Joseph Campbell

All posts tagged Joseph Campbell

We’re All in Myth Together

Published November 20, 2014 by Susan Woodward

ujun20.v008.i04.cover I am so excited to hear that my article, “We’re All in Myth Together” has been published in Culture and Psyche, the Jung Journal of San Francisco! Click on the Journal cover to see the article.

The article is based on a presentation that I did at the Symposium on Mythology in Santa Barbara, California in September 2012.

The following is the video featuring students who were published in four of the, now six, short story anthologies that my students wrote for English 9 Enriched between 2009 and 2014.

This is so thrilling for me!!

Following My Bliss: Niagara-on-the-Lake

Published July 2, 2013 by Susan Woodward

joseph campbell“Follow your bliss.  If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living.  When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open doors to you.  I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.  If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that would have opened for anyone else.”

– Joseph Campbell

My summer assignment from the First Unitarian Church of Rochester falls into this thread.  We are being challenged to go outside our comfort zones and stretch ourselves…and I take that as having the courage to follow my bliss.   I plan to document my summer blissings here with plenty of pictures!

One thing I love to do that brings me peace is to go out and take pictures, especially flowers and other nature shots.  My daughter Robin and I took a day trip to Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario, Canada last week.  I have always loved the little town with all its shops and flowers and theatre goers (the Shaw Festival is there).

niagara_fallsIf you click on the map, you will be taken to the Niagara-on-the-Lake home page.

So the first part of the blissful event was getting to spend time with Robin and Sean the evening before, and then she and I got an early start the next day.   It was also much more blissful to drive along the Niagara River on the Canadian side by crossing the Peace Bridge in downtown Buffalo instead of driving across Grand Island to take the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls on the American side.  Let’s face it… the American side is not a pretty drive.

Tuesday was a great day to do this road trip because I do not think we would have had the awesome parking and accessibility to the village if we’d gone on the weekend.   The streets and shops were also not as jammed packed as I have seen them on Saturdays or Sundays either.  One thing that really stands out is the sight of the beautiful gardens that line the streets.

100_0247 This is an Angel’s Trumpet flower.  I had never seen one before, and I absolutely loved the color.  This picture really doesn’t do the plant justice.

100_0248I shot the inside of one of the “trumpets” and was surprised at the swirling star pattern of the petals.

100_0251 100_0254These other flowers are also gorgeous.

100_0260This just gives a taste of what the gardens along the streets look like.

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Part of following my bliss included stopping at an Irish Tea Shop for a “cuppa” and later sharing a picnic lunch that Robin packed at Dufferin Islands near the Falls.

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My plan to continue with following my bliss is to get out in the world and bring parts of it home with me through pictures.   I am feeling more active now and I want to celebrate the time I have left on this earth by being part of it and not my couch.

Student Writing: Sharing in the Journey of the Hero

Published November 2, 2011 by Susan Woodward

You know, it really warms my heart when my students get into a class assignment.  I’ve just spent the past hour “chatting” with many of my students on our Hero’s Journey website, and it’s been great.  And reading their posts on the 60 Day Sojourn has made me feel as if I am connecting with them in some way beyond just teaching them how to construct a variety of sentence structures or how to analyze a work of literature.  This project is connecting to them as individuals on a journey.

We are the heroes of our own life stories; how those stories ultimately play out will be based on our reactions to life’s challenges and the decisions we make.   Using references to mythology, literature, television, and film, we illustrate how the Hero’s Journey permeates not only our culture, but all cultures across time and geographic location. From there, we will explore how the pattern is part of the human condition and how it can be used as a tool to examine our own lives.

After referencing the connections to the stories of humanity (myths, etc), they will listen to  guided visualizations that will allow them to examine their own journeys through life. From there they will respond to introspection questions that make the project personal for them.

I sincerely hope that all my students will be open to sharing their journeys with the rest of us.   In examining ancient and recent literature as well as exploring our own life patterns, it will help us to see that we are all connected through our stories. We all have goals, trials to face, dragons to slay, and our Ultimate Boon awaits us for a job well done!

The culmination of the long term project will be to write their own heroic tales and have them read by, not only others in the class, but by other members of our site.  The work of Joseph Campbell is my passion, and I hope to see it live on through the work of my own students.   Each year, we publish an anthology of the top-voted stories (the students do the voting, not me)… and I look forward to what they will come up with this year!!

I’d like to invite anyone who happens to wander across this page to check out my students’ work!  (Just don’t spam my page, please… that really detracts from what the students are doing and I don’t appreciate that).  You can find us at http://herosjourney.ning.com

These are our previous anthologies that the students have produced.   They are published authors, complete with an ISBN number, whose stories are available to the world online through Amazon, Lulu, and Barnes and Noble!  I am very proud of their work!  And I am already so looking forward to what this year’s students will write!  Based on their replies so far, we are in for a treat!

 

by The Immortal Keepers

by the Tenders of the Embers

by Song of the Phoenix

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