My bookkeeper sent a frantic e-mail yesterday saying the money in my bank account was getting dangerously low. My bookkeeper Anne is an important person in my life. I love her, but I fear her also. Sudden e-mails and calls are not usually good. She was right, as usual, and some money from the remnants of my IRA’s that was supposed to arrive last week and be in my  bank account did not, and are lost somewhere in some computer system. No humans available to talk to or to help – it takes 7 to 10 days, says an automated voice, call back in a week if you do not get your money – machines deciding my fate. For me, this is helplessness and frustration. I began to imagine bouncing checks and plunging credit  ratings in the merciless and detached realm of bankers and was drawn sharply back into the real world that is living a human life. No one can escape it. Money matters, you have to your bills, even when you’d rather write, take photos, talk to your wife, walk your dogs, herd the sheep – anything else.

I felt the old echoes of panic and fear, shame and confusion Have I messed up my life?  Is this all beyond me? Am I heading for disaster? Will it all work out? Has my life her on the farm turned into a fiasco, as so many people in my life assured me it would when I came here?

I remembered that even when problems are real, fear is not. It is a geography a space, and it has little to do with reality.  I took out the book I read most often when I was struggling in the shadows, Joseph Campbell’s “Pathways To Bliss,” my bible and guide to the hero journey. I cannot recount how many times this book brought me back from the edge.

It was Joseph Campbell in this book who first taught me the guiding principle and inspiration behind my photography. The idea of maya, which is the power to take the colors of the world and arrange them in so artful a way that they will let you experience through them the true light. That is called the revealing power of maya and it was the creative spark and mission for my first photographs, and for many of the ones I take now. The artist is meant to put the objects of the world together in such a way that through them you will experience that light, that radiance which is the light of our consciousness and which all things both hide and, when properly looked upon, reveal.

The hero journey, Campbell wrote, is one of the universal patterns through which that radiance shows most brightly. A good life, wrote Campbell, is one journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, the choice – the mythic life or the secure life.  Change or stasis. Self-determination or enslavement. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco.

But there’s always the possibility of bliss.

That then, is my life, the life I sought, the life I chose, the life I live. We can stand still, and live hollow lives, or we can set out for the realm of adventure. One one side always looming, fiasco. On the other, bliss. To awaken is to understand that the hero journey does not take us to a perfect life, but to one journey after another, from fiasco to bliss, in search of the radiant light.

My money will find me or I will find it, and I will, until the next e-mail, set out again in search of my true light.