Taking to the Terrible Beautiful Road

KnotWork episodes are always roadtrip stories.

Before I record, I need the dog walk rehearsal sessions. Nuala is always my best first audience. Once the show is out in the world, I assume you’ll take it with you as you walk or drive.

This summer, however, the relationship with the road seems a little less simple and easy.

Today, with the smoke coming down from Ontario, I’m not sure how far we’ll walk. All day yesterday, the air was thick and the light was that diffuse orange we’ve almost come to accept as a feature of the summer. “Must be more fires in Canada,” we say. Three years ago, when this happened, we thought it was the end of the world.

Funny what we can get used to.

Of course, shifting baseline syndrome and becoming inured to catastrophe isn’t funny at all, but still… we persist.

We worry. We post about what we might possibly do to lower the global temperatures and raise the bar for political leaders. We wonder, if the old tactics aren’t working, what more we could possibly do.

This week, I’m sharing stories about roads. I’m weaving myths and personal reflections about roads during the week that Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo have been shot by ICE while driving to work.1 I am talking about “desire paths” on a podcast while that man is finding ways to ensure that it’s legal for his thugs to stop cars and draw guns.2 The irony is nearly unbearable.

And the disparity between people born with white skin in American territory and people labeled alien, criminal, other… The disparity is almost unspeakable. But we have to name it and speak of it. Especially when one’s complexion and birth certificate confer such privilege and relative safety.

I create a podcast so that people have something to listen to while they walk and drive. I tell stories of the Otherworld so that we can perceive this world in new and different ways. KnotWork may offer a bit of an escape from the day’s worries, but it’s never meant to be escapist fantasy.

When you listen to this week’s show, I hope you’ll have a chance to consider how unnecessarily cruel and dangerous our roads have become - not because of “those crazy drivers” but because everyone is at risk when masked men with unmarked cars have been hired as so-called protection for this so-called American dream. (I really mean everyone. Because of this country’s outsized influence, and its colossal environmental footprint, when the focus is on targeting immigrants it’s easier to miss, for example, the destruction of pristine wilderness.3 It all adds up. It all erodes the earth. It all erodes our humanity. Globally.)

The latest KnotWork Myth & Storytelling episode is another installment in our Turas series. In the public edition of the show, you’ll hear the story of Macha, the goddess who leaves the Otherworld and takes up housekeeping with a widowed farmer in the North of Ireland.

It’s the start of a terrible, fascinating tale from Irish mythology, about the pregnant woman forced to race against the king’s horses. There’s a good chance you know it, but I know that every time I hear or tell Macha’s story, I’m met with new visions and resonances.

The second half of the episode, available exclusively to my generous Myth Workers’ Hearth paid subscribers, explores the personal and collective histories and mythologies of roads.

What are roads, really? A way to get from here to there, of course. The trails made by walking or by riding. Ancestral knowledge trod into the earth. The memories of forced migrations. The grooves left by cartwheels and pilgrims’ feet.

There are stories worthy of rage and tears in this episode. But, in the extended version available to my paid supporters, there’s also… singing? There’s something about a roadtrip that convinces just about everyone they can sing this song, including me.