Your Call to Adventure

What do you want to Be or Do when you “grow up”? Or do you feel you are already fully grown, thank you very much? When I have asked this question at the start of a life mapping process, I usually ask someone how they would have answered that question as a child compared to now as an adult. I ask them to consider the difference in their answers to this question Then and Now. I was surprised the first time I asked this of a large class of mainly college seniors. Quite a few answered they are more realistic and practical as an adult versus when they had merely fantasized about what they wanted to be as a child. Several said that since they had taken on their ‘grown-up’ responsibilities, they look back at their childhood dreams as frivolous, childish nonsense. Some even said that being an adult requires them to dutifully shed or “sacrifice” such immature childhood flights of fancy.

Nonsense, I would say! I propose that this question, WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE OR DO WHEN YOU GROW UP?, is fundamental—monumental even!  We should continue to ask it of ourselves and of others throughout our lives.  It embodies a CALL TO ADVENTURE, an invocation to you, to each of us, to claim a stake to your LIFE DREAM and to pursue realizing that Dream with all that you are.

When you were a Child, did you maybe want to be an Astronaut or a Superhero? From an Archetypal Psychology point of view, these are not frivolous aspirations. They may indicate that your IDEALIST (often associated with Air or flight or travel) or your honorable WARRIOR parts of Self (personal unconscious archetypes) are Strong in You.  If you have grown up to become a world traveler or perhaps a fireman, a soldier, or a defense lawyer, you have actually realized in these occupations your childhood ‘fantasy’, see?

Allow me to come at this from another angle, to more profoundly invite you to YOUR Call to Adventure.  Have you read Dr. Michael Newton’s book, The Journey of Souls or watched the comic film with Meryl Streep and Albert Brooks, Defending Your Life?  Newton is a psychiatrist who interviewed individuals under hypnosis about reincarnation and these Souls’ experiences BETWEEN lifetimes.  He discovered an amazing similarity across their reports.  One common theme was that after dying, Souls are shown or explore on their own  what had been their purpose: their goals or Mission while they had lived, and how far had they come toward realizing these goals.

In the film Defending Your Life, this theme is dramatized as two recently deceased persons (played by Streep and Brooks) must undergo a court trial at a transition place called Judgement City to determine whether or to what extent they had fulfilled their previous lifetime goals.  Meryl Streep’s character Julia was certainly heroic; everything she had undertaken was done with panache and she never failed to risk her own life and act boldly to help others. She was clearly moving on. But Daniel, the Alfred Brooks character, had been diffident and hapless in his former life. At every opportunity to take a risk, he had turned away. His lawyer, played brilliantly by Rip Torn, has a hard case trying to defend his client’s plea for advancement, and we know Daniel is most likely to return to Earth for yet another round at life.  Then again, Daniel falls in love with Julia while in this purgatory sort of realm, which brings out something extra in Daniel’s character; I will not give the finale away.

Here’s the point: Consider that ‘What do you want to do or be when you grow up?’ as your own Soul calling out to You from within your highest awareness.  Another way to pose the same question is:

WHY    ARE    YOU    HERE ?

This query, this further Call to Adventure, may be your Wake Up Call.  If you are not even metaphorically where you had hoped you might be at this juncture in your lifetime journey, here is a golden opportunity to reflect on where you are, how you have gotten here, and where it is you would yet like to arrive in your life.

 

This year at Better Endings for Your Life Path we shall explore the Hero’s Adventure as a paradigm of mythic motifs you can discover or apply to YOUR LIFE STORY.  This is a Call to Adventure for You; a Call to Action!

A New Year of Better Endings

Endings are new beginnings; I love the fresh breath of freedom released with this awareness.  With this new year, preparing for that launch today, I will expand this blog tremendously and infuse it with lots of new energy and purpose. This year should see the publication of my life mapping book and manual, Your Life Path. As the release date nears I will add more information about that.  Our central content material for this new year will focus on twelve (of 17) monthly phases of what Joseph Campbell presented as ‘the MONOMYTH’ in his famous volume on comparative and personal mythology which I am sure many of you readers are familiar with, The Hero With 1000 Faces (HWTF; 1949).

