Sublime

Stories like these are core to what mythologist Joseph Campbell began to identify in the 1940s as the Hero’s Journey theme in global storytelling, a theme that I was grateful to start understanding in my midtwenties. Hero’s Journey stories convey the transformation of a person—almost always a Quarterlifer—from one level of consciousness to another.

Each of these elements has its own call to the work you love: Integrity, the call of conscience; Service, the call of compassion; Enjoyment, the call of your talents; and Excellence, the call to greatness, the call of your destiny. The conscience, or inner voice, speaks to us through creative inspirations, visions, and intuitions. Compassion calls

Sometimes the answer is to be mothered, and sometimes it is to become the mother. This is true on the human level, but it can also happen on the spiritual level. Ariel, who was very undermothered, turned to the goddess tradition to provide a positive model of the mother and the deep feminine, finding it healing and transformative.

Eventually we find that, after unearthing our misconceptions in such diverse areas as love relationships, friendship, work, play, sexuality, and creativity, there will be certain common denominators to our images. Our work will circle around certain kinds of issues and we can begin to identify the false belief behind these issues as our main image.

Our Egos are like the chair of the board. And the board members are the archetypes within us. Each needs to be heard from.

Most people have an Everybody made up of the people who raised them, plus a few individuals who became very important to them at crucial developmental stages in their lives.

leitmotifs,