Searching for the Blue Flower - Life's Ultimate Adventure

Apr 15
4 min read

Updated: May 19

Why the search itself may be part of what makes life meaningful

The Blue Flower is Novalis’s Romantic concept that represents a longing for something more. Joseph Campbell called it the “call to adventure.” It’s when you can’t stay asleep in your own life anymore and you leave the familiar and step out into the unknown.

As he puts it, "the adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive."

So what does all this mean? It doesn’t have to be an action adventure. It can be internal. Sometimes it's spiritual. Sometimes it's just realizing that you've gotten away from the things that made you feel alive and you need to self-correct.

That’s what Sparkle Valley is about.

Emily loses her connection as she gets older, and her inner world—Sparkle Valley—starts to fade alongside her imagination. But Abigail (her Blue Flower) fights to keep it alive. And because of her ultimate sacrifice, Emily grows up, but she doesn’t lose the ability to imagine and feel deeply.

Abigail fought to save Sparkle Valley, but I’ve also seen this fight taking place in real life through the years. I'll give you two examples.

The Search Itself

Caspar David Friedrich - Woman in Front of the Setting Sun circa 1818

I had a professor at Oxford who spent years studying Kant. Every time he thought he had it figured out another interpretation would appear. Another nuance. He would get another response in the ongoing academic conversation that would send him back to his books again. This literally went on for years. I think it's still going on (he’s got to be in his 80s). At some point, I realized he wasn't really trying to finish with Kant once and for all. The search itself had become a part of his life.

And strangely, there was something joyful about it.

It reminded me of the Magic Garden in Sparkle Valley—Emily's thin place, where the world felt deeper and more alive.

Caspar David Friedrich - Northern Sea in the Moonlight 1824

The other example is more recent. I have a neighbor who has a vintage car and he's always tinkering with it. It actually looks perfect to me, but apparently there's always something that needs to be done. He was mentioning how he might get it painted orange like the original. And this of course meant he would have to buff out all the rust—a multi-week job. He’d spend days adjusting and repairing small things that nobody else would ever notice.

One day, just like with the professor, I realized that he wasn't really fixing his car. It had become a part of his life. And the ultimate vision he may have had in his head of what the car would look like is something he would never actually see. It wasn’t the perfection itself he was chasing, so much as the feeling that was connected to it. He would talk about how he had seen an orange Austin Healy with a racing stripe when he was in the military. Maybe it was that memory that was driving him. Maybe it was some other version of himself from an earlier time in his life.

But this was his Blue Flower, and he was chasing it. And it would always be just out of reach.

Caspar David Friedrich – Mountain Landscape with Rainbow 1809

What struck me about both the professor and my neighbor was how they were so absorbed. There were setbacks and then there were victories. But there was always engagement. And there was joy. This wasn't obsession, or endless drifting, or refusing to grow up. It wasn't chasing some fantasy. It was simply caring. And it was open-ended. Day after day.

This is part of the blue flower too. It's not about finishing, it's about the pull. And when I would see my neighbor polishing his car there was a joy. A quiet kind of joy that comes from being completely absorbed. And seeing this made me feel good too.

And ultimately that’s what stayed with me. Not a theory, not Kant, not an Austin Healy, or any other metaphor, But seeing them so absorbed actually impacted me. They cared, they were engaged with life.

Were they answering Campbell’s “call to adventure?” I’m not sure, but if you asked them I think they would tell you that these pursuits were a part of what brought them a sense of fulfillment.

The Pull

Maybe this is part of what Carl Jung meant when he talked about becoming fully yourself, and how it requires learning how to live with all the different parts of yourself at once.

Jacob van Ruisdael – Entrance to a Forest (ca. 1660‑65) — Jacob van Ruisdael – *Entrance to a Forest* (ca. 1660‑65)

The ambitious parts, the fearful parts, the joyful parts, the wounded parts. Everything.

"The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are."

"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."

Balance is essential. Just like we see in Sparkle Valley. Too much order and the world ends up barren like in Book 3. Too much chaos and Frank takes over and rain falls upside down.

And that's why the Blue Flower has to always stay slightly out of reach.

And it’s not because fulfillment is impossible—both of them could put a stop to their quests at any time. Perhaps it’s because the pull itself is what keeps us engaged with life. Even if that means the Austin Healy is never actually finished and Kant keeps sending my professor back to his books one more time.