The MONOMYTH (diagrammed above from HWTF) is generally referred to as THE HERO CYCLE or as THE HERO’s ADVENTURE. Now then, as the Hero is Everyman/Everywoman; it is YOU!  We are each of us on a mythic Odyssey from the cradle to the grave, and Beyond. We all must heed the Call to Adventure and may expect to encounter Threshold Guardians that aim to waylay our Quest. Then when we do Take the Journey we face internalized or mirrored external Dragons, Shadowy archetypal aspects that can inhibit our deepest ambitions unless we slay (or, tame) them.  We seek truth and to fully express our creative imagination, to accomplish our goals that each of our unique skillsets and talents equip us to Manifest for the benefit of the larger Whole.

images are from pixabay.com

When I teach a course about Your Mythic Life, I always open the class with a poem. It is the well known “Ithaca”, composed by the modern Greek poet C.P. Cavafy. I have found my favorite version, translated by Rae Dalvin, posted on the Poem of the Day blog (https://ninaalvarez.net/2007/05/03/poem-of-the-day-49/), so I gratefully re-post the poem “Ithaca” below. Read it carefully, for it is an invocation to You, a Call to Adventure.  That will  be our first topic for the new year

Ithaca

When you start on your journey to Ithaca,
then pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
Do not fear the Lestrygonians
and the Cyclopes and the angry Poseidon.
You will never meet such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your body and your spirit.
You will never meet the Lestrygonians,
the Cyclopes and the fierce Poseidon,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not raise them up before you.

Then pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many,
that you will enter ports seen for the first time
with such pleasure, with such joy!
Stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and corals, amber and ebony,
and pleasurable perfumes of all kinds,
buy as many pleasurable perfumes as you can;
visit hosts of Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from those who have knowledge.

Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
and even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with all that you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would never have taken the road.
But she has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.
With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,
you must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.

-K. P. Kavafis (C. P. Cavafy), translation by Rae Dalven

Gratitude for the Blessings of Spirit—Life Lessons, Part Two

Last Friday when I posted the blog on “Life Lessons,” I actually had a great experience that reinforced another Life Lesson, too.  It has a Christmas theme about it, so I share it today as a positive Holiday message.

I was feeling a bit down that Friday morning. Mainly I was feeling very alone. En route to my regular weekly writing session at a cafe in Castle Rock, Colorado, I stopped along the way at a Village Inn restaurant for a breakfast I could eat  with my low carb diet.

Writing can make me feel lonely some times.  It is a paradox that an activity someone uses to communicate with a wide range of people is accomplished by practical necessity in relative isolation.  Even when you work with a writing partner or share a writing session with a friend working on their own project as I occasionally do, the self-discipline of writing requires the sort of mental focus and concentration that to some extent excludes the world around you.  That’s why I choose to write in a public space when I can; at least there are others in the background environment while I immerse in the ideational process.

So, that Friday morning en route to a solo writing session, I had a fine breakfast and prepared to move on up the road. I asked the waitress for the bill. She smiled and said mysteriously:

“You can forget about it. Someone has already taken care of it.”

I was dumbfounded.  What did she mean?

“Somebody paid for your meal. He didn’t want me to say who he was.”

Oh, my! I asked if I could at least leave a tip but she waved it off, saying he had covered that quite well too.

“Did he have a white beard, with a jolly big belly and a red and white suit?” I joked.

“He did have a beard,” the waitress replied.

images are gratefully from pixabay.com

I left the restaurant feeling thankful for this unexpected gift. It was more than a free meal in mid-December.  It was a reminder from Spirit, I do believe, that I am/we are never truly alone.

 

Lessons for Life History?

Not all stories have ‘better endings’, and some of life’s Shadow Teachers offer but bitter pills to swallow. After a long conversation with my sister, a pastor, yesterday and reading through several current blog posts around the web, I am left with some somber insights about where the recent election and anti-globalism in the world have brought us to from the point of view of lessons from history.

