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.

This month in the MythBlast Series, we’re exploring the relationship of blurred boundaries to heroism. Anyone who has ever been in psychotherapy is likely to be familiar with the no-nonsense injunction to have clear, defined boundaries, to prevent others from “invading” or ignoring your boundaries. The idea is that those solid, clearly defined boundaries are the key to a mentally healthy life. Indisputably, when it comes to emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, creating good boundaries are a necessary (but not solely sufficient) step in stopping abuse, as well as the prevention of further abuse. But I’d like to bracket serious pathological issues such as abuse, setting them aside for the moment, and instead explore boundaries from a less dire perspective. Encountering boundaries is an inescapable feature of being human, and we should remember that boundaries are not simply human creations. Geologic features create boundaries: mountains, seas, and forests have all at one time or another been regarded as boundaries. Time, space, mind, and body are organically connected to boundaries. The very existence of nations, states, and municipalities are predicated upon boundaries. Perhaps the most interesting are the boundaries between inner and outer, and those are the boundaries I want to work with in this essay. In her remarkable novel The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch wrote that “being a real person oneself is a matter of setting up limits and drawing lines and saying no. I don't want to be a nebulous bit of ectoplasm straying around in other people's lives.” Like Murdoch’s character, Bradley (one must appreciate the irony), we want to be able to imagine ourselves as single and singular individuals. We want to believe that if the limits are clear enough and the lines drawn are incisively and bold enough, we can prevent others, and even the world, from “straying around” in our own lives. We’d like to think that boundaries are mostly unambiguous, self-evident, and inevitable. And yes, they certainly contribute order and clarity to the living of life, but we can’t escape from the messiness, the straying around in, and the sordidness of life to enter into a discrete, ordered, well-bounded life with aspirations to an undisturbed hermetic existence—nor should we want to. I can’t help but wonder if we would benefit from less reliance on boundaries and let ourselves sink a bit more into the disarray and blurriness of life. Boundaries are ambiguous; what’s inside and what’s outside depends upon which side one’s perception lies. So, it follows that one culture’s hero is another’s terrorist, one’s treasure is another’s trash. Additionally, where there are boundaries there are defenses, and again, depending upon where one is positioned and the better those defenses work, the more easily they can become self-imposed prisons. For Joseph Campbell, the hero’s adventure was all about moving beyond boundaries, and the primary mise en scene for the hero’s adventure is found within one’s own inner world. It seems that the inner world, particularly the unconscious, simply demands blurring movements among, across, and around boundaries. This is perhaps why, in the mythless, unheroic age of contemporary life, Campbell emphasizes that the Hero’s journey is primarily an inner one, and the boon achieved is that of an expanded consciousness. In his introduction to The Hero’s Journey, Phil Cousineau put it this way: As a mythologist with a metaphysical slant on life, a doctor of things-beyond-appearances, [Campbell] dedicated his life to mapping out the experience of plumbing those depths, which is the journey of the soul itself. The cartography, as he drew it, was the geography of the inner or underworld, showing perilous territory to be traversed not by the faint, but by the stout of heart. If myths emerge, like dreams out of the psyche, he reasoned, they can also lead us back in. The way out is the way in. It is a movement beyond the known boundaries of faith and convention, the search for what matters, the path of destiny, the route of individuality, the road of original experience, a paradigm for the forging of consciousness itself: in short, the hero’s journey. (xxiv) William Blake insisted that there is the known and the unknown, and in between them, there are doors. I would suggest that myths are the doors between the known and the unknown, and serve to make such boundaries as the known and the unknown blurred and permeable. Myth is perpetually blurring boundaries, and I would argue that the singular quality of myth is its ability to do just that. Myth constantly smudges the edges of ourselves and the world, it blurs boundaries between the material and the immaterial, between gods and humans, between past, present, and future, between ethics and morals, and between emotion and catastrophe. Myth peregrinates through all these and more, leaving one to conclude that the body of myth is itself a unifying symbol. As C.G. Jung wrote, a unifying symbol is: […]running its course in the unconscious of modern man. Between the opposites there arises spontaneously a symbol of unity and wholeness, no matter whether it reaches consciousness or not. Should something extraordinary or impressive then occur in the outside world, be it a human personality, a thing, or an idea, the unconscious content can project itself upon it, thereby investing the projection carrier with numinous and mythical powers.