I Am Orpheus

I just watched Hadestown, and it wrecked me. I couldn't stop shedding tears after about a quarter of the way through. If you have not seen the movie, go watch it before reading this. Seriously. I do not want to spoil it. The movie echoed everything I've been learning, writing about, and even my very life. It did so beautifully and with all the struggle and strife included.

Orpheus begins with a sole purpose: to bring back spring to escape winter by writing the most beautiful song and bringing the world back into tune. As the show expresses, the extended winter was due to Hades' fear of losing Persephone as she spends her 6 months above ground and prompting spring. Persephone represents abundance, life, and joy, but her forced return to Hades had winter overtaking the earth.

Hades, in his fear of losing Persephone, built a wall to keep out poverty and took to industrialization. He represents big business and illustrates why people engage at the expense of their lives. It began out of need and fear as people needed to work together to create and get fed. But as it grew, and fear took over, they lost their way and continued blindly with their heads down. They couldn't look each other in the eye and it was easier to lay low than to lose their heads. They traded life for a false sense of security against poverty and called it freedom while building their own walls and enslaving themselves. This is corporate America or any such first-world nation.

Orpheus recognized the winter and began writing his song but didn't yet know Eurydice until he met her. She became his muse and represents a better way to live outside of fear and enslaving ourselves to industrialization. He longs for her and she becomes the reason he writes his song—the very song to break winter and give her—and this new way of life—a chance to live. In his pursuit of the song, trying to figure it out, he loses track of her. He doesn't hear her calling and physical needs drags both her and him to the working class.

He must thoroughly reject the old ways and continue faithfully with the new without hesitation to show the way to all the others.

Orpheus goes to rescue Eurydice from her fate, and confronts the entire camp of the enslaved. They do the bidding of fear-based industrialization and the dream of a better way is stuck within it. Orpheus begins to doubt that he could ever free her and bring back this better way of living and restore Spring. He gives up and throws his hands into the air. But as he begins to walk away, he finds that his words had impact. The industrialized world began to take note. He comes back to sing his song once more and confronts Hades.

Orpheus' song is extraordinarily high in pitch while Hades is equally extraordinarily low. They represent the high and low vibrations of love versus fear. Industrialization once began as hope. Hope to contribute, hope to do amazing things, hope to seize the day and live life to the fullest. This is many college grads. But the fear and the weight of the system takes its toll. It turns contribution into requirement to keep our freedom from poverty while robbing us of the very life we started with. High and low vibration fight it out and Orpheus has a chance to save his dream, his love, his worldview, his way of living and freeing the world from this self-induced slavery.

To succeed, Orpheus must return to the surface but alone, in the dark, with his doubts and fears, and without seeing that his dream, his love, Euridice, is following behind. He must thoroughly reject the old ways and continue faithfully with the new without hesitation to show the way to all the others. He knows the way to paradise, he simply needs to walk it in order to show it, and to prove it. He must trust it by ignoring the doubts, and bring it into being seeing only that she made it when the escape was complete.

As he continues the path, his fear overwhelms him and he unfortunately looks back. His dream was indeed there following all along, but she is taken back to industrialization and hope is lost due to fear. They explain that the story is old as time and is told time and again. They continue telling the story hoping for a new ending. They end with a song calling out to wherever Orpheus may be to encourage him and bring him hope in the latest retelling of this story. Perhaps this time he will succeed.

As stated at the beginning, this brought tears to my eyes and they would not stop. I recognized myself in Orpheus immediately. I started writing my song years ago to bring back Spring while not fully understanding the tune. I had just enough to get the gist and bring my hope of new way of living to my eyes. Blinded by trying to figure out the song, physical needs eventually turned me back to the workforce. I found that my song had no ears to listen and my hope was indeed a failure. As the song in the show rang out, I decided that perhaps it really was just the way it was. This is how it is and how it will ever be. I gave up on my hope and threw up my hands fairly quickly. This culminated in me writing An Infidel's Progress (available freely to read). I even named my publishing company "Fool's Errand Development: Utopian Pursuit" to be an anagram of Fed Up. I gave up on my Euridice.

I would rather die in this life than to return to the old way and abandon my hope.

Years later, I began to see a change. More people were interested in finding this new way to live. Just like in the show, I was encouraged to take a stand yet again, to recognize the full song, to rescue my Euridice, and to sing the higher vibration of love to defeat the lower vibrations of fear. The world is watching and waiting for someone to show the way. I was given that exact charge and to go forward with this new way even quite specifically to not look back. I wrote this story in Your Mind is Made of Voices. 

I began the journey yet again to build Utopia as I knew it, but I am still within industrialization as I look for my next step. After writing the second book, I established a website and a way of living known as FLOW. As my book explains, I get many voices of doubt about who I am and what I am doing and I am often pressured to quit and to give up while questioning who the hell am I to think I can do this. But I press on by listening to the higher voices.

As of yet, I do not have a desire to quit. I would rather die in this life than to return to the old way and abandon my hope. But as they say, fear and physical needs can sway eventually. I think back to many mythologies including many that indicate a cycle of death and rebirth of civilization itself. I began to think that the world cycles until we finally break free and rise. And then I found this magnificent performance and it rocked my world.

Everything about it told my story, my hope, and my journey. I AM Orpheus. I don't know if I'm the only one, but I can tell you this: we all must become Orpheus. While the journey is indeed lonely with so many people unsure of the way, it is forging it that makes it happen. We will not see the dream emerge if we turn back. We have to press on knowing she'll be there. She'll show when we've succeeded but that success is itself not lonely. I know the way, but the end is not reached until others have joined to make it end. I will continue to show the way, and I hope many more will follow. Let's not repeat the cycle. Let's end the story without letting fear grab hold and let's bring life back into the world. I am doing my part and I hope to see it to completion. Join me. I cannot do it alone. 

I am Orpheus. Are you?