Transcript: MICHAEL MEADE on Cultivating Mythic Imagination /124
Ayana Young Welcome to For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. This week we are rebroadcasting. Our interview with Michael Meade originally aired in June of 2019. We hope you enjoy this special encore episode.
Michael Meade When the planet is in this much trouble, we're in the dark night of the soul of the planet itself. Then we are strangely closer to the seeds of imagination that can be used to reinvigorate life and also possibly heal, not just personally, but on a collective and possibly planetary level.
Ayana Young Today we are speaking with Michael Meade. Michael is a renowned storyteller, author, and scholar of mythology, anthropology, and psychology. He combines hypnotic storytelling, street-savvy perceptiveness, and spellbinding interpretations of ancient myths with a deep knowledge of cross-cultural rituals. He is the author of The Genius Myth, Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of the Soul, Why the World Doesn't End, The Water of Life: Initiation and the Tempering of the Soul. Meade is the founder of Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, a nonprofit network of artists, activists, and community builders that encourages greater understanding between diverse peoples.
Well, Michael, thank you so much for joining us today on For the Wild, it's really a pleasure to have you with us.
Michael Meade Great to be with Ayana.
Ayana Young So I want to talk about your most recent publication to begin: Awakening the Soul. And you touch on a number of very large global crises from climate change and natural disasters, to political polarization and the proliferation of mass destruction. And you write about these issues as symptoms of a much deeper-seated problem, a toxic underlying culture of disconnection from the “natural world, each other, and our own souls.” So to begin this interview, I'm wondering if you could guide us into your thinking around these disorienting and troubled times? You know, how is our current predicament connected to a much larger and profound reckoning of who we are and how we must change in order to survive and thrive on this planet? And then maybe a second part is, how does this connect to how we can understand this time in terms of the mythological notion that there is the story of the world and the story of the individual soul weaving through one another.
Michael Meade So that's where I usually start looking at the idea that there are two great stories going on at the same time for humans, and one is what I would call the eternal drama of the manifest world. In other words, I think it doesn't come to an end. I think mythologically it can't. It had no specific time of beginning and therefore it doesn't have to have a specific end. So that's one big idea, mythological idea. And then the other is that the other kind of eternal drama is the drama of the individual soul in the midst of the ever-changing world. And why I like to look at those two things is when you approach her from the old ideas of the embodied soul, then the individual soul is secretly connected to the soul of the world. And where that becomes important nowadays, I think, is it takes away some of the idea of “Oh, I'm just a little speck in the great universe. And there's nothing I can do to change the kind of catastrophic conditions that are now affecting the earth.” And it doesn't go to the old kind of discredited idea that humans are in charge of nature, it actually goes a different route, that humans are secretly, through human nature, connected to nature. And if we could become a better version of our own nature, we could actually relate better but also possibly contribute to the healing of what they used to call ‘great nature.’ And to pull the thread all the way through, contrary to Western ideas of the kind of opposition of culture and nature, when people act from the genuine grounds of human nature, the human soul becomes the meeting ground of culture and nature. And so going back to the, I think, was the first thing question you were posing, I think we're in such an extreme condition that we need a different view of the world than we have inherited. And so that is the other element. I think we're in a cosmological crisis, mythological crisis, and a psychological crisis, as well as a climate crisis. And the latest thing, I guess, being reported on the crisis of nature in freefall, where it comes to the loss of species.
Ayana Young So, to transition into a conversation on the mythology of today, and the notion of the popular “American mythology,” there are those who say we are lacking. Others argue that our mythology is embodied in concepts like democracy or progress or even that mythology is recreated through the production of entertainment. And if this is so, then I can't help but think about how the stories we tell in this culture are grounded in individualism: the linear arc of the hero's journey, for example. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think modern culture requires a new mythology? Or must we connect with age-old myths? You know, do you see a hyper-focus on individualism and the modern adaptation of mythology, and does this limit its ability to heal on a cultural level?
Michael Meade Really good, nuanced question. So there’s a problem with the idea of a new myth. Because myth is by its nature, ancient, it kind of rests on what they used to call archetypes, the kind of root basis of things that manifest in the world. And so it's a little bit of a hard thing to straighten out like a lot of people talk about a new paradigm. But paradigm is really another word for archetype, arche means ancient. And so mythic imagination, kind of is ancient and immediate at the same time. And so it's not a choice between new and old. It's really, I think, a bringing together of the ancient and the immediate. For instance, the big concern, and properly so, is about nature now; well, nature isn't new. Nature is the old, you know, ecology of place. So ‘new’ is the sales pitch of the culture of individualism and progress, I would say.
So, what I think we're looking for is - it's difficult to say ‘simply’ - but where I wind up focusing is in creative imagination, which they used to say, imagination is the deepest power of the human soul. And then even someone like Einstein said that nothing can exist until it has first been imagined. So when we get involved in creative imagination, we're actually close to creation itself. And I think what we're trying to do is find a greater, more imaginative way of seeing the world and our place in it. You mentioned the hero's journey, which is probably the only familiar myth to people in the United States, really. And that's partially because it was the basis for Star Wars. And that's what made those ideas popular.
