Hey folks – we’re gathering at the University of Winnipeg this Sunday. Same time as usual (10:30), but not the same location. If you haven’t been to this location before, don’t be daunted by the length of the directions. It makes good sense “on the ground”. As follows:

We’ll be meeting at the University of Winnipeg Club Room. It’s located on the 4th floor of Wesley Hall. That’s the castle-ish building that faces Portage Avenue on the main U of W campus (515 Portage Avenue).

Details about finding our gathering:  Enter the building by the main front doors (right in the middle of the front of the building, on the Portage Avenue side). There is a red and white campus sign on the grounds to the left of the doors that says “Wesley Hall”. Once inside, go straight ahead up the first short set of stairs, and take the wide curving hallway to your right. Once you go around the curve, you will see the elevator in an alcove on your right. Take the elevator to the fourth floor, exit to your left, and you’ll be in the Club. Or you could just follow the smell of the freshly brewed coffee…

Parking is on the surrounding streets, most notably convenient on Balmoral, the first street to the east of Wesley Hall.

Talky Bit – last week I laid out a bit of an overview of Joseph Campbell’s “Heroes Journey” model, including some of the critique it’s met with over the years. If you’ve encountered or studied this model before, just be aware that we are not engaging with it “in depth”, but rather using it as a gateway for the consideration of our own journeys and stories. It will come as no surprise to those familiar with my approach to ideas to hear that we didn’t get as far as I had hoped last week. Basically, I provided an overview of the model and we got started on some community dialogue about our own stories. So we’ve got a lot of story telling and story exploring still to do, and that’s what we’ll be focusing on this week. No obligation to share, of course. What I’m hoping to facilitate is the opportunity to reflect on how the path we each take can give us something unique and powerful to share with others. Our journeys, even when they might seem complicated, conflicted or confusing, bring with them lessons and gifts that can be positively life-changing for others, but only if we recognize them and share them. So that’s where we’ll be headed. I should also add that I think exploring this sort of terrain can help us learn something essential about offering ourselves to others as friends – an important realm to explore in light of the epidemic scale of loneliness we seem to be surrounded by these days.

Following are the questions we’ll be considering together this Sunday:

When and how did you receive a call to adventure?

What picture of home did you leave behind (cultural, personal, system of belief)?

Who has helped or guided you on the journey?

What tasks or challenges have you faced / overcome?

What died along the way?

What did the experience give you?

What could you now offer to others?

Hope that helps. I’ll see you on Sunday.

Peace,

Tim Plett