I saw quite a few "May the 4th be with you" shares on Facebook a couple days ago. I'm guessing maybe you did too? I don't recall hearing that wonderful play on words all that much till 5, maybe ten years ago.
May the 4th...
I saw the date on another share on Facebook earlier today and it stopped me in my tracks. It was a post by the Joseph Campbell Foundation which read:
"The Joseph Campbell Foundation is deeply saddened to announce that its co-founder, Jean Erdman, award-winning dancer and choreographer, wife of famed mythologist Joseph Campbell, and extraordinary contributor to twentieth-century dance, passed away in Honolulu, Hi, on May 4, 2020—Star Wars day—at the age of 104."
A shiver went down my spine as I read it. Whoa!
It was a good shiver--the kind I get when in Awe--when feeling like I somehow brushed up against that Something that transcends transcendence.
I can't write it off as coincidence. Joseph Campbell helped revive my faith, if you could call it that, in the Mystery, and I've had far too many no coincidences types of experiences to not get the feeling there's something's there. The transcendence transcending Something...
I mean what are the chances? Okay 365 to one I guess but still! Jean Erdman exited this life on a day that nobody would have even ever known if not for her husband, Joseph Campbell. Upon seeing news of her passing on "Star Wars Day" I recalled reading or hearing somewhere about George Lucas saying he'd likely still be writing Star Wars if not for reading Campbell's work, especially The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
There are only a few of Campbell's books that I've yet to read so I got to searching the JC section of my little library for where I read that only to give up since every one of them is loaded with dog-eared pages, notes in margins and highlighted text. Thus I got to searching online and came across this:
MYTHIC DISCOVERY WITHIN THE INNER REACHES OF OUTER SPACE: JOSEPH CAMPBELL MEETS GEORGE LUCAS
Another "Whoa!"
I imagine Joe and Jean watching the Star Wars Trilogy all in a single day there at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch. Watching all three movies for the first time even! I couldn't help but smile when reading of Campbell telling Lucas, after watching all three of the movies in a single day, that he thought real art stopped with Picasso or James Joyce but now he knows it hasn't. How great is that!
So there it is. Jean Erdman, Joseph Campbell's wife, left this life on the day people say "May the fourth be with you"
On Star Wars Day. I just can't stop smiling over that one.
It's yet another in a long list of things I see and hear; experience and feel, that makes me think the game is rigged--that "Life is God's play" as Alan Watts said it.
And as for Joseph Campbell, or Alan Watts too and now of Jean Erdman?
"Who need be afraid of the merge"
as Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass.
The light that shone through so many who I continue to learn from--through all those bulbs that beamed it out to the rest of us so well but burned out by and by as all bulbs do--that light continues its never ending cycle of returning to the Source--to Life Force that animates us all.
Godspeed Jean Erdman.
May the Force be with us as you merge back into the Force.
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