Liking this chapter that I’m in: enjoying very much reading about archetypes and the stories of our humanity. Bought Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces last night to accompany ‘the Writer’s Journey’. LOVING it. His language is complicated and rich. It is a thick book with many pages, small print, and large words. The story is fascinating me: how the various roles develop and overlap and intersect. With this chapter being about me restructuring myself, it resonates deeply, and I anticipate that it will be impactful as I move forward. This season, this new year—I have decided—is going to be about studying story-craft so that I can write powerfully and with resonance. Vocabulary, themes, filling gaps left by collegiate dependence on Cliff Notes, symbolic thought. The return to me. Yeah!!
Then, what are the themes in which I am steeping? Identity, service to greater good v personal desire, lonely internal journey v need to connect, fidelity to core beliefs, role of core beliefs, exploration of sexuality and emotional need, emotional landscape, transitions, role of society’s rules on decision making, thresholds of comfort and willingness to explore extreme edges of my own boundaries, living with the tension of all of this. Commitment to the journey. I feel at the place where the hero recognizes the need to go dragon-hunting as the dragon is pissing off the villagers and something needs to be done. For such a time as this…
Commitment to journey: a friend asked me if there was a chance of me reconciling. My cursory response was that if it happened it would be far down the road, that I’m not keen on putting the kids through those roller coaster feelings. It is more complex than that. It would be so much easier. But easy isn’t the criterion that motivates me to make decisions: maybe even the opposite in some twisted martyr sensibility. Not crisis-oriented exactly, but certainly complexity-oriented. Difficult to explain this internal drive to investigate ‘this’ (place I need to go) and translate it…
Am I giving up on men, he asked? For a season—also need to keep space between my future adult life and the kids. But the other side of that is that I have been walking up and down this hallway, visiting its open rooms and dallying with their baubles, distractions, and busy-nesses. Marriage, breeding, businesses, moving, apocalyptic preparation, hardcore dogma—using these distractions to keep me from feeling the uncomfortable place of just raw me. Until now, I have used those things to keep me from the closed door just to the left of the hallway as I first enter. I peaked in that door, and it was desolate and rocky. The sky was yellow and the sun hung low. There was no sign of real life. It scared me and I slammed the door shut. The vision of it haunted me, though, and I couldn’t keep it out of my mind. I began to think that that desolate landscape is the very terrain on which I will build me. Those rocks are the resources that I will use to make shelter. The hard work it will take to make that place welcoming is the work that will transform me into a strong and able Hero. One unafraid of dragons. Maybe even a Dragon Whisperer.
So do I think that I will find signs of life in that place that I am getting ready to enter? I think it is irrelevant right now. I have to go here alone. I have THIS time and THIS place to do THIS thing. I have had a vision of what this might turn into, and it doesn’t resemble anything I’ve seen before. It is intentional and creative and very, very challenging. I will probably cry a lot and get blisters. I will need to sleep on the ground until I can figure out how to make something comfortable from rocks. I will probably take a stack of books and reams of paper for when I am alone and my thoughts get away from me. Maybe one morning I will wake up and find that the yellow sky was seasonal and has all sorts of other colorful manifestations.
In my vision, there will be a time when I have a house built. It will have a porch on which I will sit in a chair which I have made and ponder things that people tired from hard work ponder. I will know the lay of the land because I will have done recon. I will have found neighbors and made negotiated peace with them—or boundaries. I will let in visitors from this place I am now. Some will like it but many might not be comfortable there. Maybe I will find someone who likes my porch and this transformed landscape. Maybe we will sit on this porch and tell each other our dragon stories. Maybe that will lead to other things…