Navigating the Mysteries

Don’t brush your tastes away. Take your delight seriously. You could reach out towards historical figures, cloud formations, and badger tracks in the snow. Claim them as familial instructors. They have a kind of warmth attached. These are useful, odd ideas. Uncertainty requires such expansiveness, requires some flex, some curiosity.

Reaching out to nature and history: The notion of community is a breathless affair when we imagine it as solely human.

Really good gossip across species becomes a story and eventually a myth. So what are the stories that will come from the mysteries of our present moment?

mythic intelligence suggests we have to negotiate such terrain for a story of worth to surround us.

Life doesn’t feel certain, but it feels succulent. Life doesn’t feel assured, but it feels vivacious.

Move from seeing to beholding: To see a situation is to catch the facts of the matter. To behold it is to witness the story. If you dwell entirely with statistics and data, you will be a burnt match within months. Move from just seeing the world to beholding the world. Seeing is assessment and analysis; beholding is wonder and curiosity. It’s not t... See more

but—maybe there’s useful and un-useful uncertainty.

So as I approach the mystery of telling these stories again, the uncertainty of working into my mythmaking, I wonder if we could do something similar with our own narratives. What are we bored by, what needs to stay buried? What deserves to be re-imagined, re-seeded, re-beheld? That’s where the joyful work is. I’m handing you a spade.

It doesn’t feel safe, but it feels pregnant with possibility. And, like every human before me, I’m going to have to make my peace with that arrangement. To repeat, it was always like this.

The useful is the invitation to depth that myth always offers. Because if there’s uncertainty, then we are no longer sure quite what’s the right way to behave. And there’s potential in that, an openness to new forms.