Telling the World in a Dangerous Time: The Importance of Myth

"Goddess Speaks" by Earth Traditions Community at the Parliament of World Religions 2023

 

Recently I found myself joining conversations about possible futures in our very uncertain world, as we face both Climate Change and the possible end of the American experiment in democracy, which Trump and his very wealthy supporters, seem determined to do.  These are uncertain times indeed to be alive in.  I pulled up the following article, which I wrote in 2017, because it seemed to offer a reminder I needed, once again, unfortunately.

"Weaving" from "Restoring the Balance" (2004)

             TELLING THE WORLD IN A TIME OF DROUGHT: 

                                     Artists as Myth Makers

                                                           by Lauren Raine MFA (2017) 

“What might we see, how might we act, if we saw with a webbed vision? The world seen through a web of relationships…as delicate as spider’s silk, yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.”

 Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web

Recently I travelled cross country, joining conversations that always seemed to end with a question.  Since many of my friends are artists (I include writers, performers, ritualists, dancers, storytellers, and a number of shamans in the category as well) the question seems to come down to "what do we do now?"  

How do we, in a time that seems bent on eliminating education, free speech, environmental preservation, social ethics, and possibly even any kind of consensual truth…..as practitioners of the arts, increasingly marginalized by society, how do we find meaningful identity? 

"A Mask for Shattering Old Paradigms" (2024)

My own response is that I believe it's vital for artists to remember that we are myth makers.  Throughout history artists of all kinds have possessed the imaginal tools to invent and re-invent the myths that were the cultural underpinnings for their time.  

Phil Cousineau, author of  Once and Future Myths: The Power of Ancient Stories in Our Lives (2001) cautioned that if we don't become aware of both our personal and our cultural myths which "act like gravitational forces on us" we risk becoming overpowered, overshadowed, and controlled by them.  Myths are in many ways the templates of how we compose our societal and personal values, as well as how people organize their religions.  As Cousineau commented further, "the stories we tell of ourselves determine who we become, who we are, and what we believe."  

The human mind has a unique ability to abstract.  A stone is not always a stone - sometimes it becomes a symbol of something, a manifestation of a deity, or it can also become intentionally invisible, even when it stubs our toes.  An interpretation of "God" is something that whole nations have lived or died for.  And depending on the aesthetics of a particular culture, foot binding, skull extension, or bouffant hairdos can be experienced as erotic beauty.  If the worlds we know are, indeed, experienced through the lens of the stories we tell about them, then how are those stories serving or not serving the crucial time we live in?

A renunciate myth of the Earth as "not real" or a "place of sin and suffering" does not serve the environmental crisis facing a global humanity.   Stories that make women lesser beings do not release the creative brain power of half the human race.  A cultural mythos that celebrates violence and competition do not contribute to nurturance and sustainability.   Stories of "rugged individualism" may not be as useful in a time when science, sociology, ecology, theology, and even physics are demonstrating that all things are interdependent. 

I remember years ago participating in a week long intensive with the Earth Spirit Community of New England.  The event took place in October, in celebration of the closing of the year, the "going into the dark" time.  The closing ritual occurred at twilight.  Bearing candles, different groups wove through the woods toward a distant lodge from which the sound of heartbeat drums issued.  Slowly the lodge filled, illuminated with candles.  As we sat on the floor, lights gradually went out, we were blindfolded and the drums abruptly stopped. 

We felt bodies rush by us as hands turned us.  The sounds of wind, and half understood voices, someone calling, someone crying, or a bit of music came from all directions.  As we lost any sense of direction or time we became uncomfortable, frightened and disoriented.  I felt as if I was in a vast chamber, the very halls of Hades, listening to echoing voices of the lost.  And when it felt like the formless dark would never stop:  silence.  And the quiet sound of the heartbeat drum returned, re-connecting us to the heart of the Earth.

As blindfolds were removed I found myself in a room warmly illuminated with candles.  On a central platform sat a woman enthroned in brilliant white, illuminated with candles and flowers.  At her feet were baskets of bread.  Slowly we rose, took bread and fruit, and left the "Temple".  And as we left, on each side of the entrance, stood a figure in a black cape.  Each had a mirror over his or her face – mirror masks, reflecting our own faces.  

