Butler’s science fiction novels today will see a world reflected that is far too close for comfort, from the rising prices of basic necessities to the election of a Christofascist president who claims he will “make America great again.” I can’t emphasize enough: Butler wrote these words in Parable of the Talents in 1998. "Post-truth" was Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year in 2016, a year many Americans may recall feeling especially unmoored. It was, as Butler's novels illustrate, anticipated, like an especially large chunk of ice finally sliding off a glacier; the latest schism in an ongoing series. Debate over the simplest facts—especially now, in the internet non-places that run hot and eat fury for fuel—has long been an earmark of extremist groups who benefit from rejecting our shared reality, indoctrinating and isolating their community members to create a psychological chasm that makes it near impossible to leave, let alone reintegrate into reality. And with our world in turmoil, it's very tempting to choose fury, denial, and blame over grief, acceptance, and adaptation. The problem is that facts, as well as universal, capital-T Truths, bind every single one of us and our actions together whether we believe in them or not. That is not only a beautiful feature of the collective human experience, but a vital piece of our continued survival. Joseph Campbell waxes poetic about this inevitable system of interdependence in a letter to his friend, biologist Ed Ricketts, in 1941. He’s here referencing Ricketts’s book Sea of Cortez, which was co-authored by their mutual friend John Steinbeck: These little intertidal societies and the great human societies are manifestations of common principles; more than that: we understand that the little and the great societies are themselves units in a sublime, all-inclusive organism, which breathes and goes on, in dream-like half-consciousness of its own life-processes, oxidizing its own substance yet sustaining its wonderful form. (Correspondence: 1927-1987, 48-49) Truth is a living organism the way Earthseed’s god is Change: the only constant in our lives is that the sands will shift. In general, this is objectively terrifying. Change is dirty work; certainty is easier, settled—and deadly. The communities that hide from our shared experience are a shame, and I prefer to focus on the communities that lean into the work. Much like Campbell’s oft quoted, rarely understood “follow your bliss,” there’s a misleading idea that a positive, effective, coherent, and sustaining community is idealistic. But if God is Change, a functioning community looks less like a land of lotus eaters and more like a system of mutual care, where members face even the most hideous truths with organized collective action. Campbell admired the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, and it’s not difficult to see why. His concept of bliss is much the same as Campbell’s: not unfettered joy, but finding and celebrating your place in the great web of humanity: At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations) Butler’s young protagonist found comfort in her Earthseed verses. Accepting that change is the only constant, we find ourselves much more likely to help our neighbors and remain close to the people we love, making our community a many-celled organism more likely to survive. Olamina writes, Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces. During the periods of our lives that feel the most unjust, the most bleak, the times when we feel voiceless, is when we need our community most. Olamina’s Earthseed went from the notebooks of a teenage refugee to printed source materials for a global religion over the course of two novels (as well as a third, Parable of the Trickster, unfinished at the time of Butler’s death in 2006). What we’ve learned in the past few years is the necessity of operating in a shared reality. We must pay attention to the God-as-Change, even though the truth might pain us. We must listen to this god, respond to its whims as well as we can, become resilient—not so that this god will care for us, but so we can better care for one another.

The theme for July at JCF is Community, a term that draws all sorts of positive, warm and fuzzy projections today. In its broadest sense, a community is a social group with interests in common. Nevertheless, in his description of the traditional hero’s journey as depicted in myth, Joseph Campbell seems to set the individual at odds with the larger community: Your real duty is to go away from the community to find your bliss. (A Joseph Campbell Companion, 21) Is society then the villain here? Just what does Campbell mean by “community”? Traditionally, according to Campbell, a mythology grows up within a bounded horizon, whether a tribe, a village, or a culture. "A system of mythological symbols only works if it operates in the field of a community of people who . . . share the same realm of life experience." (Thou Art That, 8) There are two ways of living a mythologically grounded life. One way is just to live what I call “the way of the village compound,” where you remain within the sphere of your people. That can be a very strong and powerful and noble life. (An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms, 23) Though the community may not understand the individual who craves more than what “the way of the village compound” offers, Campbell does not suggest that such a divide need be permanent—far from it. It’s no surprise that many interpreters of the hero’s journey motif naturally focus on the beginning of the quest (hearing a Call, which often involves realizing something significant is missing in life), with the idea of encouraging their audience to risk the adventure and dare to “depart from the ordinary world,” leave one’s comfort zone and step beyond the expectations, support, and protections of society. Much attention is also paid to detailing the trials, ordeals, helpers, and guides one meets along the way, as well as the transformative initiatory experience that is the climax of the quest. Though this might include a literal, physical journey, the real work of initiation ultimately requires an inward turn. On occasion, though, I notice the end of the journey gets short shrift from some who popularize it—little more than a mention in passing, as if it just naturally follows that everything will come out right. Nevertheless, the hero quest Joseph Campbell explores in The Hero with a Thousand Faces has three equal movements: Separation (from the community); Transformation (physical and psychological); and Return (once again part of the community, but in a new role): You don’t have a complete adventure unless you do get back . . . It's not an easy thing to know how to handle that return threshold; it's even more difficult than the departure threshold. But it is the same threshold. It's the threshold where that which has been missing is reintroduced to that which missed it, but didn't know it missed it. (Joseph Campbell, Archive Audio L0604 – Odysseus Discussion Q & A, 8/14/1980) I’d like to focus on that last line, “where that which has been missing is reintroduced to that which missed it, but didn't know it missed it.” Which begs the question: whom, exactly, is one questing for? A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.(The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 23, emphasis mine) There is a natural tendency to think of the concept of the hero’s journey as totally subjective: I’m off on my quest, for my benefit. But that’s not exactly how it works in myth. Centuries ago, the Plains Miwuk in the part of California where I live told a tale of how, back in the beginning, this land was always drenched in fog. No one could see anything in the perpetual cold and gray—and none who lived there had ever seen or heard of the Sun. Then, one day, Coyote departs and wanders up into the Sierra Nevada range, where he stumbles across the Sierra Miwuk, who just happen to possess the Sun. Enraptured by its warm glow, he craftily manages to steal the golden orb and beat it on down the hill—where, eventually, an arrangement is brokered between the Plains and Sierra Miwuk that allows a balance between the sun's blistering summer heat and the cold, damp, gray of fog in winter. (We are still plagued by thick, impenetrable tule fog here, but only some 20 to 40 days of the year—thank you, Coyote!) Coyote didn’t keep the Sun to himself in order to read in bed at night; he shared it with his community. Parzival wasn’t after the Grail so he could upgrade his coffee mug; his success on this quest healed King Amfortas and restored a blighted kingdom. Moses didn’t confront Pharaoh to secure power and riches, but to free his people. That’s not to say mythic heroes never have selfish motives. Many may start from there (such as Han Solo in Star Wars, whose participation in Princess Leia’s rescue is secured with the promise of