The hero’s journey, writes Joseph Campbell in Reflections On The Art Of Living, always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide, a spirit, a voice comes to you and says, “look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.”

The herald or announcer of the journey is often dark, spectral, loathsome or terrifying, seen by the world as evil. Yet if you choose to follow him, the way would be opened through the walls of day and light into the dark where the jewels grow.

The call is to leave your life, move into your own loneliness and soul and find the jewel, the center of your life and dreams that is impossible to find when you are sleeping through life, living the life of the hollow man or woman, living to survive, living for security only. The call comes when you have been thrown-off center, uncertain of your purpose or direction in life, and when you are thrown off center, is is time to leave the familiar and set off into the unknown to find out who you really are.

The first step, writes Campbell, is a radical transfer of emphasis and emotion from the external to the internal world, a retreat from the desperations of the wasteland to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within. This realm is the infantile sub-conscious, the realm we dwell in in sleep, it is how we were formed, we carry it within us forever. All the ogres and demons and guides and helpers of our nursery are present, all the magic and terror and  creativity and dreams and possibilities of childhood.

Such golden seeds do not die, they are always within us, waiting for the call to awaken and grow.

Always, from the first, we are confronted with the choice: to live our dreams or to be safe. This is the decision I had to make when I got the call, living in New Jersey, in a place I did not love doing work I no longer loved. I was alone there, I had no friends, no sense of belonging, no community. I was asleep there, existing but not alive.

When one thinks of many reasons for not going or has fear and remains in his or her society because it’s safe, the results are very different from what happens when you answer the call. If you refuse to go, then you are someone else’s servant and you remain someone else’s servant for the rest of your life. When you refuse the call, there is a kind of drying up, a hollowing out, a sense of life lost, a sense of regrets. I imagine it is a choice all of us have to make at one time or another. Do we answer the call when it comes,  or not? I answered the call, late in life, I abandoned the notion of living for safety, I was someone else’s servant my entire life.

If you decide to go – the journey may be entirely within you, you do not have to move away – then you will be  setting off on your own true adventure, a journey tailored to your own own deep spiritual needs. Magical guides, often in the form of animals, will appear to help you. Trust that they will be there. And you must be strong, the hero journey is frightening, on the call to adventure, you will leave rules, security, most of your known truths, the beliefs of those around you, behind, perhaps for good. The people around  you may not understand, they can no longer see what you see, you will no longer think what they think.

You will be alone, at least for a time.

As you go towards the center of your being, more help will appear, and more travail. You will face difficult trials and challenges. You will have to surrender more and more of what  you have always hung onto, your guideposts to life, your truths. The final leg of the hero journey – I am not there yet, I sometimes feel close – is a total giving up, a yielding all the way. This is a place in your head that is the direct opposite to your life experiences, all you have been taught in school, what you have read in the media, what your parents and grandparents and siblings have assured you is the absolute truth and reality of the world.

Psychologically and spiritually, it is a shift into the unconscious, into the spirit world; it’s a move into a new world and field of action about which you know nothing. It might be good, it might be bad, it is journey into the unknown. If it is successful, you will return to the world reborn, eager to share what you have seen and learned. Or, you may fall into a dark space, a dark hole, and never climb out. There are no guarantees on this trip.

My hero journey began in 2000, when I bought a cabin in upstate New York, and guided by the writings of Thomas Merton, I set out and left my world behind for a life in nature, a life with animals, a life of creativity and writing. Everything Campbell said of the hero journey came true for me. I found magical helpers along the way – Orson, Rose, Izzy, Red, Mother, Elvis. My human guides, some of whom remain in my life, most of whom are gone, told me I was looking for love.

I found love, she was a magical helper, a spirit who appeared in the form of a loving human being. She is my guide and helper still. All that I had been led to believe about life turned out not to be true for me, I made a great shift to the unconscious, a journey into the unknown. I remain on this journey, it has been a long trip, I am coming to believe I will always be on it, to the rest of my life. It separated me from the world, and connected me to the world. I began my life anew, I answered the call, I went to a dark and frightening place and was nearly broken and unable to return.

The way was opened through the walls of day and night into the dark where the jewels grow. And I am finding them still. Before I answered the call, I was asleep, I was drying up. I did not understand my place in the world, there was not enough of me alive and awake for anyone else to know.

The deeper I go on this journey, the older I get, the harder I work, the closer I get t the final realization, the heavier the resistance. I am coming down to those areas that are the ones that are the most entrenched and repressed, and that is both frightening and disturbing. This is a wall I have to climb, an opening I have to walk through. This is where magical helpers are most urgently needed.

And then I will come back, to tell what I saw, to share what I know, to do as much good as I can. The final thing is knowing, loving, and serving life in a way in which I am eternally at rest, at peace.

When the world

seems to be falling apart,

the rule is to hang onto your own bliss,

It’s the life that survives.