A socialist, a christian writer and Led Zeppelin walk into a bar...

A socialist, a writer and Led Zeppelin walk into a pub

What happens when you're innocently minding your business and sipping a ginger beer in a pub, where Tolkien use to go? Probably nothing.

Or maybe bizarre, illogical connections start pouring out of your imagination.

And they're so arrogant, they claim their epiphanies make perfectly sense.

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born". 

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king."

They insist that, in times of change, when heroes face challenges and temptations down to the bottom of the abyss, exactly during this process, they don't look like heroes, don't even know they're bound to be something more than dust, that shall return to dust.

Heroes feel miserable, their lives suck. 

And it goes worse and worse.

Thing is: it has to happen. No shortcuts.

What happens down there is more than revelation, it's death and re-birth.

The hero is created only through metamorphosis, when he's ready to go to the underworld, without certainty of reward.

Once he accepts his fate, the impossible occurs, unexpected:

he is re-born. Re-born to hero.

It's a journey in two directions: into unknown lands and inward, into the hero's very substance.

His glorious essence, that was once concealed, even to himself, can finally shine.

While the substance has always been there, it wouldn't have been possible for it to come to light, to "be born", without the necessary dying process.

Now let me eat the damn steak pie.