Until this point of the story, the hero’s course made sense… in a way. Not conventional by any means, but from a mythic and narrative perspective, you got where they were coming from, ya know? The hero was training and growing further into themselves, slowly acquiring the skills that harmonized with their natural predispositions. Their road seemed to be an incremental yet steady climb, towards some distant goal on the horizon. However, in mythic or psychological terms, this ascent more closely resembles a descent: down into the dark and murky waters of the hero’s own inner netherworld.
Without knowing it, as the hero grows in stature and experience, they are preparing themselves for a penultimate trial with the demon that lives in their own shadow. Although the hero has had many trials and tests of courage up until this point, it is here where the encompassing darkness appears to subsume their light completely, and they seem about to break beneath the weight of evil.
Orpheus treks down the stairs of Hades’s realm to reclaim the life of his loved one; Luke discovers the true nature of Vader as he escapes without an arm and his best friend Han; and of course the saga at Golgotha, where the various beloveds are all shattered after witnessing the King of Kings vanquished before their eyes.
In the story of Perceval, during his search for the Grail of his heart’s yearning, the knight finds himself lost and wandering aimlessly through a desolate arid Wasteland.
He’s far removed from the solace of community’s comfort and left with no leads for where to go next on his journey. Devoid of human, animal, or even plant life, this realm is entirely without hope. I find this metaphor especially profound, as I feel it to be an apt description of where many of us find ourselves to be in our current society: stuck in a wasteland devoid of meaning.
Encountering the Wasteland on the Road
This Wasteland is bound to become a place you will be quite familiar with if you live a life on the road. In the early stages of your adventure, meaning flows into your life as a byproduct of simply living freely. However, as rich and rewarding as this may be, the well inevitably runs dry. At a destined point, you’re going to enter the Wasteland of your life; most of us know this place well, and we may even be fleeing from the Wasteland in our pursuit to explore the world. No matter how far we go, or how many novel cultures we immerse ourselves in, we’ll always find ourselves back in the desert from which we vowed to break free from.
When we travel, we bring with us all of the mental baggage that we had accumulated in life: all of our doubts, vices, weaknesses and chinks in psychic armour. When we move to a new place, we’re all tempted to envision ourselves leaving behind our faults in character. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
While one’s tenure in the Wasteland can categorize a wide array of internal and external struggles, it’s most significantly a full confrontation with who we are as a person, in all of our depth and unique nuance. One aspect of traveling that I love – and which I believe is the most potent – is how intense of an experience it is. This very intensity is what we all love about seeing new parts of the world, and what keeps drawing us to new horizons. However, this same intensity can catapult us into the Wasteland with a force unheralded; it summons all of the demons and parasites that inhabit our psyches, and calls them into the foray with overwhelming urgency.
Without the same comforts and scaffolding of our life back home, our life can become unrooted while traveling long term. Combined with the subjective experiential intensity of daily life, this is a recipe for existential questioning in its most daunting form.
The Wasteland as Fertile Soil
The Wasteland is a place I know quite fondly, both while I’ve been living at home in Philadelphia and in the various places I’ve traveled to so far. No matter where I venture to externally, it’s as if my inner compass is forever attuned to this barren land within. This is the exact reason why I believe we all need to become familiar and comfortable with the Wasteland; it’s a psychic realm that we all find ourselves roaming in. We must learn not to shrink from the pain and emotional tension that it incites, but to lean into the potential it presents. The Wasteland is inherently devoid of any meaning and life, and is a place where solace cannot be found. We are handed a blank canvas, and tasked with painting something to give us some semblance of purpose.
Instead of having a story of our lives handed to us and listening to external authorities, it is here where we are forced to create something of our lives. When we’re in the wasteland, whatever meaning arises for our lives must originate from within us. That is simultaneously a terrifying and riveting place to be, and frankly the only place I want to create my life from. It’s a realm without rules and regulations; nobody has it figured out or is comfortable there. It’s up to you the individual to fight and bare your teeth, and do whatever you can to figure out how to make something sprout from a soil barren of life
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