(Civilization in Transition, Vol 10 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung) Myth, because it exists and functions between opposites, becomes an important point of entry, not just to imagination and the unconscious, but to the discovery of the capacity and potential of the human being. But mythology can assume this function only if we cease to understand myth as a relic, as a curiosity, a just so story, a religion, or any other clearly defined, bounded concept; to the contrary, it moves in and through and around life, disclosing that Will ‘O the Wisp quality of the vital spark, the élan vital. Mythology is not merely a museum-like repository of normative or once-orthodox narratives. Mythology is the final destination of singular thought and experience; the sublimely confounding creations that cannot be repeated, and which are diminished by attempts at replication. That’s why when we read myth, it matters little from where the myths come nor their historical context, we never fail to be moved by them. Thanks for reading,

In this MythBlast, I want to contrast the words of the dancer Isadora Duncan (as quoted by Joseph Campbell in The Ecstasy of Being) with my own thoughts on rhythm. Rhythm in art and in the art of life is essential. Rhythm imprints its patterns into our body, mind, and very souls. This incorporation builds strength and resilience in ways that our everyday cortex awareness is never able to fully grasp. And if it does detect these imprinted patterns, it rarely appreciates them. Rather, our left brain’s general default tendency is to judge, compare, and doubt their worth. When I was fifteen years old and I realized that there was no teacher in the world who could give me any help in my desire to be a dancer, because at that time the only school that existed was the ballet, I turned, as I had noticed all other artists except dancers do, to the study of nature. [109] On all levels, long and protracted arrhythmic conditions are life-destructive. Rhythm, in all its various manifestations, is one of the most healing forces on the planet. It’s why when we’re anxious, we’ll also often feel “off beat.” And almost everything that we say out of our mouths will come out at the inappropriate time, even if what we’re saying is valid. Put simply, we are “out of sync” with ourselves and our surroundings. So being in rhythm—in body, mind, and soul—conduces an alignment both within ourselves and our wider world. We feel centered and settled, at home in ourselves and in the world. Woman is not a thing apart and separate from all other life, organic and inorganic. She is but a link in a chain, and her movement must be one with the great movement which runs through the universe; and therefore the fountain-head for the art of the dance will be the study of the movements of Nature. (109) And when we center ourselves in nature’s rhythms, we’re afforded some immunity from the incessant, unsolicited noise and friction that presses upon us from the outside world. To be centered in these rhythms provides us with the space to rest more comfortably in our own true nature, without the threat of violation, and we can enjoy the bliss of our own harmonics. When we’re aware of the rhythms of the universe, we may also recognize that even awareness itself is a lemniscate of unbroken exchanges between our interior rhythms, and those of our outer lives, which contain invariable encounters and duties. We also better sense how life calls forth different experiences at different times. For example, certain flowers in a garden will bloom first, or the fruits of one tree will ripen before the fruits of another, and so we too will also meet people who are naturally late—or early—bloomers. We ought not to hurry beyond our natural pace, nor hurry the pace of the natural world, which has its own patterned rhythms. For the last four months, each day I have stood before this miracle of perfection (the Parthenon) wrought of human hands. I have seen around it sloping the Hills, in many forms, but in direct contrast to them the Parthenon, expressing their fundamental idea. Not in imitation of the outside forms of nature, but in understanding of nature’s great secret rules, rise the Doric columns. The first days as I stood there my body was as nothing and my