The Rapture of Being Alive

I have recently been watching (again) Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers. Joseph Campbell is brilliant. He had such a plain way about him, but he was so incredibly insightful. I was amazed by him when I was first introduced to him in college and I am staggered by him all over again today. What’s terrible is that even though I have read some of his work and seen most of these interviews before, it all seems to have been squeezed out of my brain to make room for lesser propaganda. It is vaguely familiar, but it’s really like I’m hearing it all again for the first time. Oh, to be able to retain more than that.

I listen to what Joseph Campbell says and how he says it, and my little brain tries to unfold and make room for something, anything he says to stick, but then old gray just kind of rolls over itself and settles in to whatever it was ruminating on before: a grocery list, a potty training schedule, trying to remember which Bee Gee is dead, the lyrics to the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie,” or something wholly unnecessary that I’m writing for my blog (case in point).

But in the end, Campbell makes me happy. He makes me think. I stopped the DVD at several places so I could write down what he said. Just so I could try and get it a little better, or a little more. Here is one of those things:

"We are so engaged to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s about."

Yeah, man. What he said.