Following the Hero’s
call to
By Lisa Reagan
What are we really doing when we decide to live and parent consciously? In longing for a more peaceful and healthy
life, what drives us to defy the chanted “You’ll spoil that
baby if you pick it up,” or reject the GMO, the overused
antibiotic or weapons of mass distraction, and say, “No,
I think there’s another way”? Could it be that in these
seemingly small but life-affirming gestures the parent is
“following the hero’s call”?
One of the seminal works of the 20th century, Joseph
Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, presents the
revolutionary insights of the Hero’s Journey, a universal
motif of adventure and transformation that runs through
virtually all of the world’s mythic traditions—and our
daily lives. As Campbell discovered, there is really only
ONE story at the core of all of our stories. The impact
of the Hero’s Journey cannot be underestimated, as its
archetypal model influences modern storytelling, and
storytelling is how we make sense of our lives and the
world around us. George Lucas credits Campbell’s book
as the inspiration for Star Wars, our modern mythology
of personal and world transformation.
As a seventh grader in 1977, I vividly remember sitting
slack-jawed in a dark theater watching Luke Skywalker
run out of his uncle’s desert home in frustration, stand on
a windy dune and stare wistfully at Tatooine’s two setting
suns. Luke was hearing the hero’s call to a transformative
adventure. It meant rejecting everything that did not
support his heart’s wisdom, even though he had no idea
what it meant to follow that call, or where it would lead
him. I still play that scene on You Tube when I want to
remember the enchanted feeling of the hero’s call to
adventure. It is magical. And so is our brief, transformative adventure with our children.
What calls us as parents to envision a better world for
our children and act on our heart’s wisdom? What is the
cost of rejecting our culture? Should we think of ourselves
as victims of an oppressive world and give up, or follow
the call that will lead us through a journey that promises
to transform ourselves and the world as we go. And that
last part? That is not a fairy tale. That part is true, especially for parents who read Pathways.
Pathways readers belong to the segment of the population who are actively seeking to tip the world toward
peace and sustainability through their individual and
conscious living choices. Cultural Creatives were identi-
fied for the first time in 2000 by social scientists Paul H.
Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson in their research-based
book The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are
Changing the World. Ray and Anderson defined Cultural
Creatives as people who “care deeply about ecology and
saving the planet, about relationships, peace, social
justice, and about self actualization, spirituality and
self-expression. Surprisingly, they are both inner-directed
and socially concerned; they’re activists, volunteers and
contributors to good causes more than other Americans.”
If there are so many of us—millions—why doesn’t it
seem that way? Ray and Anderson answer: “However,
because they’ve been so invisible in American life, Cul-
tural Creatives themselves are astonished to find out how
many share both their values and their way of life. Once
they realize their numbers, their impact on American
life promises to be enormous, shaping a new agenda for
the twenty-first century. What makes the appearance of
the Cultural Creatives especially timely today is that our
civilization is in the midst of an epochal change, caught
between globalization, accelerating technologies and a
deteriorating planetary ecology. A creative minority can
have enormous leverage to carry us into a new renais-
sance instead of a disastrous fall.”
So, we are invisible in our culture to one another un-
less we make an effort to find each other? This effort to
find and create community consciously can feel awkward
when we labor under the industrial world’s value that
“going it alone” is heroic. But looking at Campbell’s
model, we can see that for thousands of years, heroes
have always been surrounded by beloved companions on
their adventures. Tragically, studies show that while our
culture is profoundly lacking in social connections of any
kind, parents in particular are the least likely group to
create social bonds.
For example, the oft-cited Better Together Report
by the Saguaro Seminar of Harvard University’s John F.
Kennedy School of Government warns that “the national
stockpile of ‘social capital’—our reserve of personal bonds
and fellowship—is seriously depleted.” And the Building
Strong Families Initiative shows that most parents are,
just as predicted, “going it alone”—even though the benefits of a social support system include better parent-child
relationships and better school performance for children.
