Love in Action Heals Us and the World
Contact Me
close
A Roadmap for the Hero, Part 2: Call to Adventure

2. Call to Adventure

The call to adventure is the day when everything changes. Some incident requires the hero to change their comfortable yet flawed course. Something happens to take the hero out of her ordinary life and into an adventure. There may be a direct threat to her safety, her family, her way of life, or to the peace of the neighborhood where she lives. It doesn’t have to be a dramatic incident like a war or a death. The Call to Adventure can be an everyday situation and the hero’s response to it disrupts the comfort of her Ordinary World. The Call brings up all the hero’s fears and doubts, presents a challenge, and sometimes causes the hero to go on a quest. 

Can you recall a time when some event sent you in a new direction? The Call to Adventure can come in many guises. You get a phone call. The test results come back. You get the promotion. You lose your job. You take a new route home. Something comes in the mail. You say “yes” when you would normally have said “no.”

Let’s take another look at how Doris receives her Call to Adventure:

“Just when she questioned why she’d ever been born a fairy at all, she became the most important fairy who ever lived. Fairies used to fly in and out of their own lairs, very proud of how they decorated them with their own sense of style. It was all the rage to have the most up-to-date artwork on the walls of their lairs and the most efficient kitchen appliances in their tiny kitchens. 

They spent most of their days playing jokes on the animals living in the woods like the white-tail deer, coyotes, red foxes, red squirrels, porcupines, and even beavers. Because that’s what fairies do, they lift spirits through their folly. When they got their fill of belly laughs, they swiftly flew home to their own lairs. 

In an odd twist of fate, Doris opened her door one day after baking her favorite honey cakes, and every fairy in the land flew inside her house. 

“Goodness! What on earth is going on!” Doris exclaimed. She thought they might be playing a joke on her.”

One day Doris’s doorbell rang, and she opened her door. That was her call to adventure. Can you imagine something so mundane changing a life? Lots of movies work this way. Especially romantic comedies. In movies, they talk about the “meet cute,” a mundane moment where the romantic leads meet. In The Holiday, the character played by Kate Winslet meets her romantic interest played by Jack Black when he rings her doorbell and she doesn’t know how the technology works to answer it. 

Has a mundane moment changed your comfortable life? Did you ever literally open your door and discover someone bringing you life-changing news? Did you respond or react? Doris responded by opening the door and listening to what the fairies had to say. Take some time to write down the moment you received your Call to Adventure and describe whether it caused you to go on a quest. 

This is Part 2 of a 12 part series.

Be sure to read Part 1, if you missed it!

Tags
Hero’s Journey
HSP
Roadmap

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You Might Also Like
return
A Roadmap for the Hero, Part 12: Return With The Elixir

12. The End of the Journey This is the final stage of the hero’s journey. She returns home to her Ordinary World a changed woman and will have grown as a person, gained knowledge, faced many terrible dangers and even death but now looks forward to the start of a new life. Her return may […]

Read more
A Roadmap for the Hero, Part 10: The Road Back

Doris gets a little help on The Road Back to her Ordinary World after receiving the reward of adulation because of her gifts of hospitality, positivity and baking.

Read more
The Power of Storytelling

Amazing storytelling is crucial when fundraising: good stories inspire. Good stories coming from the heart, that is. Stories that have the power to change what is outdated and no longer works. Stories that live in and for today’s world, and not in the long-gone past. Stories that resonate with the collective consciousness. These are the tales of transformation and of love in action.

Read more
Humane Education Saves Animals, And Us

Understanding animals shows them respect. Doing so illuminates the interdependence between and among species, including humans. This understanding doesn’t come from books or nature films alone. It doesn’t come from a brisk walk through a zoo. The understanding needed grows through the guided exposure to animals’ stories, strengths, threats and survival skills.

Read more
Where There is Love, There is Life

After dropping the tool he had in his hand, he wiped his forehead and eyes and stood up, puzzled. What in the world can that be?, he must have said to himself, but because his preoccupation was with the broken-down water system and he knew that he had a limited amount of time to fix it, he kept ignoring the idea that maybe, and seriously maybe, something else needed his attention right away elsewhere. He couldn’t exactly pinpoint where those sounds came from, but he quickly figured out once he started walking behind the gate and around the pond with the papyrus trees.

Read more
A Roadmap for the Hero, Part 9: Reward

Doris receives adulation from fairies and bats through their laughter. This is her reward. Her honey cakes worked to bring joy and peace. Doris’s reward lies in helping the fairies see the fruits of their folly-filled labor––the witness of their first joke. This gives the fairies wisdom, and they can use it to give them courage to not fly away and be brave.

Read more