soul was scattered; but gradually called by the great inner voice of the Temple, came back the parts of myself to worship it: first came my soul and looked upon the Doric columns, and then came my body and looked – but in both were silence and stillness, and I did not dare to move, for I realized that of all the movements my body had made none was worthy to be made before a Doric Temple. And as I stood thus I realized that I must find a dance whose effort was to be worthy of this Temple—or never dance again. Neither Satyr nor Nymph had entered here, neither Shadows nor Bacchantes. All that I had danced was forbidden in this Temple—neither love nor hate nor fear, nor joy nor sorrow—only a rhythmic cadence, those Doric columns—only in perfect harmony this glorious Temple, calm through all the ages. (110) There’s an encapsulation of the natural world within us, or as the ancient alchemists would put it, the elements of nature—earth, fire, water, air, ether—are naturally embedded within the fibers of our being. We can trust the rhythms of life with certainty, for we are the very rhythms of life. A microsystem of the rhythmic macro field. However, we usually only arrive at a state of soul equilibrium through a disharmonious passage... by the way of first living with all the struggles and lessons, which arise through discord. In this, we’re in a constant movement between balance and imbalance, relative composure and relative dissonance, and always within the alternating states of the psyche. We can only arrive at a comparatively unified level of consciousness through the ceaseless rhythm of integration and disintegration. When we can recognize this, it’s far easier to ride the patterns with insight and artistry and embrace their pulsating beauty. And then, through the employment of rhythm as an art, we’re invited to dance with both the visible, tangible world and the invisible, ethereal realms in an invocation. For many days no movement came to me. And then one day came the thought: These columns which seem so straight and still are not really straight, each one is curving gently from the base to the height, each one is in flowing movement, never resting, and the movement of each is in harmony with the others. And as I thought this my arms rose slowly toward the Temple and I leaned forward – and then I knew I had found my dance, and it was a Prayer. [111]

In the first essay of his collection The Ecstasy of Being, “The Jubilee of Content and Form,” Joseph Campbell writes that after fairy tales and folklore were shoved to the wayside in favor of “modern, scientifically-grounded disbelief” that “the great problem of the artist became that of coping significantly with the materials of the world of common day” (16). Campbell then highlights the job of the collective subconscious in giving mythological visions relationships to these contemporary materials: Mythology, in other words, is not an outmoded quaintness of the past, but a living complex of archetypal, dynamic images, native to, and eloquent of, some constant, fundamental stratum of the human psyche… While our educated, modern waking-consciousness has been going forward on the wings and wheels of progress, this recalcitrant, dream-creating, wish-creating under-consciousness has been holding to its primeval companions all the time, the demons and the gods. (18) Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven (now also an HBO Max series of the same name) shows the work of both load-bearing archetypes and industrious artists under extreme duress. The post-apocalyptic story centers on the bravest survivors of a devastating pandemic: The Traveling Symphony, a group of Shakespearean actors and classical musicians making their life on the road. Why Shakespeare? “People want what was best about the world,” an actor explains in the novel. (Station Eleven 38) In the series, a line echoes across various characters’ voiceover monologues, before and after the plague: I remember damage. Kirsten Raymonde is eight years old the night the pandemic reaches Toronto. The airborne, flu-like illness kills rapidly— within 24 hours—and indiscriminately. Kirsten is performing a bit part in a production of King Lear, which features a famous film actor in the titular role who drops dead on stage mid-madness. Twenty years after disease decimates the world’s population, we rejoin Kirsten. She’s with The Traveling Symphony, running lines from Lear with another actor, preparing for a performance. The Symphony moves through a dystopian landscape, stopping in the various settlements that pass for towns on and near Lake Michigan and completing a full tour of the area once a year. At a time when most survivors are attempting to send their roots deep into the rocky ground to claim some normalcy, the Symphony stops only for a night or two before moving their show to the next outpost. The roads are dangerous: the troupe navigates fire and bandits, landmines and cultists. While towns can be fortified, the Symphony’s horse-drawn caravans are a constant potential target. A line from the series captures the tension in an exchange between Kirsten and Katrina, an older woman settled fairly comfortably at what was once a country club, when the latter makes an awed comment about the Symphony’s apparent lack of fear. “We’re artists,” responds Kirsten. “We’re terrified.” It’s a great line, and to my added delight it’s in the episode called “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren’t Dead.” