Coming home
I’m currently rereading Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, the transcription of the 1980s interview of this world foremost authority on mythology by CBS and PBS television journalist Bill Moyers. My copy is 25 years old; my father gifted it to me when I was fifteen and excitedly talked about my sophomore year religion class, World Religions.
“Dad, the stories, so many of them are the same! Creations, floods, prophets; messages on love and suffering and being good to your fellow man.”
I am indebted to my father for not being afraid of this, coming from his eldest daughter in a family they were raising Catholic, and instead giving me the book.
Moyers: I came to understand from reading your books-The Masks of God or The Hero with a Thousand Faces, for example-that what human beings have in common is revealed in myths. Myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story. We all need to understand death and to cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth to life and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are.
Campbell: People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. (Chapter 1)
You may or may not have a faith or religion; but as a human, you will be naturally drawn to place importance and significance on your experience. And that is healthy and good. Much of what you will experience will be hard; life on planet earth is beautiful but brutal. And signficant transitions - from childhood to adulthood, from maidenhood to motherhood, from single to married, birth and death - can be both welcome and extremely hard.
Having lived away from my hometown of Saint Louis for most of my adult life, I have reflected on the common story of venturing out and returning home a lot since moving back in March of 2020. The twelve years I spent 1000 miles away in North Carolina may be an extreme version; sometimes it can look like choosing a different school or church than the rest of your family because that is you coming home to yourself. Regardless, the act of venturing out, what happens while “out,” and the concluding return are important; they are the experience of your life.
The (tricky) thing to remember is that while myths such as these are shared across cultures, your experience of the myth is unique to you. No other person will be able to feel the precise curve of your joy, your sorrow, your anger and neither will you to theirs. Shared and separate; both/and, not either/or. There is value is venturing out; there is value in coming home.
Concluding question: Where have you ventured out? Are there places/spaces you should retun home in?
Until next time, be well, beautiful people.
