The Return Home - Part 3 of 3

Bringing Forth What We Claim To Be Our Own

Sun Behind The Clouds at the center of our Journey Intensive Base Camp - Near Spruce Knob, West Virginia

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"If you bring forth what is within you,

what you bring forth will save you.

If you do not bring forth what is within you,

what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

- Gospel of Thomas

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“The work of representing eternity in time,

and perceiving eternity in time, cannot be avoided.”

- Joseph Campbell

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• The ultimate challenge of the return home is to wholeheartedly claim the life-giving potency of the experience gained on the journey as real and as one’s own.

Once we lay claim to the gifts, talents and resources as being truly ours, knowing these aspects of ourselves to be true in the fibers of our being, we will need to bring these resources across the return threshold into daily life. We do this ‘bringing forth’ by taking action, and offering them to the world.

• We have to take action.

We move from inward movement of awakening, and shift towards coming outward - towards self-expression, towards manifestation, towards definitive action. Life moving forward, making its own way, as only we can, as we go – the way of mythic adventure.

This is no easy or simple task. You may have noticed by now that the world is not sitting around waiting for us to make an essential self-discovery, and to speak it out loud to others. We are not typically asked to pour our talents and gifts out into the waiting arms and needs of the world. And yet the opportunities to do so will begin to present themselves.

So we have work to do. We create or discover new pathways for our inner awakening to flow outward. We must find our way to those distinct places where timelessness and time intersect, where our ‘deep gladness meets the deep need of the world’, as Frederick Buechner says.

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Allegiances

It is time for all the heroes to go home

if they have any, time for all of us common ones

to locate ourselves by the real things

we live by.

Far to the north, or indeed in any direction,

strange mountains and creatures have always lurked-

elves, goblins, trolls, and spiders:

we encounter them in dread and wonder,

But once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold,

found some limit beyond the waterfall,

a season changes, and we come back, changed

but safe, quiet, grateful.

Suppose an insane wind holds all the hills

while strange beliefs whine at the traveler's ears,

we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love

where we are, sturdy for common things.

- William Stafford

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Today I am calling out to each of us who has found themselves to be on an important type of soul journey, that has taken us far from all that was once familiar to us, and now in turn will take us to places we have not been before. For now, it is enough to return home.

Now is the time to return to our true selves, time to be more aligned with our inner life. Now is the time to make space to be in our ‘at-home-ness’ – both in solitude and silence, and with like-minded, kindred spirits, and with those who care about us.

It is time for us to rest into a newly surrendered self, becoming more sensitized to and more grounded in our being. It’s time to settle into an embodiment of what is truly ours and ours alone to live, feeling into the excitement and the vulnerability of renewed life force energy coming alive within us.

When the time is right, we are to have the courage to follow our instincts, and express ourselves from this new place within. When we take a risk worth taking, we may find an authentic response back, which is from the life awaiting us. In doing so, we follow our bliss, we ride the wave of our aliveness.

The task is to discover and bring forth your true nature, and feed this hungry world, from the fullness of our being and aliveness of our becoming.

It is up to us.

Here are a few ways we can further integrate the boon of self-realization during our return home phase of the journey.

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Self-Reflection Practice 1

Claim Our Own Way Of Orienting To Life

This exercise does not center around a question. It is an exercise in guiding you towards your own way of orienting to the world before you. It is a key practice in laying claim to ‘your own way of seeing’, your own way of perceiving the world before you. To enter into your own sense of aliveness, you can do this no other way.

Take a few minutes to slow down your body, your breath, and your mind. Give yourself at least ten full inhalations and exhalations, and allow your thoughts to quiet down. Wait until you feel a sense of spaciousness and openness settle into you.

Then slowly read the words of the next William Stafford poem.

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When I Met My Muse

William Stafford

I glanced at her and took my glasses

off – they were still singing. They buzzed

like a locust on the coffee table and then

ceased. Her voice bellied forth, and the

sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and

knew that nails up there took a new grip

on whatever they touched. “I am your own

way of looking at things,” she said. “When

you allow me to live with you, every

glance at the world around you will be

a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand.

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Let these words from the muse echo within you. “I am your own way of looking at things. When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.”