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the Fools of Hamlet who offer goofball fodder but don’t survive Act V, make a similarly treacherous voyage to reach Elsinore Castle. Tom Stoppard shows us their trek in his absurdist play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966). Stoppard shifts full focus to the clowns and finds, amid the comedy, a font of surprisingly heady philosophical questions, most which are presented without any attempted answer, curiosities unto themselves. The two characters have many encounters but, like the Symphony, are only passing through. They only engage each other, two halves of the same ghost. Terror and treachery. So why do it, then? Why rush into danger? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are on a ship at the end of the play, themselves and the narrative now abandoned by Hamlet. They realize their voyage has become pointless, but do not yet know that the letter they’ve been tasked with delivering orders their own execution. The Fools reflect: GUILDENSTERN: We’ve traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.ROSENCRANTZ: Be happy—if you’re not even happy what’s so good about surviving? We’ll be alright. I suppose we just go on. (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Act III) The Symphony is also prepared for this question, and answers more pithily with a line from episode 122 of Star Trek: Voyager they’ve adopted as their official motto: “Because survival is insufficient.” Campbell writes, From the earliest times, the dancer has been the human symbol of life-indestructible. The Dionysos-dance of annihilation is at the same time the dance of the fire of creation: [...] It is a basic principle of aesthetics that art is produced not out of fear, or out of hope, but out of an experience transcending the two, holding the two in balance[…]. (The Ecstasy of Being, 5) Archetypally, The Fool is the soft wax tablet waiting for experience to be imprinted upon it. And to call someone a fool is to say they’re inexperienced at best, dangerously naive at worst. But what Campbell is pointing out in the quote above is quite the opposite: the Fool-ish artist has not only experienced damage, but remembers it, accesses it, and holds both hope and pain in permanent tension, a tightrope that requires constant balance and focus. The Fool knows that effective art comes from the presence of this tension, not the lack of it. The Fool may be hopeful, but they are not naive. The Fool may be terrified, but they are not paralyzed. The Fool remembers damage, knows to anticipate more, and still keeps moving forward.

To begin, I offer you two words: Atychiphobia. Kakorrhaphiophobia. Dive into them past the vague gloss of vowels and consonants as we are wont to do with unknown words; say them aloud, and you will find that they roll off the tongue rather resonantly. If words have umami, they’ve got it. And a certain onomatopoeia, too, as they are both words for the fear of failure, and induce a slight twang of fear about pronouncing them correctly. Atychiphobia springs from Ancient Greek tuche for luck, with that quiet negating prefix “a,” meaning, literally, fear of misfortune. Kakorrhaphiophobia emerges from the Greek kakos, meaning “evil or bad;” the same root as the word cacophony. Specifically, this fear is rooted in the fear of embarrassment and ridicule. It is not simply a worry about misfortune, but instead, a projection of the cacophony of scornful laughter that echoes when we have publicly failed, whether in our imagination or reality. Some etymological thought connects atychiphobia with an Old French word for scorn that means to literally “break off someone’s horns.” This is the fear of being made smaller and powerless, of being laughed at, and ultimately being seen as a fool. For people who are stricken with an extreme form of these phobias, they can become crippling barriers to almost any action. Few of us are completely immune, even if not haunted by clinical levels of phobia. Feeling foolish is a particularly powerful invitation to shame, and can too often keep us from exploring, daring, or creating. The archetypal hero seems to be the antithesis of this fear, and this foolishness, at least at first glance. To be heroic is, most often, imagined to be confident, and competent, and conquering. However, in