financial reward), but generally tend to rise to the occasion as the adventure unfolds. Contrast that with the older brothers in “The Water of Life”—one of the fairy tales preserved by the Grimm Brothers—each of whom undertakes the dangerous journey to retrieve that healing elixir with the intention of inheriting the kingdom for himself; rather than rise to the occasion both fail in their task, while the youngest prince’s quest is instead guided by his focus on restoring his father (and, by extension, the entire realm) to health. Maybe the Hero’s Journey isn’t just all about me… It’s a cycle of departure, tests and ordeals, a realization of some kind. It may be great. It may be little. But it gives you the sense of realization. And then the return with your realization to the society that you left and somehow contributing to it. That’s the elixir boon. (ZBS Media Interview with Joseph Campbell, 1971, emphasis mine) That doesn’t necessarily mean you come back to the exact same circumstances and relationships. I think of fairy tales where a youngest son of a king leaves his father’s kingdom and experiences a series of adventures that culminate in marrying a princess in another kingdom, where together they rule in peace and prosperity—slightly different setting, but same vibe as where he started. Asked whether you “go home,” Campbell responds, The world you come back to is the one you left; otherwise, the journey isn’t complete. . . It may not be exactly the same locus, the same village, the same town, but you might say it’s the same career. You are coming back to your life. (Joseph Campbell, Archive Audio L1185, "EXPLORATIONS: Aim of the Hero’s Journey," Esalen, Big Sur, CA 11/8/83 What boon did Joseph Campbell bring back from his own hero’s journey—and with what community did he share it? We can find a sampling in JCF’s July book selection, Correspondence: 1927 – 1987, as Evans Lansing Smith observes in his introduction to this collection of Campbell’s exchanges: The letters that were written to and about Joseph Campbell . . . come from an astonishing diversity of individuals who were touched and inspired by his books and lectures. This remarkable web of correspondents extends well beyond the halls of academia. It shows how widely influential Campbell’s work was, inspiring creative endeavors and subtle shifts in many people’s lives. What about your community? On whose behalf do you quest?

From Correspondence: 1927 – 1987 (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell): [Barbara Morgan (July 8, 1900 – August 17, 1992) was an American photographer best known for her depictions of modern dancers. She was a cofounder of the photography magazine ‘Aperture.’] Barbara Morgan Studio High Point Road Scarsdale, New York Post-Valentine’s Day, 1968 Dear Jean & Joe: Since I had to vanish from the Van Waveren’s party for you – in order to get my Volkswagen over the tundra to Scarsdale before the werewolves entered my empty house – I didn’t get to finally say what a superb totality it was in all its complexity made understandable – your lecture series. And I also wanted to tell you partly for fun and partly for real – the following – my photographer reflexes make me always both consciously and unconsciously watch other people’s gestures (even when I have no intention of doing so), reflexes, shifts of mood, etc. – and so by the next-to-last-evening I suddenly realized that your ‘gestural aggregate’ (so to speak) meant for me – at least two things – That you are first of all a reincarnated Bard and/or Shaman – and that only – Secondly, you are a contemporary scholar. When you would pause in your discussion to quote or chant – an entirely different psyche took over. There was an inner glee – a magnetic something – your own individuality happily slid into another collective – ancient – embracing – psyche. It was like a snake casting off old skin and you glowed anew with security of speaking for the Eternal. (And there was a special gleam for the demonic). Then – chanting over – you took up the duties of logical thought as a 20th Century man, inheritor of our rat race traumas & trajectories from the past – seeking inner logic & harmony for mankind’s future. But then here came the next realization – these two phases were ‘integrated’ and slid back & forth like gears in a Cadillac. But, for me, that more primordial element will henceforth be ‘there,’ the genuine Joe, from which all springs no matter how many PHD’S. I f we were together I would laugh at this point – so you can take it or leave it. […] Well – I’ll leave you in peace – I’m in bed with this flu ‘bug’ – hence these flights of fancy –Again – thanks –Love – Barbara Figuratively speaking, we are all at Van Waveren’s party, at least for much of the time. The party posture—any party posture—bears unspoken behavioral mores, accepted mannerisms, and maneuvers: “reflexes,” “shifts of mood, ” a “gestural aggregate.” But occasionally we step out of the party’s script. We become something other: a self that lives and speaks out of a deeper authenticity and authority. Perhaps this deeper Self connects to a primordial, even eternal Psyche. If we are sufficiently conscious and skilled, we might observe the party members at play. Rather than mere voyeurism, this observing can be of healthy interest when asking ourselves, “What are the embedded gestures and response patterns that control me in this and similar situations? What are my habitual trigger reactions? Through what persona veils do I peer? And what costumes do I wear? Am I longing to press my ego onto the collective soul of the party? And why exactly do I want to impress? Is it insecurity? A consuming need to belong? Competitive egotism?” I feel that deep down we all want to be at one with ourselves, others, and the universe. This means that we not only want to belong... but we also want to become. We want to journey towards a deeper Ground, where our essential Identity resides, even if this journey demands that we exist and walk along an unscripted path. But the deeper Ground is bare. At its deepest, it’s utterly naked, undisguised and without elaboration. Given this, it’s best to seek this condition along all stages of travel, with the mirror of objectivity by our side—the mirror by which we may more reliably observe our progress. The great religious texts have pointed to the necessity of encountering our hidden nakedness—the concealed, aspirational, unadulterated Self, whether this Self be a mighty Primal archetype or sensed as a simple, vulnerable babe. “[...] For there is nothing covered that will not be revealed, and hidden that will not be known.” (Words from the “Gospel of Matthew.”) We may employ these words in respect to the path of Individuation. While on the path towards Individuation, personas (and pretensions) are gradually stripped away. This is a journey towards the Awakening and Actualization of the Self. And paradoxically (or so it may seem at first), when the individual has become fully Individuated, they take on many faces and expressions as this Individuated Self responds to every new encounter. Then being and becoming are completely present and responsive to the living request of the moment. The lengthy preamble above prompts us to consider how we may meet and speak to each other (and to the larger society) in ways that engender a more rounded perspective and greater capacity for empowerment. In this we become mindful of how we are fashioning ourselves in the world. Can we find—and engage—with that bedrock of ourselves, that aspect that endures? And, when required, move beyond the familiar social prescriptions and identity frames? Self-observation is to be joined with the desire to cultivate an open, receptive heart. When a presenter or writer shares something genuine from the heart about their own life’s journey, the offering arises from within the soul’s steadier depths. In parallel, it’s also helpful to develop some ability to speak and write imaginatively with word pictures, similes, metaphors and the like. Also required is an artistic sensitivity, so that we may adjust our message intuitively according to what, in the moment, seems most soul-alive in the people whom we’re addressing. With practice this may be done without compromising academic content or intellectual rigor. Inevitably in this porous process, we expose something of our nakedness and vulnerabilities. As we intentionally present ourselves to others, we signal that we are on a journey where our body of knowledge and personal understanding have not arrived at finality. Hans Christian Andersen’s folktale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” may instruct us. The innocent, unscripted child can be viewed as the envoy of the emerging, larger Self. This child can see beyond the pretense and the deceptions: “But he has nothing on at all!” Unlike the Emperor in the folktale, deep down we are all true Emperors. But what costumes at the party, if any, are we wearing?

