Myth as Activism

It’s Sunday, and I’m not great. There’s a lot going on, but what’s heavy for me this day are the raging wildfires, more the displaced animals and burned forest ecosystems than anything else. Wildfires rage not far from me in Oregon and across a lot of the Pacific Northwest, as well as in Canada, Europe, Africa.

How is any of this going to get better in the coming years? How is it not going to get worse?

I walk down to journal in my yurt studio. I have to keep my spirit intact – that’s the only thing I know for sure right now.

I light incense, a candle, a sage stick, call in my guides at my altar. Then I go deeper, asking for help processing some of this as I journal.

At some point I take a break and step outside, and the air is smoky in a way it wasn’t just a few hours earlier. It’s not another fire, just changing wind patterns.

My heart is breaking. Our collective hearts are shattering. This climate destruction is too huge and too painful. What can a person do?

For most of human history, nobody faced catastrophe alone as a single, frightened body. They faced it as part of bigger truth, among ancestors, and with spirit allies, and as stories with deep ancient roots.

What do we have to cling to today?

Buying things. Doom scrolling. One-upping each other on social media.

Of course we’re hurting. We took away all the joy and meaning.

Joseph Campbell put it simply: “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.” Maybe we’re not only supposed to focus on fixing things right now, but on finding a larger story, moving toward something bigger than us.

Myth is medicine. As a book coach, I help clients build their inherent metaphors, what I call their personal mythology. I can see right through each of the writers I work with, to their legend and soul’s purpose.

Is it activism to help people remember their soul story? I think so.

When I sit at my altar and call in my guides, when I journey before I paint, when I read tarot, when I send a character into an elemental plot — I am not trying to escape reality. I am building a self that is large enough to walk through it without falling apart. A woman who knows herself as one thread in a tapestry woven over centuries has the power to remain whole, and to help weave the next thread, and the next, alongside everyone else reaching for the same meaning.

Of course, we have to have fire fighters, voting, mutual aid networks. But for our bodies to handle these tasks, we must also have the poetry, the soul, the spirit.

Carl Jung believed we never fully resolve the old myths — the most we can do, he wrote, is “dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress.”

How will you “dream the myth onwards”?

This is the quiet activism I was called to do three decades ago at age 30: find the bigger story of who I am and remind others of theirs.