Now that was a ritual telling of the myth!  We had entered mythic space, we had participated together in the Great Round of death and return to the light - and none of us would ever forget it.

"Invocation of Bridgit" 

I am suggesting that artists, troubled as my friends and I have been, step away for a while from the complex questions of identity so beloved by the art world, cast aside as well the dismissal, even hostility of the current anti-intellectual environment.  Instead, let us view ourselves  as engaged in a sacred profession.   We are pollinators of the imagination,  holding  threads in  a great weaving of myth, threads that extend into a time  yet to come, and far back into a barely glimpsed past.  If "the Universe is made of stories, not atoms" as the poet  Muriel Rukeyser famously said, the only real question for us now is "what kinds of stories are we weaving"?     

"The new myth coming into being through the triple influence of quantum physics, depth psychology and ecology suggests that we are participants in a great cosmic web of life, each one of us indissolubly connected with all others through that invisible field. It is the most insidious of illusions to think that we can achieve a position of dominance in relation to nature, life or each other. In our essence, we are one."

Anne Baring 

References:

Keller, Catherine;  From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self,

       Beacon Press  (1988)

Baring, Anne;  "A New Vision of Reality" from her website

       http://www.annebaring.com/

Cousineau, Phil; Once and Future Myths: The Power of Ancient Stories in

        Modern Times,  Conori Press (2001)

The Earthspirit Community, Twilight Covening (1993),   

         http://www.earthspirit.com/ 

Rukeyser, Muriel;  The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser,  McGraw (1978)

"Rooted" - Rainier Maria Rilke

If we surrendered

to Earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing-
each stone, blossom, child –
is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we must begin again
to learn from the things of World,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left.

This is what they teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

"How Surely Gravity's Law" by Rainer Maria Rilke, 
Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

"Invocation for Mabon" by Robin Williamson

Brushwood 2016 by Theresa Guzman

The Equinox approaches, the bright and darkening liminal day of Balance.  I thought this morning of this poem by the wonderful Scottish Bard Robin Williamson, as I also remembered so many sweet memories of Fall back east, moonlight in Vermont, fallen apples in rural New York, drinking mead with friends as we celebrated Mabon.  

One of my first ritual performances was an event devoted to the Great Mother, organized by my friend Farusha, in New York City.  It took place in a "black box" theatre in the East Village, but what I brought to share with the audience was a basket of apples I found lying in the green grass around an apple tree in upstate, rural New York.  To see those fallen apples was the utter truth of the great Generosity of Gaia, of our Mother Earth, always given.  After I finished my performance I told the story of the apples I gathered, and offered them.   I expected very few of that sophisticated urban audience would take any - to my great surprise, they took every one, and ate them right there in the theatre.

There was a time when humans thought of themselves as part of the Community of life - when they negotiated with the animals and the elementals, when they listened to the voices of the trees and the medicine plants, when they thanked the buffalo for their sacrifice, when they joined in the great Song of life, a part of the chorus.  We urgently must reclaim this en-chanted paradigm, and I feel Robin Williamson's beautiful poem so fully captures that vision.

With great gratitude, may the Day of Balance bring Balance into all our lives.

You that create the diversity of the forms:

Open to my words
You that divide it and multiply it

Hear my sounds

Ancient associates and fellow wanderers
You that move the heart in fur and scale

I join with you

You that sing bright and subtle
Making shapes 
that my throat cannot tell

You that harden the horn
And make quick the eye

You that run the fast fox 
and the zigzag fly

You sizeless makers of the mole
And of the whale:  aid me and I will aid you

You that lift the blossom
and the green branch
You who make symmetries more true

Who dance in slower time

Who watch the patterns

You rough coated
Who eat water

Who stretch deep and high
With your green blood
My red blood 

let it be mingled

Aid me and I will aid you

I call upon you

You who are unconfined
Who have no shape
Who are not seen

But only in your action
I will call upon you

You who have no depth
But choose direction

Who bring what is willed
That you blow love
upon the summers of my loved ones
That you blow summers
 upon those loves of my love


Aid me and I will aid you

I make a pact with you

You who are the liquid
Of the waters
And the spark of the flame:

I call upon you

You who make fertile the soft earth
And guard the growth of the growing things
I make peace with you

You who are the blueness of the blue sky
And the wrath of the storm
I take the cup with you

Earth shakers

And with you
the sharp and the hollow hills
I make reverence to you

Round wakefulness 

We call the Earth

I make wide eyes to you

You who are awake

Every created thing
both solid and sleepy
Or airy light,
I weave colors 'round you

You who will come with me

I will consider it Beauty

I will consider it

Beauty, beauty

by Robin Williamson 

Published by  WARLOCK MUSIC, LTD.

https://youtu.be/7xvIDX9gKhg

In Partnership With Mother Earth by Robert Koehler

In 2014 I shared an article by Robert Koehler titled "Calling All Pagans - Your Mother Earth Needs You" and wrote to the author in appreciation for his article.  I was surprised when he wrote back, and we had an exchange of ideas, and very pleased when he sent me a followup article in which he quoted me from our email conversation.  This was his followup article, and I felt like sharing it again.  

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH MOTHER EARTH

By Robert C. Koehler   4/17/14

OK, mankind, it’s time to grow up, and I see a good way to start: Change the wording of Genesis 1:26. Change one word. 

Last week, I quoted that Bible verse in a column about the increasing velocity of climate change:   “And God said . . . let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air,” etc.  

Dominion!  Nature belongs to us, to suck dry and toss away. And thus we moved out of the circle of life and became its conquerors, an attitude at the core of the Agricultural Revolution and the rise of civilization. The momentum of this attitude is still driving us. We don’t know how to stop, even though most people now grasp that we’re wrecking the environmental commons that sustains life.

Addressing the verse and the idea of “dominion,” Phil Miller, a minister, wrote: “Some of us understand that word to mean ‘stewardship’ or ‘responsibility.’” And David Cameron wrote: “One has to wonder what would have ensued had the translation said ‘stewardship’ rather than ‘dominion’? Almost incomprehensible that our future and the future of so many and so much may have hinged on that one word.”

If in one of the most defining religious-political texts of the human species we’d been charged with stewardship of the natural world, not some sort of adolescent, consequence-free control over it, what sort of spiritual understanding would have evolved over the millennia? What sort of technology? What would our civilizations look like if we believed in the depths of our beings that they were not distinct from but part of nature? What if, instead of organizing ourselves around the concept that we have enemies to subdue — “survival of the fittest” — we explored the complexity of our connectedness to one another and the whole of creation, even when the connections were barely visible?

What I am coming to learn, as I ask such questions, is that this understanding is already vibrantly present in the collective human consciousness, drowned out as it may be by the special interests that run our world. These interests, which serve war and money, have belittled complex understanding as “paganism” and colonized, enslaved and slaughtered its primary keepers: the tribal and indigenous people of the world. 

Listen to the words of Rupert Ross, from his remarkable book Returning to the Teachings, as he describes his dawning understanding of the aboriginal culture of northern Ontario: 

 “The word ‘connecting’ leapt at me. It captured not only the dynamics I imagined in that room, but also the key feature of all the traditional teachings I had been exposed to thus far. Until then, I had somehow missed it. It involved a double obligation, requiring first that you learn to see all things as interconnected and second that you dedicate yourself to connecting yourself, in respectful and caring ways, to everything around you, at every instant, in every activity.“. . . (Children) had to learn to see themselves not as separate, individual beings but as active participants in webs of complex interdependencies with the animals, the plants, the earth and the waters.”

Indeed, Ross and many others have pointed out that indigenous science has always known what Western science has only recently relearned: that the universe is energy and dynamic flux, that there’s no such thing as objectivity and separation. 

“Like Western science, indigenous science relies upon direct observation for forecasting and generating predictions,” according to the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network. “. . . Unlike Western science, the data from indigenous science are not used to control the forces of nature; instead, tell us the ways and the means of accommodating nature.”   Among other critical distinctions, according to the website: “All of nature is considered to be intelligent and alive, thus an active research partner.”