When I was in graduate school studying mythology, I volunteered in the archives that housed Joseph Campbell’s papers. My job was to create high-resolution scans of Campbell’s personal photos—baby pictures, childhood, youth, adulthood, snapshots from his later years. Sitting at a workstation in that windowless basement office, I positioned each piece of paper on the glass face of the scanner, clicked the Scan button, then zoomed way in on the digital file to make sure to capture clean edges of the original. I often found myself staring at those close-up images, captivated by the eyes of the people in the scenes. My impression of Campbell himself changed as I worked. He became less of a disembodied voice on the page, and more of a real, actual person who seemed to have lived intensely and intentionally. Campbell’s book, Correspondence: 1927 – 1987, includes a letter he wrote to the artist Angela Gregory in 1928, when he was twenty-four years old. He writes: I know that the constant drumming of things around one can upset the pulse of one’s heart. But after all it’s inside our own hearts that beauty reposes. Pleasures and pains affect the body; and if our dreamings have never released our souls, then pleasures and pains will upset our mental and emotional tranquility. Aggravations and disappointments—and even a certain blankness can help the soul to grow in understanding, once the soul has learned to feed upon whatever comes its way. (13) I can picture the passion in his young face as he composed these words. I can hear the urgency that would drive his voice if he were to speak them out loud. If our dreamings have never released our souls—he's talking about loosening the tendency to over-identify with the trappings of our lives, our religions and belief systems, desires, political ideas, relationships, and even our bodies, and mistake them for who we really are. The alternative to letting those dreamings hold our souls captive, he suggests, is to release our souls not from our ideas about life, but from confusing them with our ideas about life. To grant our souls the freedom to observe our experiences the same way Campbell demonstrates how to observe myth—staying alert for truth and beauty. Further down the page he completes the thought: When we shall have lived this intensely we should have truth in our hearts and beauty—then our work will be great because we shall be great ourselves. Living intensely. Living wide awake, with our souls free and released. These are aspirational ideas, no doubt, but Campbell seems to have done a reasonable job of it, releasing his soul from identification with his dreamings, living intensely in the direction of truth and beauty, doing great work. This is one of the boons that Campbell found on the journey of his own life, and he brought it back to share with us, his community: not only his work itself, but also his wayof working. He showed us that aspirations like these are within reach. This boon also opens the possibility of communities that support their members living intensely and doing great work. For what is a community if not an aggregate of individuals, and what is an individual if not a representative of their community? The souls of individuals affect the community, and the soul of the community affects individuals. This dialectic is fundamental to creative work. Creative people, like Joseph Campbell and Angela Gregory, continually move back and forth between their communities and their individual imaginations to generate images and ideas, bring them into being, and share them. I see this pattern play out again and again in the community of mythologists—a community that owes so much to Campbell’s contributions. So perhaps we might be permitted to imagine a revision of Campbell’s reflections to Angela Gregory, this time as a message to his extended community: I know that the constant drumming of things around us can upset the pulse of our hearts. But after all it’s inside our own hearts that beauty reposes. Pleasures and pains affect us all; and if our collective dreamings have never released our community’s soul, then pleasures and pains will upset the community’s mental and emotional tranquility. Aggravations and disappointments—and even a certain blankness can help the community’s soul to grow in understanding…When the community shall have lived this intensely, the community will have truth in its heart and beauty—then our work will be great because we shall be great. And isn’t myth itself intense? Its outsized imagery, its larger-than-life deities and heroes, its clashings and collaborations among characters who represent the great powers of Earth and cosmos? Myths are collective dreamings of Earth’s human communities, and so they represent a perfect practice ground for zooming in on their images and ideas, freeing our souls from identifying with those ideas, and thereby cultivating truth and beauty in our own creative hearts. How might a community release its soul from false beliefs, dis-identifying from myths that cause misery and harm? How can a community enter more fully into the realm of truth, beauty, and creativity?