I am considering how American values and priorities are so focused on materiality today.  It occurs to me—and please share your Comments below to offer your own viewpoint—that as a post-World War II set of generations in America, many of us grew up believing in the idea of “progress” AS IF having defeated Hitler’s genocidal ambitions, somehow all of human consciousness had taken a positive and irreversible, ‘quantum’ leap forward as a collective species. So then after that threat was dissolved, presumably we could focus on achieving prosperity, which came to mean seeking material advantages at any cost, including massive debt and, more sadly, bigotry and mean-spirited politics. Of course there have been many instances of genocide since, not boding well for human enlightenment, and the socioeconomic imbalances can cycle around to the very sorts of conditions that gave rise to ‘a Hitler,’ again.

We are deeply impoverished if materiality is all that we aim for.  As well, social networking, “reality” TV and one-sided news stations magnify such paltry ambitions and selfish partisanship to an unprecedented magnitude, weakening the potential depth of heartfelt human relations or the capacity to sort out factual evidence and polarizing values so as to create artificial realities that fragment Truth like in a teleidoscope.

I have an inkling, at least for myself, of a strategy to combat mediocrity of experience in this physical materiopolis, to coin a Newspeak word. To counter negative cycles of History, what can I do? Well,  I can examine my own cycles of life experience and ‘fix’ the errors there that have led to unfortunate or unsatisfactory results, Now.  I believe that means—again, for me anyway—discerning and countering HABITS: habits of thought and attitude as well as health related habits. This can lead not only to my own better endings but it can also improve my relations with others in, at least, my world.

images are from pixabay.com

If many of us would choose to take to heart this opportunity to empower ourselves by overcoming negative habits accrued through our personal life histories, and if this practice of mindful self-improvement were to rise into prominence in the collective consciousness, what then?  Could we bring about a new positive cycle even whilst in the outward throes of darker tendencies playing themselves out?

This is a  more somber perspective than I usually put forth in this blog.  But to me it feels like the lessons of history are calling out now for realism and positive action.

Life Lessons

Life is a Teacher in and of Itself; we learn daily through the forge of experience. How often have you said, “at least I learned something” about an experience in your life that may not have turned out exactly as you had planned for or expected it would?

“Chalk it up to experience!” we say.

Or maybe:

“Live and learn”

“It was a learning experience”

“I’ll know better next time”

Then there’s the infamous:

“No pain, no gain!”

This week, I invite you to celebrate Life’s Lessons.  Large or small, long term or short term, what “Life Lessons” have you gathered as gems of experience along the road or Labyrinth of your Life Path so far?  

Make a list of some of your Key Life Lessons, organized however you choose. Then I encourage you to choose one of these to journal about; let that be a Life Lesson that feels relevant to your understanding of an experience with which you are currently engaged.

Let me try this life mapping Tool myself as an example. I will list some of my own Life Lessons and make note of the source of some of these.

LIFE LESSONS

• Always Give UP, Always Surrender (to Spirit and Higher Consciousness; learned through contemplative inner guidance)
• Patience is a Virtue (DM; this one has clearly stood the test of Time!)
• The turtle only makes progress when she sticks her neck out. (from a ceramic figurine  I had as a teen)
• Love all with unconditional love but reserve your warm sentiments for those you can trust to return that friendship deeply. (School of hard knocks; a spiritual principle)
• Drive the car; don’t let it drive you. (My father, teaching me to drive)
• “When you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” (a Goethe quote on a poster I once gave to my sister)
• “Way Will Out” (a Quaker expression learned from a friend.)

Way Will Out

This is the Life Lesson that feels most relevant to my current experience this week as I am confronted with a question concerning copyright matters with an element in my book manuscript as I prepare it to go to the publishers. I had adapted a set of techniques I thought would be helpful in the book, but after a conversation yesterday followed by some sincere contemplation, I realize there is a GIFT in this experience. The GIFT is that I will redesign these elements completely to present wholly new techniques that are more directly grounded in a central feature of the overall approach in the book. This will be of even greater value than what I had before because they will add substance to a more coherent, fully unique “process.” The original concepts were in retrospect merely place holders until I could arrive at this awareness, and the timing has been perfect as it is just now that I am editing this section of the manuscript.

