Image supplied by “T” altered art (Flickr Creative Commons License)
Are you familiar with this general scenario?
A young lad or lass lives in a pampered, loving environment. Then some major upheaval happens, often in the form of a wicked step parent, who casts the young one out into the cold cruel world. Thus starts the young one’s quest for justice and/or riches.
There are traps along the way; ogres and witches, forests of forgetfulness and swamps of misery and toil. However, it’s not always bad. Sometimes there is a bit of magical intervention to help put things right – those lucky breaks we all get from time to time.
Sometimes the traveller gets to the end of their quest, and get to marry a royal offspring and inherit the kingdom. Sometimes the traveller will be sidetracked for the longest time, forgetting about their quest, threatening to end the tale in a sad, gloomy way.
There was a man called Joseph Campbell who researched fables, fairy tales and myths from around the world and found many similarities in the plots and themes – loss, questing and redemption (is there any other theme in life?).
He determined that these tales all tapped into a shared human subconsciousness and essentially revealed the JOURNEY OF THE SOUL.
We ALL have our journey of loss, questing and redemption. Sometimes many chapters worth. Sometimes we become waylaid on our quest and forget that we are even on one.
Here are some of my favourite quotes from Joseph Campbell:
- The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
- We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
- The future can come from nowhere else but the energies of the psyche.
- The warrior’s approach to life is to say “yes” to it, “yea” to it all.
Imagine you are on a quest, and you only have the fuzziest instructions – FIND HAPPINESS. Hmmm. Yeah, right. Are you looking for a fairy godmother to give you some inside information? Pick me, pick me, pick me!
Your Assignment
What parallels do you see with YOUR life, and with fairy tales or hero tales.
If your life WAS a hero tale, how would you describe your current circumstances?
- Lost in the Forest of 9-to-5 Forgetfulness
- In the middle of 7-impossible-tasks set by a mean witch
- On an epic quest, determined to find unimagined wealth and/or wisdom)
- Another situation (please elaborate to yourself)