When I lived on a mesa in northern New Mexico, one summer night I left every window open so the starlit, indigo air could cool the house after a long, hot day. It seemed like I had barely fallen asleep when a shrill, continuous shrieking woke me so fast that I was up and out of bed before my eyes opened all the way. That otherworldly screaming swirled around me like auditory sparks in the gray pre-dawn light. I dashed to the bedroom window. Outside, not ten feet away, sat a coyote, letting loose with a piercing kai-yai-yai, but the sound encircled me, like it came from inside the house as well as the bedroom window. Wide awake now, I raced to the kitchen. Another coyote kai-yai-ed outside that window, too. All around the house—north, south, east, west—coyotes had surrounded the walls to voice their spine-tingling cry. So much sound from those small bodies! The song flared on and on through the open windows, filling the rooms from floor to ceiling. Breathless, I hovered by the back patio door facing east to listen and watch the coyote who sat there. One coyote among many, yes, but also Coyote, an archetypal field of energy, a flame of the soul whose flickering, shifting shape can represent a larger pattern often called the Trickster. In his book Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell introduces tricksters from many cultures and eras, as is his way, in traditions that range from Indigeneity to Christianity. Campbell hypothesizes that Trickster was the primary figure of myth in the Paleolithic age, creating the world and bringing fire to the people (273-76). Here we can read “world” and “fire” as metaphors for culture, but we can also read them as psychological images. Trickster can return to us our inner flame, the sparks that sometimes sputter somewhere along the way, the embers of our own personal creativity and world-making. In New Mexico, I often saw coyotes loping along sidewalks, trails, and suburban lawns, thriving at the edges of human civilization. Wiry bundles of cunning and energy, snouts always pointing toward new possibilities, they ate everything from beetles to garbage to pets. The Trickster’s amorality means they can never integrate into society. Instead, they represent the perpetual stranger who exists outside the known order. But isn’t it so often the stranger who shakes up our moribund routines? Who reminds us to stay alert? Who ignites new ideas? We tell stories of Trickster to talk about the fires of life as they exist outside our rules, precisely so we can change those rules when we need to. Trickster fires can burn, but they can also turn food into feasts and thaw frozen hearts. ~ When the coyotes finished their song, they moved away from my east-facing patio. Reunited, the pack paused together in the morning twilight. Now I could see all five of them. One sat down and rested a furry chin on the back of another who was still standing. Together, they gazed across the valley toward the mountains in the distance. They waited. And waited. And then the sun came up over that ridge, right where they were looking. The valley filled with golden light that limned juniper trees and yucca plants and coyote coats with liquid marigold brilliance. Then the coyotes trotted off down the mesa together. The morning still quivered with their jubilant song. Their placid companionship. Their witnessing presence at the sacred birth of a new dawn, unlike any other that had happened before or would happen again. Coyote called that day into being and woke me so we could watch it together. We are not alone. We are companioned by beings other than humans, by forces that sing and shape our shared experience. Why did Coyote sing so loudly that summer morning? Well, why not? Why not set aside self-doubt and self-consciousness? Why not sing with everything you have and everything you are, as though summoning the sun’s fire to earth? Why not create, and then be still, to watch the magic of a new day roll over the horizon?

Stories of heroes and their exploits occupy an important place in the collective imagination. The hero leaves the familiar, struggles through the dreaded dark night of the soul, and emerges as savior, role model, leader, and teacher. Heroes, mortal and mythic, embody the ideals and aspirations of the community. They are a source of shared meanings and cultural identity, and their deeds symbolize new possibilities that lie beyond the horizon of their present circumstance. It's all pretty grand, and I'm often moved, thrilled, and inspired by hero myths. But the hero's adventure doesn't speak to my hopes of fulfillment. I have difficulty getting past the machismo and violence, the honor earned at the expense of the innocent, the language of winners and losers, and the emphasis on the extraordinary and the superlative—qualities of life that feel so far from my everyday existence, and far from my quest to find the wonder here and now in my ordinary life, and approach the ups and downs with equanimity. When I turn to myth for guidance, I don’t seek the heroes. I usually turn to the trickster. Tricksters appear in mythological traditions around the world, in a variety of forms. The trickster may be a coyote, a spider, a fox, or a rabbit. Sometimes Trickster is a sly old man or a precocious baby. Tricksters may be charming, clever, boorish, or brutal, and they play tricks. Usually driven by a prodigious appetite for food, sex, or personal acclaim, the trickster is an opportunist who plays all the angles. She lies, steals, and shape-shifts; she commits adultery and murder. Tricksters will do whatever it takes to succeed and yet fail miserably more often than not. The mutability and moral ambiguity of the trickster is puzzling. In Primitive Mythology, Campbell says that the trickster is the principle of chaos and disorder, and yet in Paleolithic times, he observes, the trickster was "the archetype of the hero, the giver of all great boons—the fire bringer and the teacher of mankind." (252) According to Campbell, the trickster is a kind of shaman who moves between the material and spirit worlds. Campbell highlights myths of the theft of fire, a rare success in the large catalog of tricksters’ setbacks and failures, and points to the figure of the Greek Titan, Prometheus, in particular. Prometheus defied the mandate of Zeus and stole fire for humankind. In return, Zeus exacted a terrible punishment: Prometheus was chained to a rock and an eagle came every day to eat his liver. But perhaps there was a point to the Titan’s suffering. Campbell reminds us that "it is man that has created the gods [...] for as Prometheus knows, there is a prophecy that one day his chains will fall away by themselves and the world-eon of Zeus dissolve." (257) The tension between an established social order and the self-determining individual, guided by an inner authority, is central to Campbell's heroic ideal. But a defining characteristic of the trickster is his lack of self-awareness and the complete absence of reflection. He is driven by appetites. Prometheus plays a trick on Zeus and steals fire, but does he display the trickster temperament? In Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, Lewis Hyde suggests that Prometheus, whose name means "foresight," is actually not a trickster unless he is joined with his brother Epimetheus, who is short sighted and stupid. (355) The myths of a fully developed trickster figure like the Native American Coyote, for example, reveal an ingenuous and creative culture hero who is also a laughable fool. Or maybe he is a laughable fool who is also an ingenuous and creative culture hero. The trickster is the exemplar of the contradictions and moral complexity inherent in the heroic, and every other sphere of human life. His escapades also highlight the important role that chance, accidents, and luck play in life.  Native American scholar Vine Deloria Jr. writes: "[...] many Indian people believe that the trickster figure primarily represents the arbitrary side of natural events, those often near-coincidental happenings that demonstrate the fickle side of an individual's fate, the ironic unpredictable situations that arise in spite of ourselves." (C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions, 27) Many of the events in trickster myths are obscene or nonsensical. Coyote accidentally cuts off one of his own hands or arms, for example, and then argues with the severed limb and berates it for its recalcitrance. He learns to throw his eyeballs up into a tree, where they can see for miles. This power comes with some rules that Coyote disregards, and he stumbles blindly home with empty eye sockets, only to discover that his family has moved away out of shame. Coyote eats a sweet-tasting root with laxative properties, but the root tastes so good that he doesn't want to stop eating. "I can handle it," he decides, and ends up in a pile of his own excrement after defecating so long and hard it almost kills him. Somehow, parallels to my own behavior are not hard to find. Coyote helps me reflect on the difference between healthy persistence and bullheadedness, self-confidence and grandiosity, about the need to look at situations from more than one vantage point. I think about my compulsions and rationalizations—and the times I've ended up in a metaphorical pile of…well, you know. And more than once. Sometimes a blind spot opens up to fresh insight. Sometimes even the notions of success and failure collapse, allowing me a glimpse of something beyond that opposition. I find stories of tricksters like Coyote memorable and instructive, something like koans. They're also funny. The irony and earthy humor of the trickster help me return to the present moment where I rediscover the power of humor in the face of disaster. The healing release in a laugh and the recentering perspective that comes on its heels, and the strength one finds in surrendering to the absurdity of our human situation with a smile.  Old Man Coyote reminds me that my time in this beautiful world is short; that life is serious play.  “If you must have a goal," he tells me, "aim to be a master of opportunity." Then he grins and lifts his tail high in the air. “For now the ground beneath you is solid,” he says, “so why not dance?”

