An Invitation in a Conversation

What follows is a conversation in which I ask my friends to help me wrap my mind around these questions:

• How can we be good stewards of myth?
• What are we to do with myth-making systems that disrupt, rather than benefit, our shared bodies of wisdom and connection?
• What myths serve us and which don’t? How can we know and agree upon the difference?

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? 

Continue reading this conversation introducing the collection…