Viewing entries tagged
archetypes

Voyage and Return

It is 5am, and I’m downstairs on the couch, sitting right up against the front window. I reach my fingertips out, and feel the remains of the night chill on the glass. It’s beginning to get light outside, but there isn’t any colour yet - just a vague pastel blue grey. There’s a tree by the street, every leaf still and monochrome like a pencil sketch. I know that each minute that passes now will lift those leaves into more vibrance, along with the sky, the streaky clouds, and the limestone wall along our garden bed. And sometime between now and then, the sun will have risen, and the day will become distinct.

January to me feels like this time between first light and sunrise. A no-mans-land of vagary and indistinct shapes, each new day bringing a little bit more colour and clarity to the year, but, who really knows when the sun will actually crest the horizon. After the mad hustle of December, January is a reprieve for some, a recovery for others, a reward for yet other others.

I don’t know if it’s because I have kids, or because I'd shot weddings for so long, or both, but January was never any of those things for me. It was just, messy. School holidays meant a kind of responsibility-overload, paired with the hourly deadlines of editing the outstanding weddings of the last 8 weeks, and then topped off with all the existential questions one asks of oneself each new year:

“where am I going?”
“what really matters in life?”
“did I live a life worthy of living last year?”

In those past years, the only way to survive was to compartmentalise. In this moment, I am fully present with the kids. In this next moment, I am fully present with my editing. The next moment, going for a walk, spending time with loved ones, laughing at a thing.. It went moment by present moment, each of them disconnected from the other.

It’s not like that anymore, thank goodness. For something unsustainable, I sustained it for too long. But, January is still messy.

This year, I’m finding it useful to assign a plot archetype to the month of January. For me, it’s a VOYAGE AND RETURN plot. A protagonist heads out into the big world, experiences some things, and returns changed somehow. There’s a transformation, or an elixir brought back, or whatever else. So I’m looking back over the month as if I have just returned from a great voyage, and I’m sifting through my pockets of experiences, searching for elixirs.

With the sun already warming up the sky, and the leaves across the street bright and dancing in a new breeze, I find that my pockets are full of elixirs. I have a hope here, that I feel so deep. It will support us the whole year I reckon. Rach and I have communities that we can work with and play with, who love us and believe in great things. I find so many vials of encouragement, gifts from distant lands reminding us that we are all connected, and all valuable.

January hasn’t been a mess. It has just been a journey, and we have returned with dusty clothes and happy kids, a renewed focus and a burning drive to create things in the world.

We’re tired, but we are together, and we are as excited about the year as those dancing leaves seem to be about the new day.

the few, and deeply

In workshops with health professionals, teachers or parents, I often speak about Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey,” and the key character roles within that archetype: The hero, the mentor, the victim, the villain.

The encouragement of course, is that although we play all the roles at some point in our life (or even in a single day), we should aspire to play the Mentor role when serving and relating to others. That is, we are not competing with the hero. We’re not trying to win, be the best, or any of that. We’re not even running the same race. Instead, we're sharing what we know so that the hero has her best chance of success.

In thinking about that Mentor role, you know, the Yoda character, Mr Miyagi, Gandalf, Professor McGonegall… I started wondering how a mentor might negotiate the internet.

In a mentor role, I would want to be a part of your life, but I wouldn’t want to serve you crap. It’s not my place to just dump everything that has ever happened to me on you. I don’t have the right to throw my life at you, and demand that your time is best served by listening to me.

If I’m sharing something with you, I want it to be worth your time, and valuable to you somehow. Hell, it needs to be valuable enough to be worth MY time writing it. I can imagine that would be Gandalf’s thinking too “we are living in dangerous and powerful times, hobbit, don’t let me waste my breath!”

I think a mentor would share less on the internet, but what they share would carry more weight.
“Here’s something I’ve learned that you might benefit from..”
“Here’s a statement from me, but it’s all about you: you are loved, you are worthy, you are powerful, you are beautiful, you can do this, you have great potential..."

I just can’t see Gandalf tweeting his life away about what he ate that morning, or where he is travelling right now, or how cute his pet dragon is. I see him learning things deeply, and sharing information with great respect, waiting for an invitation before investing into another's life. For the few who seek, he would share his knowledge.

I think that is the motto of every mentor:

The few, and deeply.

I know Gandalf isn’t on Facebook. I know he’s fictional. And I know the nature of the internet is that nobody asks permission: it’s all post post post post post post post. But the archetypes exist for a reason, and I’m going to try my damnedest to learn from them, stand in the respectful mentor role, and create content that is worth my time, and that contributes to the betterment of, well, you.

We are artists

We are artists. In ancient times, it was the artists who society looked to for hope and perspective. The artist saw the world differently to the worker or the politician, and so, could offer valuable insight into a situation. And perhaps more importantly, the artist could also offer an archetype of a solution.

Artists naturally reveal truths, often universal truths. And in doing so, their audience feel two things:

  • They feel known.

  • They feel hope.


It’s not up to the artist to implement cultural change, manage new systems, oversee task forces. The artist simply creates pieces of truth, that move an audience towards something they believe in.