“The axiom is worth recalling here, because mythology was historically the mother of the arts and yet, like so many mythological mothers, the daughter, equally, of her own birth. Mythology is not invented rationally; mythology cannot be rationally understood. Theological interpreters render it ridiculous. Literary criticism reduces it to metaphor,” writes Joseph Campbell in The Masks of God™ Volume 1: Primitive Mythology (42). There is certainly something intriguing about myths, even for the purely secular reader or commentator. Also fascinating is their durability and perenniality. It seems that myths survive in oral and written forms because there’s an aspect within them that resonates with us at a soul level, a level deeper than our own words, thinking, or conscious experience. Myths—true, profound myths, not mere confected arrangements—reside as archetypes within our psyche’s foundation. They abide there either latently or with animation. Either way, they form (and inform) who we are. So they are not mere narratives or cultural-societal inventions, but rather bearers of truth about our essential humanity. And if we are inwardly awake and perceptive, we may observe how the personal, folk-soul, and universal myths are at play within us, and how they relate to the zeitgeist, which breathes around and through us. In Primitive Mythology Campbell also addresses the topic of suffering. Often in my MythBlasts I take up the theme that the interior journey towards transformation, self-discovery, and enlightenment is often accompanied by intense suffering, and indeed at times, even agony. Campbell states: Suffering itself is a deception (upādhi); for its core is rapture, which is the attribute (upādhi) of illumination. The imprint of the rapture enclosed in suffering, then, is the foremost "grave and constant" of our science. Compassed in the life wisdom of perhaps but a minority of the human race, it has nevertheless been the matrix and final term of all the mythologies of the world, yielding its radiance to the whole festival of those lesser upādhis—or imprints—to which we now must turn. (57) Among their many missions, myths move us from a narrow vista or perception of ourselves (and the world) towards a more rounded vision and awareness. And specific myths can help us to find meaning in our trials and tribulations. They illustrate patterns imprinted into the core reality of the soul, and yes, often with the cost of suffering. So in this sense, suffering is a given. A rugged necessity in the process of our development. Suffering shouldn’t be pathologized or viewed as wrong. And in a lofty sense, the ordeal is to be welcomed, embraced—loved, even—because we really only get to know the quiddity of ourselves through the transmutational crises that we’ve endured; not through all the times spent on the figurative “Cruisy Street” sipping piña coladas or the like. Specific myths mirror our struggles back to us and connect us to something greater than ourselves. We could even say that they realign our somewhat restrictive and mundane selves to our larger Soul-Selves. Myths help us to embrace a multi-dimensional perception of ourselves by making the invisible and unconscious stories that we tell ourselves visible and conscious. But on the other hand, these myths may also expose some of our personal narratives, which are false and soul-disabling. In this process of inner transformation we’re tempered. Tempered by the challenges, which life throws our way. And whether we meet these challenges well or poorly, we come to learn something more of our own nature. There comes with this experience a forging—a rhizome strengthening—and a deeper trust in that which is greater than our prosaic, everyday lives. We can also support ourselves along this transformative path by getting into the habit of asking what is sacred about the very moment that we find ourselves in. What is the deepest message that may be disclosed to us at this particular juncture in time? Just as many folk songs are encoded with philosophical wisdom layering, we too may weave and marry the poetic and mythic into our lives, even into its supposedly more pedestrian aspects. And this is one way in which we dream the ancient wisdom forward to inform the present. Yes, myths are timeless and transcendent, but when we don’t consciously invite them into our lives, we are prone to live them out unconsciously and compulsively, and therefore, sometimes quite destructively. The more we resist the presence and power of myths, the more their archetypal patterns push upon us. And so they must be recognized. When we can perceive (or at least intuit) the mythologies that influence our lives, we realize that the mythic realm is mightier than our prideful common sense. Myths are oneiric manifestations of the unconscious, distillations of folk and universal truths, which is why we’re drawn to them; they enable us to observe what our psyche is up to. Then our actions can be understood within a wider context of meaning. These stories work on us, as much as we work the story. This two-way process illustrates the fact that there is a psychic center beyond our own. Interpreting our experiences merely through a personal, and therefore reductive lens, is the expression of a person who is unawakened. We deplete our imaginal forces by honoring only the literalness of life. And when this depletion occurs, it results in a kind of soul flatness. When our primary modality of interpretation involves a symbolic component, then the myths have the potentiality to reveal pathways out of situations that are causing us great anguish. That is, if we indeed have the courage to follow them. And if we let them, myths will lead us. Said another way, the gods and goddesses in the myths don’t just want to be read about, or talked about, or worshiped. They want to be lived. And they must sooner or later be lived for our own sanity, because in the most important analysis, they are us.