 I note these ideas not to throw rocks around in some “debate” about who’s right, but to open up the national and global conversation about who we are. We can let these ideas sit in our imaginations. What might stewardship of nature mean if we regarded the relationship as a partnership? What might a celebration of Earth Day (April 22) look like?

“We need to re-myth culture, to re-sanctify nature before it’s too late,” Lauren Raine (“a longtime advocate and practitioner of neo-pagan theology and resident artist for Cherry Hill Seminary, “the only accredited Pagan seminary in the U.S”) wrote to me last week.“Earth-based spirituality is to be found in all cultures, including many rich traditions from Europe and Great Britain. The evolution of our strange, life-denying religious backdrop has much to do with the evolution of patriarchal culture and values. We need to get rid of the war gods, and return . . . to honoring the Mother.”

We also need to put our lives on the line, or at least honor those who do. One of the many responses I got to last week’s column was from environmental activist Jessica Clark, who faces jail time for sitting in a tree last fall.  

In September, she and other members of the Michiana Coalition Against Tar Sands, or MICATS, temporarily blocked Enbridge Inc.’s tar sands pipeline expansion through Michigan. This was an expansion of the same pipeline that ruptured in 2010, badly polluting the Kalamazoo River; it was the largest and costliest inland oil spill in history. 

One night the protesters climbed trees at the construction site in central Michigan and anchored their platform to the company’s construction equipment. If the ropes had been moved, the protesters’ platform would have tipped, dropping them 50 feet to the ground. That didn’t happen, but they were arrested and convicted of trespassing — for the crime of stewardship. It’s the price of growing up.

 Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press), is still available.

Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at www.commonwonders.com.

Nancy Wood, Poet of the Earth

Recently I re-discovered the New Mexico poet and photographer   Nancy Wood, who passed away in 2013.  Nancy Wood found a deep sense of spiritual  belonging in nature among the natives peoples of New Mexico, and much of her poetry is a celebration of that belonging.  I've always found comfort and a return to Balance when when I return to her poems, and copy a few here for my own great pleasure.

Hold on to what is good

even if it is 
a handful of earth.
Hold on to what you believe
even if it is
a tree which stands by itself.
Hold on to what you must do
even if it is
a long way from here.
Hold on to life even when
it is easier letting go.
Hold on to my hand even when
I have gone away from you.

From Hollering Sun (1972)

Blue lake of life from which flows everything good.

We rejoice with the spirits beneath your waters.
The lake and the earth and the sky
Are all around us.
The voices of many gods
Are all within us.
We are now as one with rock and tree
As one with eagle and crow
As one with deer and coyote
As one with all things
That have been placed here by the Great Spirit.
The sun that shines upon us
The wind that wipes our faces clean of fear
The stars that guide us on this journey
To our blue lake of life
We rejoice with you.

In beauty it is begun.
In beauty it is begun.
In peace it is finished.
In peace it shall never end.

My help is in the mountain

Where I take myself to heal
The earthly wounds
That people give to me.
I find a rock with sun on it
And a stream where the water runs gentle
And the trees which one by one
give me company.
So must I stay for a long time
Until I have grown from the rock
And the stream is running through me
And I cannot tell myself from one tall tree.
Then I know that nothing touches me
Nor makes me run away.
My help is in the mountain
That I take away with me.

From War Cry on a Prayer Feather, 1979

Earth teach me stillness

As the grasses are stilled with light.
Earth teach me suffering
As old stones suffer with memory.
Earth teach me humility
As blossoms are humble with beginning.
Earth teach me caring
As the mother who secures her young.
Earth teach me courage
As the tree which stands all alone.
Earth teach me limitation
As the ant who crawls on the ground.
Earth teach me freedom
As the eagle who soars in the sky.
Earth teach me resignation
As the leaves which die in the fall.
Earth teach me regeneration
As the seed which rises in spring.
Earth teach me to forget myself
As melted snow forgets its life.
Earth teach me to remember kindness
As dry fields weep with rain.

from Hollering Sun, 1972

How Do We Talk With The Earth?