the manner of archetypes that contain their opposites, even mythic heroes struggle with whether they want to be heroic. One of the steps Joseph Campbell articulates in the hero’s journey is a refusal of the call to adventure. In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Campbell suggests that what might keep a potential hero from answering the call to his or her journey are the tendrils of an ordinary life, entwining with a stasis that dulls the sound of the call. He writes: Often in actual life, and not infrequently in the myths and popular tales, we encounter the dull case of the call unanswered for it is possible to turn the ear to other interests. Walled in boredom, hard work, or “culture,” the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. While boredom, or hard work, or culture might be convenient excuses to turn away from adventure, I believe that they are actually camouflage for something deeper: fear of failure. Atychiphobia. Kakorrhaphiophobia. How often do we turn away from a true desire because we convince ourselves that we have something more important to do? Even though that “something important” is ultimately small and prosaic? “I can’t turn to write the article I’m enticed by because I need to clean my oven.” (As an aside, I bought oven cleaner today.) That is the responsible choice: work before pleasure. Commitments before audacity. Even though we are ultimately dulled by that choice, we can relax into feeling virtuous, and silence our desires. But, if we tug apart the instinct for the seemingly principled, unselfish choice a bit further, what lies underneath it is fear. Fear that we will not succeed. And that we will be a fool to even try, and the world will laugh at us as we fall on our face. So we clean our ovens, refusing the call to be something grander than ourselves, and lose our opportunity to bring gifts and insights back to our communities. While few of us are likely to strap on swords and quest after a mythic challenge, one of the most literal calls to action we can feel is the urge to create. As we struggle with the journey of making—be it a dance, a piece of writing, a business—we brush up against the metaphors of the hero’s journey. To answer the call of the imagination, we must find the courage to push past the fear of ridicule. Several years ago, rather awestruck as a former modern dancer, I interviewed choreographer Twyla Tharp for a radio show I hosted. We talked about what makes good art, and specifically, good dance. She was passionate that modern dance should be about courage and audacity, echoing painter Henri Matisse’s aphorism, “creativity takes courage.” She continued: “Modern dancers should be doing things no one else is doing, and it should come from the gut. Desire is the first thing a modern dancer should have. Skill can be developed. But if you don't have desire as a modern dancer, forget it.'' In The Ecstasy of Being, as he is critiquing modern dance that fails at its goals of transcendence, of the expression of “life-power, life-courage, and the ecstasy of being,”  by becoming overly intellectualized, Campbell asks irascibly, “who can but wonder why our dancer has to be letting the insipidities of her unimpressive brain come between the fountain source of her genius and the marvel of that all-expressive body on which she has been laboring the better part of her life?” I think, in that connection between the intuition of the body and creativity, both Tharp and Campbell begin to articulate how we might find that audacity. What breaks open when we answer the call to create, leaving rationality behind, and instead follow our guts into that call when we are making? Rather than heroically defying our fear of scorn, we instead embrace it? While the cool Apollonian discipline of technique and structure underpin creativity, art begins to articulate, as Campbell says, the “ecstasy of being” only when it opens up into the irrational. When it celebrates, like Erasmus, the delights of folly. Our metaphoric heroism becomes Dionysian at that moment, sensory and uninhibited, and genuinely fearless. The fool in his fullest form has no fear of laughter, but instead evokes and invites it. In that moment we can, as Robert Johnson says in Ecstasy: Understanding the Psychology of Joy, we are ex stasis—standing outside oneself: “If I say, ‘I am ecstatic! I am simply beside myself!’ I mean that I am filled with an emotion too powerful for my body to contain or my rational mind to understand. I am transported to another realm in which I am able to experience ecstasy.” (25) For me, this is one of the most tangible ways that we might enter into the mythic power of the archetypal hero: by entering into the metaphor of a foolish hero as we create, savoring all that evokes; that is truly answering the call. And if we’re very lucky, it might just grant the boon of ecstasy for those who meet what we create.

