The Hero's Journey

On this last day of the year I’m still mourning the loss of a dear friend of mine, Javier Navascues, who passed away in the fall. I miss our long conversations about everything under the sun, and his instructions in the basics of Chi Kung. I’m wearing a saffron colored sweater he gave me and reading a book he lent me: The Hero’s Journey, a series of interviews with Joseph Campbell, whose life and work weave myth, religion, psychology, literature and art. It’s the story of a “left-handed” path. Campbell says: life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. Find your own true passion and follow it. The path that is no path. The search for the meaning of life is really a search for a deep experience of life. Javier had underlined that last phrase.

I’ve also been reading through some of Javier’s letters to me from a trip he made to India and get a sense of a deep stirring of spirit.

In one letter, he describes how he met Tenzin Palmo, an English woman who went to study Buddhism in India in the 60s and upon achieving enough knowledge to receive advanced teachings was refused access, as a woman, perhaps as a foreigner, to higher practices. Her master suggested she go meditate in a cave, like Milarepa. So she went up into the mountains and found one. The nearby villagers thought she was crazy; it snows 8 months out of the year up there. She ended up living in the cave for 11 years, and when she came down the Buddhist monks who had rejected her now called her Venerable One...

In one of Tenzin’s talks, she starts by relating the time the Dali Lama came to teach in the nearby village. When the Dali Lama had left she asked an old woman what he had said. The old woman replied that she hadn’t understood much, but she thought what the Dali Lama wanted to say was: “To have a good heart is nice”....

Javier had a good heart. At the memorial service held for him his family shared a poem he’d written a year before his death:

I begin the long goodbye

Feeling – if not regretting – the sun’s hot course,

Waiting for browning leaves to fall

I gather up the late harvest

And in joy relish every fig and grape

Every glass of wine,

The last roses fading on my doorstep.