The week began with appreciation for life, Hiromi’s MOVE,
and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass on
the train. “Song of Myself.” It’s not egotistical. It’s about celebrating the universe
manifested by your own presence. “I
celebrate myself and sing myself, for every atom belonging to me as good
belongs to you.”
Then I taught the students about must, might and can’t, and
then the book gave us these pictures to look at and guess where they were
from. One picture was of Angkor Wat in
Cambodia. I’ve been there. Another was of the pyramids at Giza in
Egypt. I’ve been there. Then the next reading was about Yellowstone Park. I had a lot of stories to tell them.
Then I played some Bob Dylan songs about New York for the
class, and then Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett singing “New York, New York.” Afterward I went to the public library at 42nd
street and got a new library card, as I haven’t lived here for years and my old
one is in a box somewhere upstate.
Apparently I owed $3.75 in fines, and when she said, “You owe 375 in
fines,” my heart skipped a beat and I had her confirm that it was dollars and
cents, not just dollars. Then I thought
for a long time about what kind of book I wanted, and finally decided on The (233) Hero With a Thousand Faces,
the first book by one of my greatest guides, Joseph Campbell. I know the story of the hero journey well,
having read Power of Myth and Pathways to Bliss, which were compiled
after he died, but this is the first time I’m reading one of his original
texts.
After a hearty meal of vegetables, rice and tofu to the
sounds of For All the Innocence by
LiTE, I sat in an armchair and opened up the book, which I had begun on the
subway. My friend said, “Want to watch The Sword and the Stone on Netflix?” at
that very moment, not realizing I had just opened a book about the hero
journey. So we watched the story of King
Arthur--at the time just a runty little boy nicknamed Wart--learning the power
of knowledge, wisdom and magic from his mentor, the great wizard Merlin. Then he pulls the sword from the stone on a
snowy day and becomes king. Then we
watched a Futurama which turned out
to be about Bender becoming a folk singer who can manifest everything he writes
or thinks about into reality.
This morning I read Hero
With a Thousand Faces while standing on the subway surrounded by plenty of
faces. I wondered which ones concealed
heroes. Then I read:
The godly powers
sought and dangerously won are revealed to have been within the heart of the
hero all the time… from this point of view the hero is symbolical of that
divine creative and redemptive image which is hidden within us all, only
waiting to be known and rendered into life.
The two—the hero and his ultimate god, the seeker and the found—are thus understood as the outside and inside of a single, self-mirrored mystery, which is identical with the mystery of the manifest world. The great deed of the supreme hero is to come to the knowledge of the unity in multiplicity and then to make it known.
Today all the songs we learned were brought in by the students. The three best ones were “Don’t Stop
Believing” by Journey, “Empire State of Mind” by Jay-Z featuring Alicia Keys,
and “Is This Love?” by Bob Marley.
Three years ago today I completed (611) my journey across
the homeland and then to the pyramids by arriving at the site and ascending
the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon. I had hitchhiked, stayed with strangers, ridden
Greyhound’s with ex-con’s, hiked on snowy cliffs and camped in single digit
temperatures. Why did I do such a crazy
adventure? Because I believed in the
powerful goodness of the experience and that I would find something absolutely beautiful
and amazing at the top of the pyramid. I
definitely did, do and will continue to.
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