I am standing in a Hawaiian graveyard looking down at the final resting place of Joseph Campbell. My wife is in the car with our eleven-month-old grandson, waiting. Waiting for me to come to some sort of conclusion about why one of the greatest mythologists of the last two centuries is buried beneath a looming statue of unambiguous Christological intent: Beard, tunic, quote from Matthew 6:33. I, too, will probably be surrounded in death by such theologically familiar touches. But then, I am not Joseph Campbell. I am not the man who did more than any other since, oh, Aldous Huxley and his perennial philosophy, to utterly erase distinctions claimed by orthodoxy and exclusivist religious authorities, always showing how the publicly opposed actors upon the sacred stage are secretly united behind the scenes. Talk about blurred boundaries (our theme this month). We drove here because I googled “Joseph Campbell’s gravesite,” and there it was—five miles from our Airbnb. I don’t know what sort of epiphany I expected. You know what would have been a nice touch? Maybe a statue of a finger pointing to heaven reminding us, as Zen teachers are known to do, that we must not mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself.  Campbell put it this way: Religious expression is always metaphoric, it speaks in symbols that are only relevant when they are “transparent to transcendence.” So what did I expect? Signage. I’ve heard that there are placards indicating the route to Jim Morrison’s grave in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. I see none, so I locate the small office outside of the historical crematorium and seek guidance. The young man is friendly but businesslike as he consults some photocopies. He hands me one with a route outlined in yellow. He opens the door and points: Down to the lane, turn left, and from there, “follow your bliss.” He said that. As threshold guardians go, I’ll take this guy. I expected to find myself standing in a field charged with symbolic intentionality. I did not expect a garden variety garden. I did not expect Jesus. And I asked myself a question, or maybe I asked Joseph Campbell a question. What gives? In that moment, I saw intention. I saw myself transformed into one of Campbell’s favorite archetypes, Parsifal, him of the question that must be asked. Parsifal stood, not in a cemetery, but in its more kinetic cousin, the ritual. According to Chrétien de Troyes’ Le Conte du Graal, the lad had only to ask one question: Whom does the grail serve? Or, in my translation, what gives? I asked and I was not disappointed. In life, Campbell surrounded himself with the symbols and signs from which he drew the conclusion that the boundaries between faith traditions are always effaced in the pursuit of transcendence. In death, he was surrounded with another symbol set and it spoke just as loudly of a subject even closer to his heart—his capacity to love and to be loved. Not only does he share a space in a cremation garden with his beloved, Jean Erdman, his Iseult, his Eurydice, they lie within concentric rings of signification, each powerfully reinforcing the idea that this man is happily subsumed into a shared identity. This is not a Campbellian shrine, it’s the Erdman/Dillingham family plot, located not in Campbell’s Manhattan, but in Jean’s Oahu. Jean was Campbell’s student at Sarah Lawrence, but the idea that this represents a power differential is not borne out by subsequent chapters of their love affair in which her career as a globally recognized dancer and choreographer eclipsed his own nascent notoriety. These were binary stars, these two, as his placement in a small corner of her historical reality attests, one Campbell among three generations of Erdmans in the land where she grew up, “doing what we all do here, which is dance” (Hero’s Journey, p. 97).  “I never thought Joe would want to move to Hawaii, but here we are.” Indeed, here they are. In The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, their union is celebrated as mutually fructifying, not mutually exclusive. Near the end of World War II, Joe and Jean were staying in Nantucket where, in her words, “Joe was writing about the fifth version of The Hero with a Thousand Faces and I was deciding what the art of the dance really should be, right?” Campbell speaks lovingly of the first half of marriage as a time when the anima is in full flower, when the projection of the female from the mind of the male meets a sweet horizon in the youthful figure of grace that is the beloved. And he speaks lovingly of the second half of marriage, the “alchemical marriage” where the projections are slowly withdrawn to reveal an even more apposite pairing of two spirits. Jean lived to be 104, three decades after Campbell’s death, and is reunited here, in this Hawaiian haven, with the man who spent their first years “with [me] on one arm and Finnegan’s Wake on the other.” She dealt wisely with the sweet rivalry by turning James Joyce’s masterpiece into a dance. “My notion of marriage,” Campbell reflected, “is that if marriage isn’t a first priority in your life you’re not married” (Hero, p. 101). With this in mind, I suddenly remember I have left my own wife sitting in a car with my grandson. I snap out of my reverie and happily invite my little family to come join me. Here we go, Johnny. This is the grave of Joseph Campbell and his wife Jean Erdman. I point. My grandson is eleven months old. He does not look at the grave. He looks directly at my finger. Just my finger. Joseph Campbell would have loved it.

