I grew up on the New England Transcendentalists, reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self Reliance” and Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden Pond”. When my eldest children were young, I would read W.B. Yeats’ “Lake Isle of Innisfree” to them at bedtime and they would drift off to sleep dreaming of small cabins of clay and wattles made.

As I work on my own writing and ponder what we see in contemporary media, I read Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. Yet again, I see the individual fighting against great odds for some great boon. It reflects in the media since so often the hero myth is repeated. Too often, the enemy is the collective. It is the “borg” in Star Trek, it is a government run amok in the anti-utopian novels. Where do we find examples of teamwork, friendship and the value of community?

We do find it in our advertising. “Be a Pepper”, “The Pepsi Generation”, “Membership has its privileges”. If we look closely, we find it in some children’s shows such as the Wonder Pets always singing about teamwork.

So, where does friendship, teamwork and community fit into our stories?