The Return: Bringing Back the Boon
The only thing that requires more courage than the decision to embark on a heroic adventure into the unknown is the decision to return to one's everyday world with the new awarenesses one has gleaned. There is every temptation to decide to leave them by the wayside along the pathway home. They are, after all, weighty. Bringing them back is to be a different person than those in one's life expect one to be. Count on one to be.
The difficulty is that none of us is ultimately an entirely separate being. All of us live in a fabulously intricate weaving together of lives. So there is no way one person can change without creating a wave of change that flows through the entire web. Others may not feel ready for change, may not want the impact on their lives that change in one's own life will surely bring to them.
Ultimately the ability to return home in a changed way, in a more "in the moment" way, is simply "the courage to be". The tried and true old self is outgrown, like a discarded seashell the organism leaves behind in order to inhabit a more spacious one.
Life itself seeks this change, this developing forward. For this reason, as those who have studied the "hero's journey" (Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung primary among them) have noted, life itself provides assistance to the person who takes the risk of coming back changed. From unexpected quarters one finds "supernatural aide" coming to assist one. And, if all goes well, and there is enough of this "grace" for the task, those around one will be able to start dissolving some of the rocks in their own rivers:
There Comes the Strangest Moment - Kate Light
There comes the strangest moment in your life,
when everything you thought before breaks free--
what you relied upon, as ground-rule and as rite
looks upside down from how it used to be.
Skin's gone pale, your brain is shedding cells;
you question every tenet you set down;
obedient thoughts have turned to infidels
and every verb desires to be a noun.
I want--my want. I love--my love. I'll stay
with you. I thought transitions were the best,
but I want what's here to never go away.
I'll make my peace, my bed, and kiss this breast…
Your heart's in retrograde. You simply have no choice.
Things people told you turn out to be true.
You have to hold that body, hear that voice.
You'd have sworn no one knew you more than you.
How many people thought you'd never change?
But here you have. It's beautiful. It's strange.