Forgive me if I keep coming back to the idea of a Passage through the Wilderness. I started this series of posts originally because I wanted to tie it in to my just-published memoir, GOVT CHEESE, which is about my own Wilderness Passage. But I keep coming back to the topic because it seems so central to all of our lives—and particularly our “hero’s journey” odyssey that leads us to our calling as artists and as human beings.

I was working on a screenplay a few years ago with director Andy Davis (The Fugitive, Under Siege, Above the Law) when he got an odd, dissatisfied look on his face.

At my friend Norm’s memorial a couple of months ago, his son Matt got up to speak. Norm died at 94, so Matt was closing in on his own seventies. Here’s a story he told about his father.

I don’t have many heroes, but one of them is Seth Godin. Do you know him? I’d try to pin Seth down in one phrase but the range of his work is so vast—from one of his early companies, Yoyodyne, through his ground-breaking books Tribes and Purple Cow and Linchpin (not to mention his educational masterpiece, the altMBA Program) and his current collective anti-climate-change enterprise, The Carbon Almanac––that the best I can say to describe him is “VISIONARY.”

We were talking last week of the collective wilderness passage of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. But there’s another great collective passage closer to home.

We’ve been talking about Wilderness Passages in our individual lives. Today let’s consider a collective passage. 

Here’s a storytelling principle I use sometimes when I’m trying to evaluate an idea or a story I’m working on.

Here’s a short section from my new memoir, Govt Cheese: