The Call heralds a period of profound transformation, an ending and a beginning all at once.  It can throw us into chaos, fear, excitement, grief, anticipation, all kinds of emotional states, and it can awaken us to our awakeness, show us the truth of what is.  I have found that if the Call and the journey that ensues are recognized for what they are, there is a spaciousness that opens allowing an easing of the grip of fear and the alchemy of awareness can take over.  The egoic mind can relax a bit as changes unfold.
      Joseph Campbell recognized a consistent pattern in the structure of the heroic journey in mythologies all over the world, and saw that this pattern is consistent with our own contemporary life journeys. I read The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) in1980, when I was 32 years old.  I fell in love with this paradigm, as I love patterns and structures, around the same time I became immersed in my studies and personal engagement with the work of Carl Jung on archetypes (universal patterns of experience), the collective unconscious, dreams, and the Feminine.  My mythic eye opened back then and I continue to see life and its happenings, including collective events, through the lens of the archetypal journey.
     The first, and probably the most radical, life-transforming Call of my adult life came in 1982.  It announced itself as a series of archetypal dreams interwoven with a series of extraordinary experiences. One day, a divine presence of ineffable love swept into my office during a session like a soft, palpable breeze. Both my client and I felt the numinous presence. A week or so later, I had a Big Dream, in the language of Jungian analysis, in which I was told by an old shaman to "Carry the fire but don't get burned."  My analyst called it an initiation dream, and I could not have imagined what it was pointing to or what it really meant for me.