Speaking of Pysche, remember that moment when Psyche first sees her husband by the light of the lamp? She gasps, time stretches, and Pysche falls forever in love with Love, as one does when one marries Eros. Then the sizzling lamp oil lands on Eros’s shoulder and the action resumes. Remember the moment when the Minotaur and Theseus catch sight of each other in the torchlit center of the labyrinth? The shock of the other’s muscular presence, the instant sizing up, the mutual rush of adrenaline right before they spring at each other to kill or be killed. Demeter realizing that Persephone is gone — gone, leaving the Great Mother without her child. These mythic still points burst with so much emotion that time cannot contain them. The clock stops, the moment opens, the hour yields to make way for hearts that swell past the edges of anything they’d felt or known before into experience so new that their souls must rearrange to make room. 

The still point follows the last thing and precedes the next thing. It is the aperture of perception when past and future both hold the baton of our awareness. It reverberates with memory and foreknowledge, echoing into eternity.

In this imaginal when-where, the tyranny of duality relaxes its grip. The still point exists between, outside, and all around our paired modes of consciousness like, for example, past and future, hidden and revealed, life and death. The still point happens when modes of knowing meet and mingle. They amaze each other, change each other. Both of them realize that they aren’t separate at all but instead, they exist within each other. Then a new thing emerges and consciousness expands, growing its field of possibility to include more than it was able to before.

So the still point turns out to be more verb than noun, more spiral than dot, more flow than stasis, more experience than object, more awareness than location. But what is the point of this elusive point? The still point is the when-where in which we notice. Love. Fury. Awe. Campbell cites Novalis: “The seat of the soul is there, where the outer and inner worlds meet.” (Inner Reaches, 5) The still point happens when we occupy the seat of the soul. Every moment of existence offers our consciousness and imagination a new point of view, a new vantage. The ever-present, ever-available still point is the when-where in which relationship happens. 

— And so, when your father dies, you hover in the still point between his life and his death. Between your family’s past and future. Between your life before and your life to come.

You float at the threshold between farewell and regret. You mourn what never was but might have been. You become the silent sky that blankets the desert valley. You become the valley. You become the rock that reaches down into earth, its back to the sky. You sense the ease with which earth and air welcome him back into themselves, no matter how he might or might not have lived, no matter how you might or might not have responded or understood. All of it was a gift — all of it, and you gather him into yourself at the exact same moment that you let him go.

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Joanna Gardner, PhD is the Director of Marketing and Communications at the Joseph Campbell Foundation, where she also serves as Managing Editor of the Skeleton Key Study Guide series and the lead author of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide. Joanna is an adjunct professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute's Mythological Studies program and a founder of the Fates and Graces Mythologium, an annual conference for mythologists and friends of myth. Joanna’s fiction, poetry, and nonfiction appear in a variety of venues, available at joannagardner.com/stories.