The Joseph Campbell Foundation MythBlast Series has spent March musing about The Adventure and reading Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss which, let’s face it, sounds exciting: filled with presentiment, and descriptive of that happy flow state you can taste when deeper truths appear out of nowhere as you race through town hitting nothing but green lights. It harks to that experience of being in the slot, surfing the curl, on the glidepath with the gods helping to taxi you in. “Woohoo, I’m on The Adventure now!” you hum to yourself as the world brightens and the qi flow turns the dull miasmic stone soup of every-day-life into an iridescent thrill ride. Well, for a while, anyway. You know what I mean. Everything is going great and then you get interrupted by some seemingly petty piece of daily life. It jumps into your lane and suddenly you’re hitting nothing but red lights. It chokes off the oxygen. The world turns from a wonderland into a dull blizzard of busywork and endless lists. Irritability flips a switch and turns all that sparkle back into shades of tedious, deathly gray. Now, we all know that these periods of normal (mundane, pedestrian, dreary, tedious, dull, routine, commonplace, prosaic, uninspired) life happen all the time, but knowing this intellectually doesn’t help. Boredom puts out your fires and all you can do is gather kindling, pile it up and, with whatever hope you have left, smack flint and steel together and pray something catches. “Spiritual dryness happens” should be the flipside of every “Follow your bliss” bumper sticker. Right. But if real life intrudes on the adventure, sometimes adventure intrudes on real life. So for my MythBlast this month I was trying to piece together something on The Adventure and Pathways to Bliss and how the adventure requires bliss or how bliss is the endpoint of the adventure and what all of this has to do with Aristotle’s observation that wonder provides access to the architecture of the universe… but seriously, I just wasn’t feeling it. We’re years into covid, we hear the inexorable drumbeat of wars and rumors of wars, our politics has become exhaustingly tribal and, more immediately, I'm in the tumbling and disorienting process of moving in with my amazing significant other. Moving should be a time of excitement, a pathway to bliss all on its own, and metaphorically rich— “you’re in motion!” —but I'm pooped.  Moving is boring and relentless and repetitive.  Moving requires cleaning up the place you’ve left and preparing the place you're headed. Painting, countertops, plumbing, all sorts of stuff. I don't want a metaphorically rich experience, dammit. I just want it to be done. At times like this, life can feel so mundane that you wonder whether you’re on an adventure at all—or whether you’ve ever been on an adventure. If you’re like me, this is when you start whining: “What about my damned adventure?  Why do I have to do all of this boring stuff?  And where did all of this junk come from?  And why does the end of the packing tape keep disappearing into the roll??” With Charlie Brown I howl, Aaugh! I was bored with the remorseless persistence of all the trivial, annoying, but mission-critical details that had to be taken care of—and, right on cue, the final straw arrived when my significant other noticed that the floors in the new place were a mess and that maybe we should pick out new ones. Great, I thought, one more thing to add to the endless list. But with that breathtakingly mundane observation the adventure, as it tends to, intruded on my real life. It's embarrassing to say this, but it must have taken two weeks before I realized that we were picking out new floors for our relationship. I’ll repeat that: A new relationship needs new flooring. I hate it when it’s this obvious. The observation was metaphorically rich in ways that could not be ignored and, boom—all the fires roared back to life. Suddenly I found meaning again, a new pathway to bliss, and all it took was to notice the myth, the metaphor, hiding in plain sight—in the literal sense of picking out new floors. Suddenly the flooring was no longer something in a List of Sisyphus; it became symbolic: transparent to transcendence, in Campbell’s language. Picking out new flooring became more than flooring. It became an acknowledgement that our new lives needed a new foundation and, just as suddenly, picking out a new garbage can became a search for the Holy Grail. That's what I mean about the adventure intruding to remind you that, as dreary as the world can be, meaningful adventures and pathways to bliss still lurk around every corner—and under every floorboard. Thanks for musing along!

