Brain Food #727
Love in the hero's journey
Thoughts of the day
A short thought for today, to close this week’s exploration of love.
In fairytales and epic stories, the hero’s journey, what Joseph Campbell calls the monomyth, represents our own uncharted course towards meaning through a journey of transformation. The main fuel behind this journey is love, acting as an internal driving force to help us discover what truly matters. Ultimately. Odysseus seeks to go home, not to a town or building, but to his wife. In our own heroic journey, the path to meaning may reveal itself if we begin to pay more attention to what we love.
Love can also act as a catalyst. The monsters we encounter along the way, which often tend to be the monsters within, may just be defeated when we choose to overcome fear with hope.
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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