Eyes for Wonder
John Bucher and His Passion for Storytelling
“I believe there's wonder waiting around the corner for all of us.” — John Bucher
Years ago — before he became head of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, before he served as a teacher at the most storied human potential institution in the world, before he created comics with Marvel, before he wrote six books, before he built new universes in online games, before he helped some of the world’s most influential people tell their stories in wildly new and authentic ways, before he became an honorary member of the Magic Castle, before he had his own Star Wars action figure — Bucher was just an everyday kid from Eastern Texas who couldn’t wait for the weekend. That’s when his parents would grant him his special allowance.
His family only had a little money, but they had just enough for John and his two brothers for them each to choose two VHS movies every week to rent from Movies and Sounds, the local video store. Eventually, they made their way through the entire store.
“I fell in love with storytelling watching movies,” he tells me — especially adventure fantasy movies full of myth and magic and set in faraway places, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, and Back to the Future. And yet there was something about these tales that felt familiar to him, even close to home.
”The struggles that these families in distant lands were experiencing and going through,” he says, “they felt a lot like what my family was going through.” In those stories, he felt seen. And he wanted to help others feel the same.
John Bucher is a master of many realms bound by one passion that only grows by the day in his soul: storytelling. He sees it everywhere – from the movies and books we love to our own real-life hero’s journeys. He inspired me to look at my own life more like a story — one reason I wanted him to be one of my very first interviews.
So how has he done it? How has he lived a life on fire for storytelling?
While movies ignited Bucher’s sense of wonder as a kid, most of us know that what we love when we’re young doesn’t usually translate into our career. For most of us, it takes someone else to show us that our dream is, in fact, possible. In Bucher’s case, it was his second-grade teacher, Mrs. Ballou.
“She really made me feel like it was okay to color outside the lines,” he says. He is mischievously grinning, as usual. When he does, it’s easy to see the boy in him, his short, spiky hair sticking up as I imagine it might have back then.
When I ask him what his path might look like without her influence, he shakes his head, the only time I’ve ever seen him look distraught yet. “Without her, I am confident that I would have pursued logic as the ultimate goal of life.”
By “logic,” he suggests the pursuit of what society deems "practical" — the path that societal norms so often push us towards.
When we do that, he says, “You only take a job that makes sense. You certainly don't become a mythologist who makes his living digging through old sacred texts and talking to people about what the meaning of life might be and what the human experience comes down to. You don't do that. You become a computer programmer, a doctor, or a lawyer. And not that there's anything wrong with those things if that is what you're called to. But when we think about passion, I'm reminded of Joseph Campbell's famous quote to follow your bliss. And following your bliss in some ways is about following your passion.”
When I ask him how we can all apply Campbell’s famous quote to our lives, he lights up.
“I used to approach what I was trying to do in life and my passion like this giant steel ball covered in oil,” he tells me. “I was constantly trying to get up on top of it. I thought life was about getting up on top of it and just being able to stay there. And I would always fall off on the sides.”
He pauses and leans back in his chair. His hands linger on his goatee while he thinks.
“The metaphor that resonates with me now is that life is more like a hiking trail. And sometimes I'm like, oh wow, there are some trees over there, and there's this rock over here, and I'm going up. And sometimes it gets dark on the trail, and sometimes I don't know where I'm going or what's going on. It's hard to see the trail, and sometimes I even scream into the darkness.” Now, he trusts that someone a little further up the trail will shine a light down on him and help guide him on his way.
Many of us equate a passionate life to a pleasurable one. But Bucher says we’re thinking about it all wrong.
“Most of the time, following your bliss is hard. It's painful. It's Indiana Jones going through that cave and boulders coming after you. And, you know, it's scary. But to give one more Campbell quote, Joseph Campbell said that he didn't so much believe that people were looking for the meaning of life as much as they were the rapturous experience of being alive.”
“A lot of people confuse existence with life. I don't want to just exist. I want to know what it is to live,” he says, suddenly locking eyes with mine with a seriousness of purpose unexpected for someone so normally childlike. “But [doing so] it’s not luck.”
Then what is it? Changing the way we see, he says. “There's wonder waiting around the corner for each of us. But we have to have eyes to see it.”
Three takeaways from our conversation:
1. Find Your Mrs. Ballou.
Like Bucher discovered myths in movies, seek out stories in your everyday life. Whether it's a book, a movie, or a conversation, let your curiosity guide you to unexpected places. You never know where it will take you.
2. Stop trying to climb the ball.
Instead, treat life as a journey with varying landscapes and conditions. It involves exploration, discovery, moments of difficulty, and times of uncertainty. The trail may get dark, representing challenges or unclear paths in life. But there is also beauty, surprise, and the potential for assistance and guidance from those who have journeyed before you.
3. Embrace that bliss means blisters.
It’s so easy to choose the safe route. But safety and passion are rarely connected. Although it will most certainly be hard, as Bucher’s journey demonstrates, passion often leads to the most fulfilling paths.
Pursuing our passion gets hard when we worry, or want straight answers and a linear path. Our passions can be chaotic with unknowns, surprises and the infinite learning curve!
For all who embrace the nature walk analogy, we can transmute discomfort to positive change if we just trust the process.
Thank you, John and Krista for the fun and important inquiries!