In 1968, singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson tried to make a phone call and heard a sound familiar to anyone that remembers the age before cell phones. Beep, beep, beep, beep. The sound not only informed the caller that the party they were trying to reach was currently engaged with someone else, but it also announced with incessant alarm that your attempt to connect with another soul was rejected and hopeless in that moment. For the time being, you would remain alone. As Nilsson sat listening to the rhythmic reminder, he thought about the isolation the moment created. He considered the loneliness of the experience. He kept listening and eventually imagined the tones as the opening of a song. He would later scratch down lyrics to accompany the experience describing how the number one was the loneliest number. Less than a year later, the band Three Dog Night would make famous Nilsson’s song about the experiences we have when we are alone. Of course, some experiences are best had by ourselves, and some adventures can only be undertaken alone. Since Joseph Campbell introduced his ideas about the Hero’s Adventure in 1949, untold scores of people around the world have found a framework for understanding the challenging journeys so present throughout literature and history, and their own journeys as well. The journey that Campbell described was that of an individual. Though the journey involved the participation of helpers, mentors, and others, the journey itself was a solitary one. Campbell tells us that “Myths derive from the visions of people who have searched their own most inward world. Out of the myths, cultural forms are founded.” (Pathways to Bliss, 24) Campbell goes on to say: For myths, like dreams, arise out of the imagination. Now, there are two orders of dream. There is the simple, personal dream where you get tangled up in your own twists and resistances to your life, the conflict between wish and prohibition, the stuff of Freudian analysis, and so forth…But then there is another level of dream, which we call vision, where one has gone past one’s personal horizon and confronted the great universal problems, the problems that are also those rendered in the great myths. (25-25) We might then say that while our personal journey is undertaken alone, there is a larger, parallel journey undertaken by society. Campbell’s ideas about the journeys of the individual have transcended almost every human boundary and transformed the lives of thousands, if not millions. As our world has continued to get more complicated since Campbell’s death in 1987, cultural conversations have not only expanded how the individual’s journey is understood, but also progressed to include a conversation about our collective journey together—a journey that expands beyond humanity to the ecological and all living entities on the planet. Could Campbell’s ideas about the journey of the hero also be framed for the benefit of our collective evolution? To be clear, the collective heroic will never subvert the importance of the journey of the hero, the heroine, or anyone that does not embrace those binary labels. In a sense, this collective journey has been with us since the beginning. The individual journey is always, in fact, contained within the collective journey. We see the collective journey depicted in the ancient myths and right up through Dorothy and her companions on the yellow brick road. Of all the superhero stories that Marvel has told in the past 25 years, the largest box office draw was when they sent all the heroes on a journey together in Avengers: Endgame. There seems to be a recognition of the importance of undertaking the adventure together. Bob Walter, President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, has been sharing ideas about this journey of the collective heroic, which he terms the heroic ensemble, for decades. The need to embrace the shared journey we travel together has only continued (and will continue) to grow. Many realities about life that once would have been deemed alien to us are now part of our ordinary world, which is the first stage that Campbell describes in the heroic adventure. While we see mass disagreement about how a good or bad story is defined in this ordinary world, few would argue that there is likely a better story out there for us. There seems to be a universal dissatisfaction with our ordinary world—the type of dissatisfaction that inexorably pushes individuals and cultures toward the next stage that Campbell described, the call to adventure. While we might struggle to articulate it and argue about the language that should be used around it, our collective society is sensing something like a call—a call to adventure. The great universal problems that Campbell spoke of are still very much with us, and they only seem to be becoming more complex and intense. The dark reality of these problems creates a call that echoes in each of us. That eternal, unending beep that inspired Harry Nilsson years ago was the signal of a refused call. But a new urgent siren is sounding. It is the call to collective adventure for our heroic ensemble. May we answer it with courage—together.