Feel into how this type of presence can begin to be claimed as a part of you, and being connect to you. Can you allow yourself to be informed by such a deep re-orientation, just for today?

How you claim your own ability to perceive the world as it is, and let it be your way, is crucial to being able to experience yourself as becoming more real, more alive, more like who you really are.

It will become a source of life for your creativity, your imaginative potential, and it will render you more compassionate towards yourself, and the world at large - so that you can both accept yourself as you are, and the world as it is.

This is the new starting point for a life worth living, and a future worth having.

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Self Reflection Practice 2

Joyful Participation In The Sorrows Of The World

Like the first one, this exercise does not center around a question. It is another exercise in guiding you towards your own way of orienting to the world before you. It offers you a way to accept that life inevitable involves suffering, yet we can still choose to participate joyfully in the face of life’s vicissitudes and losses.

Take a few minutes to practice patience and slowing down. Begin to bring stillness into your body. Slowly expand your breath, and allow your mind to rest. Give yourself at least ten full inhalations and exhalations. Take the time that you need to allow your thoughts to quiet down.

Wait until you feel a sense of spaciousness and openness settle into you. There is nothing you have to know right now, and no where you have to go. This is it.

Take a slow read of the following reflection from Joseph Campbell, first published in Myths To Live By:

“The obvious lesson ......... is that the first step to the knowledge of the highest divine symbol of the wonder and mystery of life is in the recognition of the monstrous nature of life and its glory in that character: the realization that this how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed.

Those who think -- and their name is legion -- that they know how the universe could have been better than it is, how it would have been if they had created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without life, are unfit for illumination.

Or those who think --as do many-- "Let me first correct society, then get around to myself" are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God's peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be.

So if you really want to help this world,
what you will have to teach is how to live in it.
And that no one can do,
who has not himself learned
how to live in it
in the joyful sorrow
and sorrowful joy
of the knowledge of life as it is.”

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Notice how you are affected by reading this particular passage. What resonates for you as ‘true’? How does that truth have its own space to reside in you?

That is life sorrowful, unjust, filled with difficulty and challenge - what does it take to accept this as a reality to become a part of?

One of my favorite lines from all of Campbell’s writing is this one. “So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it.” Life on life’s terms, as it is. This is the orientation point for the return home. We change ourselves in relation to the needs and realities of the world, not the other way around.

Notice what reflecting on this particular passage does to your state of consciousness. Does it open your mind or elicit despair? Create a sense of wonder or mystery, or cause you to contract against it?

The ultimate hero task, needed for the 21st century in which we now live, is the ability to surrender, and say ‘yes’ to it all, as it is. No easy task, in any way. But the one thing we can do that allows us to find peace, joy, and acceptance in our lives, and offer that to others.

As I mentioned earlier, the other task at hand is to discover and bring forth your true nature, and feed this hungry world, from the fullness of our being and aliveness of our becoming.

It is indeed up to us.

• Michael Mervosh

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“What I think is a good life is one hero journey after another.

Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are

called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare?

And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also,

and the fulfillment or the fiasco.

There’s always the possibility of a fiasco.

But there’s also the possibility of bliss.”

- Joseph Campbell

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Thank You

Thank you for being a part of the Hero’s Journey® series of essays, where I have written about The Call To Adventure, Crossing The Threshold, Entering The Dark Forest, Having Adventures & Ordeals, Encountering Allies & Synchronicity, Entering The Belly Of The Beast, Discovering The Boon, and The Return Home.

I have interspersed other essays as part of my Substack writing, and I will return now to those more loosely arranged themes that attempt to bring dignity, levity and fresh perspectives to the challenges of the human condition.

I remain grateful to those of you who have been supporters of my writings as part of Tracking The Zeal Of Eternity, both financially and verbally, as it provides me with the necessary headwinds of support to stay on this important track.

More to come.

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Looking For A Fresh & Enlivening Journey Experience?

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A Musical Journey Immersion Through Voice & Song - October 2nd - 5th, 2025

With Korel Tunedor & Michael Mervosh

This uniquely composed workshop makes available, through embodying and expressing one’s own voice as vessel and instrument, a felt sense of what it’s like to be immersed in the joyful participation of being alive in one’s body, through the rhythms and expressions of making music together.

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What to Expect

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Lifebridge Sanctuary Musical Group Space

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