It is an especially humbling experience for me, tilted upside down in a dentist’s chair, my mouth forced open with clamps and filling with saliva – hoping the dental technician will notice and put in the sucking tube – waiting for my root canal to begin. I don’t recall often feeling much more helpless, exposed or useless than at such a time. The root canal  wasn’t so bad, it was a lot easier than dealing with Verizon and less painful, but in the long interval between the needle and the numbing, I thought about a beautiful e-mail I received from Clay in Georgia. He is pondering a move from Atlanta to a small town in North Carolina and has been following my own run to the mountain for years. He wrote that my blog is like a wise old friend whose observations are both comforting and unsettling but which ultimately made the thought of changing his life a little less intimidating.

That was a lovely message to get, it means I am doing my job. A lot of people fantasize about living on a farm, there is something about a farm that touches a deep yearning in many of us, although not usually in real farmers who tend to live without fantasies and can’t afford yearnings. It is a great irony of our times that so many people want to be on farms, so many farms are collapsing. I wondered, sitting in my dentist’s chair, hoping  for the best, why I set out on my own hero journey, whether I was running away from life or towards it. As it turns out, I think, it was something of both.

I was fleeing an unhappy and cowardly life rather than facing up to it, and as Joseph Campbell warns, on the hero journey you leave the familiar and set out into the realm of adventure. You cannot hide from yourself. There, you fall into a dark place, and you either come out unscathed or you never come out. Along the way, you confront yourself, find out who you are really are, and if you are lucky, you encounter mystics, prophets, guides and magical helpers, often in the form of animals. All of this, all that Campbell prophesied,  came true for me, it was a profoundly spiritual and life-altering decision beyond my imagination. Once you set out on the journey, you can never go back, you will never be the same,  and that is the beauty and the terror of it. You will always be a refugee, in the old world and the new, stamped for life with the mark of the wanderer.

Yet ultimately, my running to the mountain brought me to my true life. To knowledge, strength, spiritual reward and love, all the things I had always been seeking but could never seem to find. Clay has been reading my blog since the beginning, I can tell, messages from those people always come through like old and dear friends, we have a connection that is strong and clear, even through the digital divide. I fell into a dark space and almost did not come out. And I saw so many magical helpers along the way – Carol, Orson, Izzy, Rose, Frieda, Simon, Rocky and now, Red. And so many people to guide me, my departed friends in hospice, many of you, most of all Maria.

I feel sometimes as if the animals handed me off, one by one to one another, each one taking me to another place along the path, bringing me to Maria, where I was destined to be. Beyond that, the journey into my life challenged me to be honest, to be strong, to take the leap of faith out of one life and into another. To life life, rather than exist in it or survive it. That means leaving the familiar behind, leaving people behind, most people don’t want to come and fear people who do.  Along the way, I have met so many other travelers on the hero journey. I have never met one who ever went back or who ever wanted to.

Sitting in the dentist chair, I settled in, was calm. I closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. The wonderful thing about taking a leap of faith is that it always leads to another. And another. Run to your mountain, Clay, take a breath and take the leap.