From Darkness to Wholeness

 Many heroic journeys seem to follow a typical pattern of defeating monsters and moving toward a kind of projected prize. It is as though somehow the "gain" were separate from the actual process of moving through one's difficulties. I beg to differ and suggest that what we call "monsters" are actually projections of things that we don't necessarily savor about ourselves that we haven't properly integrated into our personalities. Our lives are repeated efforts to reintegrate lost or dislodged inner material--and when I mean "dislodged", I am literally describing the book that gets lodged between the bookshelf and the wall by mistake! Sometimes things that were meant to lead to a fully adjusting person just get stuck between those cracks, and never truly function quite as desired. However, perhaps from a developmental perspective, there are always these chances in life that they lead to new growth possibilities later down the road.
  To use the analogy of, say, a seed that accidentally gets lodged into a crack between one thing and another: trees will grow no matter whether their seeds are planted in convenient or inconvenient spaces. Whether or not they integrate well in the rest of the environment...well, that's a slightly different story. But the point is that growth is there, and it intermingles with the environment in ways that create creative collaborations and symbiosis, to the point where one can no longer define with any certainty how a tree is ideally meant to grow. But when the right moments come together, there are new insights that allow a person to transform their potentials in new ways. I believe that a combination of inner effort and outer serendipity is needed for these things to come together.