Mythology Journey
Individually and collectively we live in and through stories and myths. We do not know ourselves, we do not know others, and we do not know the world other than through stories and myths. We are held together and we are kept apart through stories and myths.
If stories are of and about our personal experiences, our family, our social life, then myths are of and about our culture, our universe. Though, of course, the personal story is often mythic in nature, and the mythic is often personality in its essence.
The stories and myths that, for the most part, construct our lives are essentially ‘out there’. They existed before we are born and they will last long after we are gone. What life, in this context, then is surely about, is to create an alignment, a satisfactory alignment between my individual story and experience and those stories of the communities, nations, companies of which I find myself apart.
This is the Bard Mythology Journey. It is a journey into Chiron’s Academy, to Scatcach’s Training ground, a journey into a Hedge School, into a Druid’s apprentice, but ultimately, Bard Mythologies offers the opportunity to experience, uncover, unravel the stories and myths that we live by. To do this journey is a meditation into who and what we are, individually and collectively. To do this journey is to explore the alignment of self with the communities and tribe of which we are apart. To do this journey is to be open to the possibility of letting go of myths that no longer serve me, to re-embrace myths I may have forgotten and perhaps craft for myself and my world a new myth to live by.
For many in this modern world, the myths we live by are not sustainable, they don’t work in either the short term or the long. The myths are the DNA of human cognition, the operating system, as it were, of the mind and they are simply not working.
In this regard and context, the challenge we face is to harrow the myths we live by. And to harrow, is indeed to let go, it is to turn over, it is to experience and re-embrace. But most of all to harrow is working within a tradition, to shape for ourselves and our world mythologies that we can live by, sustainably and meaningfully.
The task is to craft sustainable mythologies for a post-industrial world. But this has to be done at an individual, community and collective level.
