I was reading Joseph Campbell yesterday and this passage came up, ‘the return and reintegration with society, which is indispensable to the continuous circulation of spiritual energy into the world, and which, from the standpoint of the community, is the justification of the long retreat, the hero himself may find the most difficult requirement of all.’
Holy shit Mr. Campbell.
Despite his monomyth being so widely distributed through media - the return is almost a throw away portion of the story. People will replicate the monomyth and then imbibe the happily ever after of fairy tales and give no real heed for the essential vitality in the act of returning. Yet the return feeds us all. No wonder there is so much extraction and depletion from all of our activities. The monomyth really does tie into many threads of reality.
Think of farming. If all farmers did was return prunings, or crop stalks, to the land, there would be significantly less erosion of the microbial life base which constitutes soil health. There is a method called chop and drop, which is where we prune, and simply drop the prunings at the base of tree. This reduces weed growth, returns much needed carbon to the soil, creates moisture traps, creates homes for critters, and protects the soil from the sun. All of this feeds back into the system overall, replacing extraction with regeneration. In Permaculture, we employ the ideas of source and sink, that is a source of energy and its eventual entropic sink out of the system. By slowing energy down, reusing everything, returning everything, having one system feed another, and another, we engender our habitats with longevity.
Think of education. If all lessons were framed around the return of thinking and action to the local, there would be significantly less depletion of the necessary people to repair and heal a place, which constitutes communal continuity. But it is a very normal response. After going to university and then graduating into the world, we often express the exact same termination of the return.
All problems Humans face are local. They are within the village and community. Anything beyond that is what is known as a deluge myth, whereby the world is wiped clean and the heroic journey rolls out slightly differently but mostly the same. It has been observed that people are graduating younger and younger, not because the age of graduation has changed but because the maturation, by way of this heroic journey, has been interrupted.
Perhaps this is the crux of the infantilisation of the west - we simply don’t complete the journey home and so do not fully integrate the teachings. We can certainly go on someone else's heroic journey, through stories, and find ourselves, mostly, talking the talk. But when it comes to practising what was hard won by the particular protagonist, our embodiment of it feels excruciatingly awkward - its like a foreign language in our mouth for the first few months of learning it, the shapes are not very intuitive. With this realisation of the glove not fitting, how do we act? Are we inspired to face our own journey? Or do we simply become that big talker proffering slippery teachings, parroting without the necessary scars to show we earned their wisdom?
Say we do go on a journey, and raise the standard for ourselves. We decide we deserve more, we deserve different. All of the familiar faces - waning in delight like slow seasons unfolding toward the doomsday winter of bitterness - simply makes us nostalgic for the brilliance and excitement of being on the road. We arrive back, after months or years away, sell our shit and head for greener pastures… it’s really not a very heroic thing to do, is it? Take the notion of 'moving back in with your parents'. Doesn't it make you want to scream? Or even down the road from them, it is painted as a kind of failure.
Yet all of the stories teach us, that in fact, this is the work. The reason the stories don't show us the life of the returned is because it is what we have to do, it cannot be shown or told - it is specific to the individual, the community, the place, and the nature of our journey finding completion there.
This return is likely the most difficult act of the hero.
But why should that be? I believe that Ram Dass hit the proverbial nail on the head when he said, 'If you think you are enlightened, go home for the weekend,' which is to say, 'well done for collecting all of this wisdom, now prove you have been a good apprentice and apply it to a familiar setting, with people who know you only from before the journey.'
Truly teaching or distributing the wisdom and practising it in the day to day brings to mind the other classic of enlightened thinking, 'chop wood, carry water.' The work needs doing, by returning we have not become promoted, we have become integrated.
Joseph Campbell continues, 'the problem of making known the way of illumination to people wrapped in economic problems may seem too great to solve.' The core of the issue could simply be that the work is in the too hard basket.
This is the missing somatopoetic of the journey of becoming - remaking home in the shape of the wisdom of the world. It is sorely needed, and we are all the more compromised because of its absence. The process of integration is a bodily one, hence my use of the term somatopoetic. It is the creative embodiment of these wisdoms from the road. How we carry ourselves and act around the familiar is the work, and is a work of the body. I find with my clients that the wordiest, the most intellect dominant folk are the most likely to struggle with getting into the body. But the body is where the rubber of talk meets the road of walk. Somatic practices are, at their core, a way of 'returning home'.
Thank you for your attention. If this piece has resonated at all for you, I would love to know your thoughts about it.
And if you know anyone who might benefit from or enjoy the message within this piece, it would mean the world to me that you share this with them.
This piece really resonated. I do work with people around integration and like your said coming back into the body is often a missing piece. I'm not specialized in somatic work though so might need to pick your brain on it!