I’m reading (re-reading) Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth.  It is the book I will be using for the mythology class next semester and, though I did not get to choose my own book, I already own it.  Serendipity.  I was meant to teach this class!  (Hopefully enough people will sign up for it to allow me to teach it.)

I love Campbell.  Watching his mid-80’s interview with PBS’s Bill Moyer (loosely transcribed in The Power of Myth) is mesmerizing.  The man had so much energy it’s contagious just watching him, twenty years after his death.  I read him and I feel like I’m becoming more introspective, looking inward rather than outward, digging down deep for all of that intellectual and spiritual stuff that gets lost in the day-to-day materialistic stuff.

Of course, what I love most about Joseph Campbell is that he speaks to me on an intuitive level, he reinforces what I already know (even when I wonder if I know what I know I know… oh!).  He writes about following your bliss, about going “where your body and soul want to go.” I try to live my life that way.

In the Middle Ages, a favorite image that occurs in many, many contexts is the wheel of fortune.  There’s the hub of the wheel, and there is the revolving rim of the wheel.  For example, if you are attached to the rim of the wheel of fortune, you will be either above going down or at the bottom coming up.  But if you are at the hub, you are in the same place all the time… That is following your bliss.

That’s what writing is for me, always has been.  It is my “hub,” my center.  My bliss.

Posted by Kristina in Life in Writing at 08:49 PM Permalink 1 comment