“Way Will Out,” to me, has always been a very calming proposition. It says to RELEASE any sense of conflict or concern, to Trust in the Universe or Spirit, and to act accordingly, with good intent.  It works!

images are from pixabay.com

Your Turn: 

Print out this post if you would like to write in the space given below a list of Key Life Lessons in your life and an account of how ONE of these is relevant Now. (I invite you to send your own story here if you would like me to post it for others to read.)

List Your Life Lessons:

1)

2)

3)

4)

5)

6) 

 

Journal about the Relevance of ONE of these Life Lessons to your experience Now:

 

 

Celebrate Your Mentors!

What have you learned from the Mentors in your life, and from when you have mentored others? A mentor is a Teacher (of the TEACHER Archetype), yet the Mentor is a specific kind of a Teacher; one who imparts Wisdom, not just knowledge on a subject. So the Mentor is often paired archetypally as a TEACHER/MYSTIC character, such as Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, Glinda in The Wizard of Oz, or Dumbledore at Hogwarts.

This week I invite you to make a list of some of your primary Mentors.  I encourage you to contemplate and/or journal about their influences on “the person you have become.”

I will share about just one of several key mentors from my life; I will call her Dr. T, or Bonnie. Bonnie was a philosophy professor at my undergraduate college. I first met her while I was a student in a class on Creative Studies. She was a guest professor that day who was to speak with us about the philosophy of creativity. I arrived a half hour early to our class that day (held in a lounge sort of area where we students often liked to ‘hang out’ even apart from classes there).  Dr. T. was already there, too, sitting with a student who majored in art and who had brought a papier mache figure of a human being he had created in an art class that day.

“How the *x*x* did you do that!?”

These were the first words I ever heard uttered by Dr. T.

“I mean, I could never do that; how could YOU?”

She persisted. The student was stunned, as was I, at this encounter. Soon others arrived and the class began.  Bonnie proceeded to explain her profound appreciation for the creative process this student had drawn upon to envision and then manifest his vision in an artistic form. From that day on I became fascinated with Dr. T. I took several philosophy classes with her and several Independent Study classes as well. I even came to mother-sit for Bonnie’s elderly mother for two or three years before I graduated and left Buffalo for Arizona.

Of many insightful lessons I learned from my Mentor, here are two:

Dr. T. took a nap every afternoon at her old-style, stone and oak Buffalo house. She slept in a small room on a single bed like a cot. One day she told me:

“Every day, I swim in the Ocean!”

I remember her telling me this one wintry Buffalo afternoon when I had arrived to mother-sit.  I understood she was telling me that she dove into a deep contemplative state every day with her nap.

Another time she told me how when her son was young, one day while they were sitting under an oak tree in a park, she picked up an acorn and asked her son to hold it in his hand.

“There is God!,” Bonnie proclaimed.

From then on I understood why she had furnished her home completely with used oak furniture from Salvation Army. She loved the sturdy Oak Tree as a symbol of mature spiritual wisdom.

images are from pixabay.com

After I left for graduate school in Arizona, I touched base a few times with Dr. T., but sparingly.  One time she told me she had started painting with oils in her retirement.  Like Van Gogh, she told me, she painted with full tubes of paint instead of with brushes. A local gallery had held a showing of her works. To the end Bonnie expressed her passion as a spiritual Being fully and with gusto!

How the *x*x* did she do that? I have ever since emulated Dr. Bonnie’s integrity and drive to create, to thrive, to truly BE.

I invite YOUR Comments and Story!

.

…and gladly teche

 

I have been fortunate throughout my life to have encountered and learned from many excellent, inspirational Teachers, not only in school environments but in life! In my next post I will share about several of their key influences as mentors and I will invite you to celebrate your mentors too, but today I want to focus on just one of them: Mr. Oliver. It is the memory of his distinct inspiration (and a few others from early grade school on) that led me confidently in the direction of serving as a Teacher myself for now over 38 years.

Mr. Oliver was on the English Department faculty at my undergraduate college where I majored in English, in Buffalo, New York.  He did not have a doctorate as most of the faculty there did; he had started teaching in a one room schoolhouse when he was 16 or 18 years old and taught from his growing experience from then on. Mr. Oliver specialized in Chaucer’s The Canturbury Tales, and I met him as a student in a class on that subject.  Middle English rolled off Mr. Oliver’s tongue as a native language to him, and I marveled and delighted in his fluency with what remained essentially a beautiful but foreign language to me throughout the semester.

