THIS HERO'S JOURNEY . . . is NOT the traditional Joseph Campbell journey, which is supposed to be the same for everyone
The hero’s journey. One is supposed to start as inside the society. One is supposed to get a call to adventure. One is supposed to respond with a refusal of the call.
Nothing about that beginning is right for me. Nor does it fit what I see around me.
Instead, I hear so many people say things like: I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with my life. My life feels meaningless. Everything feels meaningless. What is my purpose?
I hear that they have a longing to be called to some adventure, to something - but the call has not happened or they have not heard it. So, far from refusing the call, there has been no call, or anyway no hearing the call.
Very different.
A scene from the nineteenth-century novel, Jane Eyre, just came to mind. Jane is looking out from a high window. Inside herself, she cries out: Women are supposed to feel content with domestic things. But we long for adventure, just as men do.
I remember Virginia Woolf criticizing the author, Charlotte Bronte, for allowing this passage to be in the book. Jane is supposed to be longing for the hero, not for adventure.
I’m with Charlotte Bronte. What she writes is true to my experience of myself - such a longing for a bigger life than the everyday. What Virginia Woolf wants, on the other hand, is that Charlotte cut her heroine so she fits the set script.
I remember feeling Jane’s longing for a heroic quest, even in childhood (as well as for romance).
_________________
Then, to go on with the hero’s journey, we are supposed to start in and return to the ordinary world. I was never in that world, not completely anyway. I have lots to say about that, but the general thing: it wasn’t quite an ordinary world. And it’s not the ordinary world I’m wanting to return to.
_________________
More about the traditional quest. When the call comes, when Gandalf the Wise comes knocking, one is supposed to refuse it.
I had one quest from childhood - a creative quest: to create and get those creative things (stories, scripts, drawings) out into the world. I did what I could. But while the creating was a pleasure, I found hardly any ways of reaching out into the world, and never as fully as felt right. No Gandalf the Wise.
I was about 30 when I found an easier quest - to be part of the quest for women’s full flourishing. I didn’t see it that way, actually. I just found a way - university and college teaching - where my desire to give to the world was satisfied.
I didn’t refuse the call. Instead, I was thrilled with the opportunity - it stilled a hunger, for a time.
There is so much I learned on that quest, including how that quest can be both fabulous, and can also be twisted into something damaging - like when it comes to race, the twisting of Martin Luther King Jr’s I have a dream . . . of all of us judged by our character into Black Lives Matter, anti-white racism, often extreme.
In many ways that quest continues, has become larger. I have learned and keep learning more about this world I’m part of and what I might be able to do. I have also met so many other amazing people also doing what they can.
My journey path. I came to care deeply about something that is not right but widely accepted. I answered the call.
_____________________
A huge thing for me has been, and often continues to be, the MISSING MENTOR. I have heard, so many times, when the student is ready, the master appears. That has not been my experience. In fact, my sense is that that facile statement covers that the statement is, very often, utterly untrue, utterly anti-factual.
_____________________
I could go on and on. But the big thing is that the traditional quest is so far from mine, and also far from the quest of many of the people I’ve talked with.
_____________________
One thing I will be doing, with the Truth Teller’s Tribe, is having a workshop on our quests.
Now, my questions to you. Have you wanted to be on a hero’s journey, but could not find one? Did you get thrown into one? Did you refuse the call or welcome it? Are you refusing the call? Do you have no idea what to do?
_____________________
Below, by the way, is the traditional quest. My sense: most of the people on this quest to create a society where we flourish, where the Predators are creatures from the past, have lived and are living a different quest.
Let me know.
Posted Sept 20, 2023
Love this. In my experience there is no mentor. Some are called with the purpose to make their own path. That journey starts with a step that you're afraid to take but take it anyway, sometimes not knowing where it will go but stepping forward anyway because staying where you are is not acceptable. Most of the rest is fluff except the reward for stepping into adventure. Maybe I'm not old enough to be resurrected or find the elixir!
Elsa, I like your openness, as always. I relate to many of your observations. Since you subscribe to my Subtack, "Albertine" is a story about 2 teenage friends wanting adventure and how they resolve their quest.