I was very disappointed that circumstances forced me to return to Tucson and I was not able to remain at Brushwood for the festivals as I hoped this year.  I have come there to heal and "talk with the land" for many years, and the land (and people) always inform me of what I need to know.  I feel very fortunate that I could have all those "pagan summers" at the Brushwood Folklore Center in Western New York, working at the festivals, building my Moss Garden shrine deep in the woods,  spending time with my visionary friends Frank and Darlene Barney who created Brushwood, and their daughter Theresa and her husband Dave..........and the many people who have come there over the years to celebrate with ecstatic exuberance the land, Gaia, the Goddess and the God, the rising of the Dog star, the walking of the Labyrinth, the recreation each year of little shrines and gardens, at festivals like Starwood,  Sankofa and Sirius Rising.

For years I've been making works  I ended up calling  "Earth Shrines" or "Earth Icons".   I've made them from bird nests, twigs, and found places that seem to insist on making a little shrine.  The pieces I hang on walls always seem to have roots and eyes woven into the designs.  I finally understand that  the roots represent our inter-dependancy with all other living beings, our deep roots of nourishment in the Earth.  And the  eyes are the presence and intelligence I experience everywhere, the  conversation inherent in the woven fabric of the  entire world, in our bodies, in the trees,  in the slow dance of ecosystems,  in the breath of the sky, in the tendrils and roots that  twine and seek and speak deep under our feet.  

Frank Barney and I had a conversation a number of years ago, and I want to share it again, because it's important.  We were riding through the “village” that seems to bubble out of the ground when the big festivals happen.  It's like I used to feel with the Renaissance Festivals when I worked at them........like Brigadoon, the festivals appear, then gradually  disappear.   I asked Frank what it was like to live with a particular place since childhood, to raise your family there, to grow up within his environment of forests and meadows,  and eventually become  its caretaker and spiritual collaborator.  "How", I asked, "do we learn to  speak with the Earth?"

Frank (who is a dowser as his father was) answered my question as he always does, in his own inimitable round-about way. He was answering in circles, literally, as we toured, looking at favorite trees, niches,  feeling the geomagnetic intensities of various places, the “green breath” of the forest, that watchful "presence" I always feel among the trees.

“Most of the voices of nature are small and delicate,” he told me, “and can easily be silenced. They can be made invisible, or driven underground. And when that happens, people forget that they ever existed at all. Within a short time, they forget what it was like to live in such a rich chorus of voices, among so many stories, intelligences, lives.......and then  they’re living without them in a world that has lost not only that living  population, but also its mystery and vitality. An increasingly flat world with only human voices. “

“If you violate a person, be it a child or an adult, they shut up. You silence them. They withdraw - although, with human beings, the energy of that violence is likely to erupt in some future way, in some future violence. Places, like people and animals, also have voices. Violate a place, like putting a Wal-mart parking lot over it, and all the voices that belong to that place leave.  The land is silenced. ”

“What I've been trying to do” he said, “for the past 30 years is to create a place that can facilitate communion with the Earth. By treating the land with respect, by acknowledging the presence of so many other intelligences, visible and invisible, that are evolving within the immanent cycles of life, right here, on the land. On this land, with all of its uniqueness. "





"And there are different ways we've accomplished that.  For example, because we didn't have much money, we couldn't do what many people do when they acquire a piece of land. Which is to come in with big machines that level and dominate the land, bulldoze it flat, force it to do what they want it do. We didn't have the financial means to do that, even if we wanted to, so Brushwood evolved gradually, organically, according to the dictates of the land, its contours and water ways and bumps and swamps and resources. And also its energy leys and vortices. 

We bring people here who have an earth friendly ethos and mythos. They can feel safe here, they can interact and create and explore without ridicule or hostility. They come here to connect, to play, or to heal. They can do ritual, make things like art or theatre or music, wear masks or costumes, dance, have discussions, make love, get naked in the sun or rain if they like, the children can ride their bikes or play in the mud - they feel safe. So the Earth can speak through them in all the things that they say and do.

That’s how we talk with the Earth.
 We let the Earth talk through us.”

Erecting the Thunder Bird (2008)
Throughout the week long festival, prayers and intentions were collected,
and deposited in the Thunder Bird "messenger " -  similar to the ancient
Celtic  Lammas rituals  of the burning of the Wicker Man.

Photos of  Sirius Rising are by, and copyright,  Roy Jones