The story I am to tell (like the pilgrims of the Canturbury adventures) about Mr. Oliver relates to the time of his death. Yes, really!  When I took my Chaucer class with Mr. Oliver, he was 69 years old. At that time (1973 or so), the university required faculty to retire at 70. As he had been teaching for over 50 years, all of his students felt badly for him that he would have to retire, at all. He was the consummate teacher who was ardent about his topic and centered his life around his teaching. 

In the Spring of 1974, about two days before the end of what would have been Mr. Oliver’s final class, he died. Honestly, when we students talked about his passing we were happy for him! He did not have to leave his teaching life before retiring unto the Beyond! But this story relates to another one that he had shared with us during the Chaucer class.  Once when he was in a hospital and needed an appendicitis operation, the anesthetic drugs wore off before the operation was finished. Mr. Oliver told us that for the remainder of his time on the operating table, which was at least another hour or more, he simply recounted the entire Prologue to the Canturbury Tales, in its entirety!

So, when Mr. Oliver passed, among us students we shared a passage that we had learned from him from that Prologue. To us it signified everything he meant and imparted to us:

And gladly wolde he lerne,

and gladly teche.

images are gratefully from pixabay.com

I welcome YOUR comments and Stories!

Today’s Quote

Thank you Theresa of Today’s Quote blog site for this, as always, thoughtful and beautiful quote and picture. This one is particularly, spectacularly actually, relevant for me today so I am reblogging it on my site at Better Endings for Your Life Path to mark a special occasion. A few months ago I conceived of blue butterflies as a sign of an important step in my writing career going forward, and today is the very day that is coming into fruition!
Linda Watts

(PS: The good news is a book contract for Your Life Path!)

Soul Gatherings

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud
was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

~ Anais Nin ~
___________

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The Alien Teacher Archetype

December is associated with the TEACHER Archetype. Last week I saw the new film  Arrival  and realized there is an Alien Teacher archetype that runs through much of science fiction literature and films.  The short story The  Day the Earth Stood Still by Harry Bates and Edmund North (screenplay) is an example in which an alien named Klaatu and  his peace enforcing robot Gnut (Gort in the film versions) arrives on Earth to warn us that we will be destroyed unless we establish peace instead of war as we emerge as a space venturing species in the atomic age.

In Arrival, a linguist serves as a consultant to the military when twelve ominous, egg-like apparent spaceships come to hover over twelve areas around the globe. I don’t want to give too much away here about the story (it is well worth seeing!), but the linguist, who aims to find a way to communicate with the aliens by learning to interpret their odd ink bursts of communication, comes to understand they have a profound message for the world, and for herself personally as well.  The global message pertains as in The Day the Earth Stood Still to our needing to find a way to live peacefully together with positive international cooperation and communication rather than rely on violence and aggression to meet our perceived threats.

The Alien Teacher represents knowledge and wisdom far beyond whatever the current consciousness of people on planet Earth have arrived at when the story is written. I guess in order to have survived as a species long enough to reach Earth from interstellar travel such aliens would have had to find a way to achieve wisdom enough not to have destroyed one another, though they might have destroyed their planet so that they need to find a new one to ravage (another common alien lesson theme).

images are from pixabay.com

The Alien Teacher, as “not Us,” represents knowledge and wisdom we aspire to or a mental capacity for awareness we sorely lack.  In a way, all spiritual Teachers and Masters are of this same archetype. We look to those who have been where we wish to go and who have already achieved our spiritual or personal goals, to follow in their footsteps or at least to gain a sense of grounding and direction for striking out upon our own adventures.  The Teacher shows a Way, a Path, but you and I have to walk that path and carve it out more clearly as we advance through the wilderness. The lessons from our Teacher are always with us, even when the Teacher is no longer immediately present.  As Learners (a correlated archetype) we store the knowledge and aim to achieve the wisdom of the Teachers who have gone before us on our Journey.