What follows is a conversation in which I ask my friends to help me wrap my mind around these questions:
We meet in their living room, one wall full of shelves with drying clay projects. Cristin makes tea for us, and we pause occasionally so they can grab something from another room or so Betsy can check on her Renaissance stuffed pumpkin oven-experiment.
Cora Lee: When we want to invite people to make meaning in myth, we often do it through ritual and ceremony, by participating together intentionally with a shared moment in time. By doing so, we’re participating with time and telling stories by moving through a landscape, internally or externally.
Betsy: It’s like a guided meditation: there’s a framework that guides someone but allows them to fill in all the details. With their own meaning, symbols, images, and sensations that arise as they move through that landscape. And when our stories are connected to real and familiar places and people, those stories become a lived part of the physical landscapes that we share. They become inscribed on the earth and embedded in the bodies of other beings.
Cristin: We have some serious responsibilities that come with directing that shared energy. If we think about how much we transform a landscape by the ways we make it a part of our stories and transform it over time by reenacting those stories, we need to be very intentional about what stories we are telling. Intentional myth-making is then the praxis of creating with story; it goes so far beyond just an idea or just words, it’s a practice of how we can shape everything.
Betsy: I’d say it’s definitely an important part of the process to create intentionally, but that you also have to give yourself room to play. Usually when I’m making myths and inviting people to play in the stories and knowledge and people I’m offering to connect them with, I’m asking myself: “What do I want guests to leave with? Who is the audience for this? Who needs this and how can I reach them?” I want the experience to be beautiful and fun and meaningful. I’m balancing how to relinquish control, guiding the intentions, and giving just enough structure to support the level of vulnerability I’m asking people to engage with.
Cora Lee: This makes me think about which stories stick with us and which ones don’t. We know that long-term memory works by how many tangible, emotional, and informational connections we can make with something. If a moment or a piece of knowledge doesn’t get enmeshed with other parts of our understanding and identity, then it doesn’t stay a part of us for long. Then I’m thinking of the replicability of story when it comes to myth, especially oral myth. It seems really central to the lasting usefulness and applicability. The ways myths are distributed in this day & age are wildly different than the past, and I think those means lead to or at least enable the host of problems with the myths that have ended up being handed to us.
If myths are a guiding force to us as human beings, it becomes really tricky to navigate these landscapes when our guides don’t know the way anymore. It messes with our cushion to make mistakes and to play, too. I get why so many people feel life can be unforgiving… Because it often looks like we aren’t enmeshed and connected and being held by nearly as many beings anymore. As Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it when she talks about the experience of not knowing the names of plants and animals in our environments, many of us are surrounded by strangers. So how do we create and share stories in ways that are sustainable and sustaining again?
The conversation so far is full of contemplative pauses. We’re all gazing curiously at these questions taking form and changing shape in between us. Sometimes we pause to check in with Grimm, an old wire-haired terrier schnauzer whose eyesight isn’t very good though his protective and cuddly nature remains intact.
Cristin: That reminds me of the ways myths have been and can be a product of cultural cross-pollination. Stories get transmitted with people across time and space, whether by conquest, migration, trade, or other avenues, as people have always adopted religions and myths. Our traditions, gods, saints, ecological knowledge, and personal or cultural histories, are all part of our ecologies of people.
Then there’s a kind of natural selection happening where the stories that survive are the ones that stay relevant and applicable to real people. Sustainable stories happen when we tell stories that are well-adapted or adapt well to our environments and help sustain the beings that make up those environments, including diverse human-beings.
Betsy: With both the cross-pollinating and the memorability of myths, I’m thinking about yoga retreats and summer camps, honestly! They’re for a limited time, they’re intensive, they’re vulnerable, and there’s a strong shared intention for everyone there. Then there are the games and songs and rituals that you strongly associate with those places and people, even if it’s just a daily routine, because they emerge from those shared intentions. But there’s something undeniable about how memorable those moments are-- like you think of summer camp and are instantly transported.
Cristin: I’m remembering something I read about human ideals around innovation. Generally in human history, innovation for a long time was considered a threat or at least something to be treated with caution. There were mountains and forests where you shouldn’t go, taboos you shouldn’t break, and a certain way of making things, engaging in ritual, taking care of each other, etc. If you change something that works and has worked for maybe hundreds or thousands of years, there’s a danger to it because that small change could lead to eventual drastic effects. But our culture currently has this story that innovation is always a huge advantage, which is kind of an unprecedented attitude. So a certain piece of knowledge, maybe held by myth and by material objects, is not just an idea that you have to remember-- it’s a matter of survival, of longevity, of a shared human identity.
Cora Lee: That helps me explain some of my feelings about our current moment in time being such a blur… Usually there would be some kind of guidepost, a vibe, an agreement on what this era means and where we’re headed together. But we’re inundated by so many stories and micro-trends that I don’t even remember what all happened this summer. And there definitely isn’t something I could point to 5 years from now and say “remember ‘brat summer?’” Like, that won’t mean anything to so many people and it doesn’t summarize enough anyway because the internet almost immediately moved on. We’ve had 15 different summers already this year.
Cristin: Toxic individualism flourishes under Capitalism. We’re trying to survive in this system that prioritizes speed, requires consumption and acquiring possessions, and intentionally contrives scarcity to keep us in that mindset and cycle. So when content creators are making something, a lot of them aren’t thinking about how others are going to benefit from what they create because “benefit” means something entirely different in these circumstances. That leads to us having all these disconnected narratives, values, and goals because operating on your own self-interest is so highly profitable in these circumstances.
The room feels small at the mention of the dreaded ‘Capitalism.’ The word is so heavy on us, you almost hate to say it at all during such a magical conversation inside such a cozy house. We half-hold our breath and feel the weighted blanket of the world outside this room. In that moment, there is also a quiet and warm solidarity here - we can sigh our relief and our dismay at the same time.
Cora Lee: I guess what I’m really wondering is… Are there myths that rival Capitalism? Are there stories ancient enough, deep enough, resilient enough that we can still bring them back to life through us?
Our conversation continues, as we identify anchors of truth in our lives that seem to last against erosive forces. We speak of love, medicine, community, and magic. At some point, our teas are finished and stuffed pumpkins are tasted as Betsy took notes on our reactions and descriptions. I leave eventually with the rest of my gold-painted pumpkin wrapped in foil, still warm in my hands.