Who’s not intrigued by boundaries? The markers of where a thing ends and another begins. Or they can be approached as meeting places where distinct phenomena bump up against each other. Or they can simply be that all-too-familiar frontier that separates the known from the unknown. However one approaches them, boundaries present elements of distinction, interaction, mystery, and, of course, transformation, which is the name of the game when it comes to the journey.  But let’s begin by lifting some boundaries on boundaries—and do so in the spirit of opening the imaginal perspective. First, I propose we avoid approaching boundaries as mere lines, as abstract one-dimensional dividers set between things—like the line that divides Kansas from Nebraska. And similarly, that we avoid limiting them to two-dimensional planes, like the vertical plane that also divides Kansas from Nebraska (as in the kind one could reach a hand through, as opposed to the line one steps over). Sure, distinguishing and dividing are a boundary’s most obvious functions, but when confined to this level they remain, literally, one- or two-dimensional. And so, we must step up (or down, rather) into the depth that comes with a boundary possessing three spatial dimensions, into what Euclidean geometry terms a solid . This simple step cedes a spaciousness to the boundary (and to the inquiry)—which we can now call an environment or dimension. I suppose some may resist this direction—this insertion of volume into a thing (if it even is a tangible thing) that separates other, supposedly more “real” things of volume from each other. If there is resistance, consider a boundary possessing the “thickness” of, say, half an inch. One still may dive into that meager measurement and divide it into increments ad infinitum . So there’s plenty of space to work with, even in a “thin” boundary.  Also, to be clear, I am not claiming that boundaries are voluminous environments. How would I know? Rather, I’m imaginatively proposing the possibility—and do so with the knowledge that imagined premises, even if rationally incorrect, can yield truthful insights that otherwise would not have arisen. This phenomenon is reflected in mathematics by the aptly named “imaginary numbers,” whose base unit is the rationally (and mathematically) impossible square root of -1. Yet, from this impossibility, calculations of great practical value are accomplished.  As a final criterion, let’s add that a mythic boundary-space specializes in hosting liminal phenomena, these latter being the evanescent and incipient building and dissolution of specific images correlative to specific archetypal energies. Or, in strictly mythic terms, it is the space where the presence of the gods is temporarily revealed to the journeyer before they dissolve back into the Mystery.  And now, inhabiting the conjunction of boundaries, spaciousness, and liminality, we can really dive into it. And for this we will need a guide, the quintessential figure of myth that leads the journeyer not only over and through the boundaries, but who also, in fact, is the deity of journeys and of boundaries and of those who traverse them. We see this in Hermes, for instance, conducting passage for souls across the great boundaries of Olympus, Earth, and the underworld—and in whose honor travelers in Ancient Greece erected “herms” as sign-posts and boundary markers, and, of course, as totems of respect to this god of travelers. In short, the guide is an intermediary—a middle moment that introduces the beholder to the beyond, whether that beyond is over miles of geographical terrain or over the even longer miles that span the inner terrains of the psyche. The guide functions as messenger, liaison, psychopomp , and also embodies those highly personal inner-figures such as the Greek daimon , or as the poet’s muse , or the inner voice that Jung emphasized with some passion, or even as the conscience , as Herbert Silberer suggests, and names it a potential candidate (of many) for the legendary Philosopher’s Stone—an intriguing suggestion, indeed. And lastly, we encounter the intermediary figure between God (or the gods) and humanity quite overtly in, I believe, every religious tradition: Christ, Moses, Mohammad, Gabriel, Buddha, and so on, and on.  In The Hero with a Thousand Faces , Joseph Campbell reminds us that “[t]he higher mythologies develop the role in the great figure of the guide, the teacher, the ferryman, the conductor of souls to the afterworld. In classical myth this is Hermes-Mercury” (72). But Campbell also warns that “the dangerous aspect of the ‘mercurial’ figure is stressed…luring the innocent soul into realms of trial… to the peril of all our rational ends ” (72-73). I have emphasized with italics this last part of Campbell’s quote because I think it addresses a crucial aspect of what transpires within the boundaries, and that it tacitly suggests a necessity for the dissolution of “our rational ends” if we are to pass through the insulating assurance and dependability that rational knowledge renders. In practical life, the rational is king, no argument there. But in matters mystic and of the soul, I’ve seen it interfere as a protective “certainty” which, like a wall, keeps us safe from what is beyond, but does so at the expense of, well, keeping us from what is beyond. This is tricky business, I know. Joe once said something about mythic figures living in contemporary times, standing at the street-corner, waiting for the lights to change. I know with rational certainty (of the best sort!) that I need to look left and right before stepping out into traffic. And this is where the boundary gets blurred. But it’s not the boundary that blurs, nor the guide that inhabits it. Rather, I think it is the clear perception of the bewildering experience of the dissolution of our dependable, worldly foundations when we come to the threshold of the mysterium tremendum. Like the ego, in the great Eastern traditions, that last bastion of [my?] consciousness standing naked and alone at the gates of the Self.

“Individualism is perfectly fine if the individual realizes that the grandeur of his being is that of representing something. Even representing a system of ideals and images that the rest of the world and the environment doesn’t have; he still is the agent of something and he is a presence. But when the individual is acting only for himself or for his family or for his team, then you have nothing but chaos.” (Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey, 239) The above words remind us of the important distinction between egotism and egoity. Self-development, whether as individual enhancement or as the journey towards Individuation, must be in the service of something larger than oneself… for the wellbeing or advancement of others. These “others” include other human beings, sentient life generally, and the natural ecosystems of the Earth. If a person pursues self-development in a self-absorbed, indulgent way, turning inwards for the sake of their own personal holism alone, dysfunction and disorder will ensue—both within the psyche and in its surroundings. True individuality is embedded in, and responsive to, a community of things and events around it—societal, cultural, and Nature-natural. So given this, individualism—the lived principle of self-reliance and independence—is only maturely itself when the person has become the representative and bearer of truth for a purpose beyond that of their own immediate self-province and personal telos. However, even before we can address the call for such embedded individualism, the related theme of choice requires ruminating upon, especially the particular choices that we’ve made throughout our lives. Because when we’re focused solely on our own development, we tend towards critical comparisons rather than rounded holism. That’s why sometimes it can hurt beyond belief when we compare the choices that we’ve made regarding our own lives, with the choices others have made for theirs. Our perspective is so tight and restricted that it can feel like there’s an elephant sitting on our chest. But when we allow this heavy feeling of judgment, self-critique, and regret to seep through the pores of our bodies, we can ensoul the pain. By entertaining the pain consciously and purposefully, leaning and moving into the sorrows born of missteps, and then going deeper into the tightness and restriction, we’re presented with the opportunity to become what we’re fleeing from. Then, as a next step, we may find a way to process our inner pain. And a portal may open to the mysteries of the life of soul. But can this pain be ritualized? Campbell states about ritual, Just looking at it from a purely academic point of view, a ritual is an action that puts the individual not only in touch with, but in the place of, being the agent of a power that is not out of his intention at all. He has to submit to a power that’s greater than his own individual life-form.”(223) This is a profound truth. And it’s why our interior journey is often enhanced through a ritual of periodic submission to a presence and power that is greater than ourselves—a sacred presence and power that assists us when evoked. The idea of such a ritualized inner journey leads us to ask the most personal of questions, namely, “Where is the sacred thread of ritual in my life? Where is the self-guided emotional alchemy? And where is the vessel to contain the shattering?” The latter question is crucial because venturing into the psyche’s unknown depths comes with a demanding cost. The purpose of ritual is to invite the presence of the sacred into our lives and to dwell with it (even if only occasionally). To appreciate this sacredness— meaning here the reverent human life and all that is holy, both within and around us—we can’t rush rituals. A slow birthing path is to be traveled. This is because, as Campbell reminds us, “The whole idea is that you’ve got to bring out again that which you went to recover, the unrealized, unutilized potential in yourself.” (223) And as many of us know, and have learnt from grueling experience, this isn’t achieved through an instant, quick fix, weekend seminar version of transformation. Usually it’s painfully slow, and in fact at times, an incredibly arduous, inner odyssey, one that doesn’t align with western culture’s present expectation of Amazon Prime delivery speed. In relation to the “unrealized, unutilized potential” in ourselves, perhaps it could be said that within the intimate interiority of the human being, there is also the nucleus of the macro cosmic divine—at least as a holy potential waiting for our recognition and cultivation. In this regard, we could borrow the biblical text: “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are gods?’” (Gospel of John, chapter 10, verse 34) Or at least, in the fullness of time, we might so eventually become. We must lose who we’ve once been so that we can give birth to who Life wants us to become. The old restricting identity patterns are to be dissolved away, or rather: they are to be transmuted into higher states of themselves. Rituals assist in this adventure because they help us surrender our critical self-judgments, sense of powerlessness, and idolatrous notions of self-perfection. Through such rituals, we do indeed lose ourselves to become ourselves. It’s a continuous and progressing process. I will finish with the following thoughts: We don’t single-handedly design reality. In a sense, we show up for it. And when we’re out of alignment with the cosmic powers of the universe, which of course are within us too, we begin grasping for the false, shadow power of the wounded ego. Rituals remind us to dismiss the lure to identify with the spurious, transient powers within or outside of us. Then we can journey towards the eternal, inner power—the power of our sacred selves. In this way we may align and integrate, not detach and fracture. We unite with ourselves by melding our disparate parts. And we quit giving allegiance to what has too much egoistical authority over us.

Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.William Blake, Proverbs of HellThe madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy) It turns out that all boundaries are blurry, but humans like straight lines and clear boundaries. We’re taught—shoot, we’re conditioned—to look for sharp clarity even in the muddiest places.  Remember this? “Don’t you get out of line, mister!” That thing? Eliminating ambiguity, un-blurring the lines, is damned useful, but there’s a downside: real life is never precise and neither is the world we live in. Still, there’s a powerful temptation to believe that the search for clarity must always trump the muddy experience of real life. I’d like to suggest that this can make you crazy. Like this: Aristotle noticed that carpenters and mathematicians have entirely different interests in triangles. Looks innocent enough, right? On the perfectly-clear side, you can know a lot about triangles. For instance, you can know that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Clearly. If you're a mathematician. But what if you're a carpenter? Carpenters make triangles all the time, but they know that no triangle, in the physical world, can ever be a perfect, mathematically precise triangle. You cannot cut perfectly straight lines with a circular saw… or even a laser. Amusingly enough, this blurred boundary between mathematics and carpentry drove the Pythagoreans crazy. Think about it: if I get some plywood and cut out a right triangle, two sides of which have a length of 1 foot, say, that would mean the length of the hypotenuse would, mathematically speaking, be the square root of 2. Now, since the square root of 2 is an irrational number that goes on forever, you’d have to ask yourself whether that edge of the plywood goes on forever. It doesn’t, of course. Weird to think about, though... All you can do is—and here’s the punchline—get close enough. Embrace the blur between theory and practice. In the real world, getting close enough works out fine. Triangles, and everything we can know about them, are terrifically handy when it comes to building things in the physical world, but any expectation that the world can provide theoretically, mathematically perfect triangles will, over time, make you crazy. So what’s the mythological hypotenuse here? The hero's journey, Campbell’s monomyth, is a theoretical structure based on the data he had available—primarily the works of Heinrich Zimmer and the ton of reading he did during his days up at Woodstock. It’s a terrifically useful way to understand structures in the real world (in your own life, for instance) but, like that plywood, can we expect that our lives will fit his theoretical model perfectly? That’s the blurred boundary between Campbell's theoretical model and the lived experience it can help clarify. But again, there’s a danger of letting the craving for clarity drive us crazy. When we lose track of that blurred character, theories become ideology—a set of totalitarian prescriptions. Campbell saw this clearly. The difference between an ideology and a mythology is the difference between the ego and the self: ideology comes from the thinking system and mythology comes from the being. (The Hero’s Journey, 266) Every once in a while you run across a fan of Campbell or, ahem, an academic somewhere who treats the hero’s journey as ideology, but the hero’s journey is itself a metaphor and, remembering one of Campbell’s favorite observations, it’s easy to get stuck on the metaphor.  When you do that, you lose the meaning. Now one way you can tell that you’ve gotten stuck on a metaphor, or reduced it to ideology, is to notice that it’ll begin to display weird contradictions. Let's take Campbell’s wonderful story about the tiger raised by goats who one day discovers he’s really a tiger. The moral of the story is that we're all tigers but we think we're goats. This is a wonderful way to understand the discontinuities in life, to explain the blurred boundaries between who we think we might be, who we might still be without knowing it yet, and who we turn out to be in real life. But if you turn the metaphor into some kind of theorem (like Pythagoras’s), the clear lines suddenly become sharp enough to cut itself to pieces: I mean, if we’re all tigers, there wouldn't be anything to eat. No more goats. Taken as mere theory, the myth becomes problematic. That's one indication that a theoretical model is beginning to rub up against reality. There’s another blurred boundary here between what Campbell called your “tiger-face” and the face you show the world. When al-Hallaj or Jesus let the orthodox community know that they were tigers, they were crucified. And so the Sufis learned the lesson at that time with the death of al-Hallaj, around a.d. 900. And it is: You wear the outer garment of the law; you behave like everyone else. And you wear the inner garment of the mystic way. Now that’s the great secret of life. (The Hero’s Journey, 271). The attempt to make boundaries utterly clear and concise lands you in trouble or, if you push it, can even get you crucified. Hitting a boundary layer like this is a reminder to treat the myths as relational narratives and not algorithms, as signs pointing beyond themselves and not as maps, as useful suggestions waiting for your own experiences to validate them and not as adamantine dogma, the fossilization of thought. As frustrating as this can be, it’s a sign of mental health.  Embracing the blurry boundaries in life turns out to be required for an authentic life, one that depends on recognizing the relative truths provided by clarity and ambiguity and how, across a blurred boundary, theory and practice can inform one another. Pretty geeky stuff this week! But thanks for musing along.