My real life began when I moved to this remote town in upstate New York. I was leaving everything familiar behind, and I knew soon enough that I could never return.

Why did I come up here, I am wondering, today, a day of peaceful and silent meditation? I need to remind myself to remember why and never forget it. I was on a hero’s journey.

According to Joseph Campbell, the whole idea of the hero’s journey is that I set out to recover my unrealized, unutilized potential. I was running out of time.

My father often told me that I wasn’t living up to my potential. He was right. For him, that meant playing basketball or baseball; for me, it was much more profound and out of reach.

I knew there was more to me than my life suggested; so much had been lost in my turmoil, fear, and confusion. I set out to find what was lost and return it.

I was, wrote Campbell in Pathways To Bliss, “to bring this treasure of understanding back and integrate it into a rational life. This isn’t easy.” He added that getting this discovery back into the world can be even more difficult than going down into my depths in the first place.

I was and is more complicated. I tore my own family to pieces and left everything I knew behind.

It was all a leap of faith. I could teach (or start a blog) if nothing else. The human in me wanted love, and the artist wanted to come out. I found both of these things on my journey and brought them home. It was challenging and it was painful; it was also the most rewarding decision of my life.

The artist and writer in me sought to take colors, put them on a disk, and spin them.

The colors of this world, wrote Campbell, can “be arranged in so artful a way that  you experience through them the true light.”

This has been the story and the meaning of my flower pictures, the start of a new hero journey.

Campbell called this the revealing power of Maya; the function of art is to serve that end. Here, I learned, was my vocation: no more jobs. I would have to make a living differently and see my life differently.

I knew there was an artist in me. Artists are often the magical helpers along the hero’s journey, as I was to learn. Evoking symbols and motifs that connect us to our deepest selves can help us along the hero journey of our lives and that of others. I still believe this is how Maria and I found one another.

The hero’s journey is one of those universal stories, patterns, and myths through which radiance can shine brightly. A good life, I am learning,  is not one hero journey but one journey after another. The search to be as good as I can be is never over. I can never be perfect. I can only try to be better.

My hero journey began in a cabin atop a mountain near my home. It was different from everything I had ever known. It was lonely and terrifying, beautiful and stirring, rewarding beyond imagination. The pieces of my life began to come together.

Over and over again, I am called to the realm of adventure, to the new horizons waiting for me. Each time, there is the same problem.

Do I dare?

And if I dare, the dangers are there, and the love and help are also. My choice is either the fulfillment or the fiasco; sometimes, it’s both.

But there is, as Campbell wrote, always the possibility of bliss.

Bliss is my Sirius, my bright star in the sky.