Follow Your Bliss

Discuss your favorite wilderness related books. Share your favorite poetry, quotes and folktales. Here's your chance to showcase your creative side!
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Hetchy
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Location: Santa Cruz Mountains Ben Lomond

Follow Your Bliss

Post by Hetchy »

A conversation between the late Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers from the PBS series The Power of Myth.. (Believe me this has relevance to hiking .. just read on.)

Moyers: And yet we all we all have lived a life that had a purpose. Do you Believe that?

Campbell: I don't believe that life has a purpose. Life is a lot of protoplasm with an urge to reproduce and continue in being.

Moyers: Not true- not true.

Campbell: Wait a minute. Just sheer life cannot be said to have a purpose, because look at all the different purposes it has all over the place. But each incarnation, you might say, has a potentiality, and the mission of life is to live that potentiality. How do you do it? My answer is, "Follow your bliss." There's something inside you that knows when you're in the center, that knows when you're off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you've lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don't get any money, you still have your bliss.

Moyers: I like the idea that it's not the destination that counts, it's the journey.

Campbell: Yes. As Karlfried Graf Durckheim says, "When you're on a journey, and the end keeps getting further and further away, then you realize the real end is the journey."
The Navaho have that wonderful image of what they call the pollen path. Pollen is the life source. The pollen path is the path in the center. The Navaho say, "Oh, beauty behind me, beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty above me, beauty below me. I'm on the pollen path."
You can make more money, but you can't make more time.
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