Ten years ago, I boarded a plane in Portland, Oregon, on
Christmas Day. Landing the following day in a bizarre Parisian snow and ice
storm.
My only plan was to spend one year in Paris.
If you want to hear God laugh, then tell her your plans. Sometimes, she takes
them and sprinkles them with more magic than you ever could have imagined.
Before I boarded that airplane, I never could have guessed that a decade later,
Paris and Burgundy would become my new normal.
It's been ten years since I moved to France, and five years since I have written on my blog.
When I started this blog in 2008, living in Paris was part of a bigger vision that I imagined for myself. Or as Joseph Campbell calls it, Paris was my Call to Adventure.
Before this five year hiatus, much of what I wrote about captured the first two parts of my Monomythic journey–Separation and Initiation. Yet, it is the Return portion of the cycle that seems to get the least amount of attention. My five-year silence is testament to that.
Campbell says in The Hero with a Thousand Faces that "The returning hero, to complete his adventure, must survive the impact of the world." The trick in returning is to retain the wisdom gained on the quest, to integrate that wisdom into a human life, and then maybe figure out how to share the wisdom with the rest of the world. Campbell says,
"The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life. Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss?
As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes. The easy thing is to commit the whole community to the devil and retire again into the heavenly rock dwelling, close the door, and make it fast. But if some spiritual obstetrician has drawn the shimenawa across the retreat, then the work of representing eternity in time, and perceiving in time eternity, cannot be avoided."
Here's to the Return segment!
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