Home: An Update or My Life as an Archetypal Hero

Perhaps it is a sense of purpose that creates a home. The kind of purpose only achieved with a certain level of familiarity. When there is no need to ask yourself what you should be doing– when the place carves out a schedule for you, when what you should be doing becomes the rhythm of local life.

I am still relatively idle, but not anxious. It is not “nothing” I have been doing, I realize. It is arrangement and inquiry. John Lane tells me that it is a necessary part of the archetypal hero’s journey– the Departure. I have just crossed the “first threshold” and I am deep in the “Belly of the Whale”– the part that feels like the lowest point, but is really the point of infinite possibilities. It is the point where the hero finally separates the world they are coming from and the world they will now allow themselves to enter. The new world may seem dark and frightening, but it is brilliant in its invitation of metamorphosis.

I am on the threshold of something. I can feel it. I am ready to be the hero of my own story.

When I first wrote of where my home lies, enummerated the things that make me protective and sentimental about the places I have lived, Spartanburg was mostly ignored. Let me try again.

This is home: The sounds of the trains, early in the morning and late at night, when I am alone; Bruster’s just before closing, eating Black Raspberry ice cream and watching the high school kids flirt with each other while they lock up; nighttime on the makeshift “stoop,” conversation and the empty, unremarkable lots stretching in all directions, punctuated by amber street light and cigarette smoke; Papa Sam’s.

I am writing lately, inspired by the Hub City Writer’s Conference of this past weekend and the loose conventions of the “personal essay.” I am writing about the past, about people who have passed me, but somewhere in there, I am not so subtly writing about home, and how to keep it inside of you. I am praying that I will not lose heart. I am ready for something to share.