Follow Your Bliss

My general formula for my students is "Follow your bliss." Find where it is, and don't be afraid to follow it.
-Joseph Campbell

When deciding how to organize all of the signs I've seen and captured with my Iphone along my way, in my urgency to gather and organize them, I hastily created a file. But, today, my Cat Tigger, as he often does, came along, as I replied to a comment on my first post, and walked across my keyboard, bringing up my photos. He did not bring up my file of signs, but rather, My complete file of over a thousand some Iphone Photos. As I believe in both Synchronicity and Serendipity, and their relationship to one another, and to in fact, my life, I make the decision to use, for this, my first official post, One of the first photos I see in the lineup.

It's a sign I saw in my own home, on my kitchen window sill, in one of my favorite rooms in my house, where lots of time is spent with my family. It's one of the places I regularly follow my bliss, serving up recipes old and new, replacing required ingredients with ones on hand, and making multiple versions of my own signature barbeque sauce which I began creating when I was in college.

But What is Bliss?

Bliss, from Middle English is defined by Webster as complete Happiness. But it's more than that.

The man who brought the word into the vernacular, Joseph Campbell defined it in a way that captured its very essence.

Joseph Campbell was a life-long student and teacher of the human spirit and mythology--not just the mythology of cultures long dead, but of living myth, as it made itself known in the work of modern artists and philosophers--individuals who searched within themselves and their societies to identify the need about which they were passionate. He called this burning need that they sought to fulfill their bliss.

"If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are -- if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time."- Joseph Campbell

It is a matter of identifying that pursuit which you are truly passionate about and attempting to give yourself absolutely to it. In so doing, you will find your fullest potential and serve your community to the greatest possible extent.

In an extensive interview with Joseph Campbell televised on PBS,

Bill Moyers asks:

Do you ever have the sense of... being helped by hidden hands?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time - namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you.

I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.

(From the Joseph Campbell Website: JCF.org)

I think when you begin following your bliss,in my words,that which brings you joy, many synchronicities and serendipities begin to unfold.

Synchronicity:

the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality —used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung-

and Serendipity:

the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.

As if by Accident.

But, in my mind there are no accidents, or coincidences. As Barbara Dilingham wrote:

“Life is not a path of coincidence, happenstance, and luck, but rather anunexplainable, meticulously charted course for one to touch the lives ofothers and make a difference in the world."

I believe this is true, and so I give to you the signs I have seen, which have resonated with Me..

My Unexplainable, meticulously Charted course. I hope it will touch your lives, and somehow make a difference.

Uncork your Bottled up Bliss,

set it Free

And see what happens.