There's a limitation to the heroes myth, a number of them, and that's why one reason I wrote the book called The Genius Myth, I was trying to suggest an imagination different than the hero because the hero tends to be masculine in one sense, tends to be very external, achievable, oriented, kind of muscular, and in the extreme leads to all of these video games that are violent with kind of heroic battles and so on. So I was looking for a concise way of saying, or naming, what is the character in people that is creative and meaningful, that is spiritual and soulful, that is natural and cultural at the same time, and I landed on the old word genius, which doesn't mean high IQ, or spectacular talent. The actual origin of the word means the spirit that's already there. So each person is born with a spirit that's already there, which they used to call a person's genius. And the genius of a person has two big connections. One is to nature directly. There's another kind of genius called genius loci, which means the genius of place and when a person loves a place or finds their place, they are connecting with the genius or the spirit of that place. And the other big direction of the genius in each person soul: male, female, young or old, gay, straight, you name it, genius is like a universal connection. Whereas hero tends to be a little bit more constricted to heroics, and as we know it.
And so, the other direction of the genius is, it's the root of the creative, imaginative capacity of the person, which, like I said earlier, puts a human potentially close to the energy of creation that gave us the natural world. And so I'm using genius, as an old idea that can be reimagined, to connect each of us individually and in groups, to the kind of great challenge of trying to heal the separation between nature and culture, and even assist in the reestablishing of the biospheres in the environmental balance.
Ayana Young The idea of technology pops into my head because so much of today's culture is centered around technology, the techno-fix, you know, genius and technology. It’s just such a huge cultural… I don't even know how to describe it. But I was recently reading an article examining our quote, ‘post-literate culture,’ and the idea that we have become mutated by digital images and interactions. And in this article, Neil Postman was quoted saying, “Americans, because television stages their world, no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other.” And this quote really hit a chord in me because I'm not so sure that all of us can even distinguish the difference between talking to someone versus being entertained. And to think that in the span of a little over two decades, we have so readily traded in connection for amusement. So I'd really love to ask you about the relationship between technology and what you refer to as horizontal connection. In your view, why have we all been so willing to trade in connection for amusement?
Michael Meade Well, in terms of - first of all, the Greeks were great for dealing with concepts that were opposite to each other. And one of the great old opposition's is between Techne and Gnosis. Techne is the common ability to connect, invent, or shape things. And Gnosis is the ability or the experience of deeply knowing in the body, in the blood, and in the soul something and also someone. And so, back to the idea of a cosmological dislocation, the West has taken the low road of Techne in a delusional way. And so now there's going to be the heroic pretension that inventive technology is going to save the earth. And of course, inventive technology is part of the problem that is endangering the earth. So, unfortunately, we're in this real crisis of imagination, mythos, Cosmos, soul, all of those kinds of things. Even as I say it, now I'm losing my track because of the size of the issue that everybody has to face.
But you know, I love language. And I lament the loss of the literary world and even the damage that's being done to the conversational world. But words are interesting in that they have levels and they have their own depth and their original meaning. The root meaning of ‘entertain’ is to turn around together and so I thought was more close to the point, when even the word ‘amuse’, if it's done in-depth, it has ‘muse’ in it. Amuse means to tap into the humor of the muse as the source of all inspiration in a feminine form. And humor itself comes from the idea of humus or earth. And so that's why so many jokes are earthy. So, in a way, we've gone far from the source. And another way our own language, as deficient as it may be, is always connecting us to the source if we only pay attention.
So the old mythological idea is everything that is experienced has more depth than is obvious and has meaning waiting to be found. So I fear greatly artificial intelligence and this kind of continuing delusion about techne or technological solutions. At the same time, I know from working with a lot of young people and so on, that people can go from being used by things that don't make much sense in the long run, to being awake in an imaginative way and in the embodiment of their own soul that can happen very quickly. How it happens on a collective level to a culture, to me is the big issue. In the latest book, Awakening the Soul, part of the time I'm writing about the idea of a collective initiation, that is to say, an awakening of imagination but also deep feeling happening on a collective level that allows us to see the world through different eyes, and also feel connected to each other, and the animal world, and the world of nature, but also the cosmos, in what we might call new, but let's say nuanced ways.
Ayana Young We're talking about technology and imagination, and the imagination that is growing in the sector of technology and design, and is creating these artificial worlds like you had mentioned the video games, do you think it's significant that it would appear that imagination is thriving in that realm, but perhaps stagnating and others? In the age of the Anthropocene, it would seem that our imaginations are adapting to a world in a multitude of ways. And I can't help but thinking about the younger generations who are immersed in tragedy and suffering and really staring into a future that might very well be unlike anything that will succeed it. So I'd like to bring up the role of youthful imaginations in today's world. And in your opinion, how is youthful imagination functioning, especially in regard to this idea of technology being the container for imagination in this culture.
Michael Meade So the things really do connect, I'm following you there. So one of the things I've been saying is what we're lacking is vertical imagination. In a way the world has become flat again, remember, when people used to think the world was flat - it's happened again. So that the great imagination, that is the natural inheritance of each individual's soul, has collapsed into a horizontal level of connectedness that we call the Internet or something… or people's ways of being socially connected, digitally connected, and pretending that that's a genuine social connection, even though it can be at times. So there's a collapse that has occurred. And so in a way, part of the challenge is to imagine ourselves part of the whole living, singing, cosmological, natural, constant expression of the source of creation (whatever a person wants to call that source). In other words, young people naturally inherit and tend to experience what the people, confirm it or not, their own dream of life which always goes all the way from the personal to the cosmological. And so I agree with you completely.
I've worked with youth for years, and to hear and see young people now going “well, there's nothing we can do this thing has gone too far. The climate change is about to turn into the hothouse state, everything's going to hell, terrorism, politics is completely opposed and negative.” And you know, it's all true. And it's all being delivered through technology to everybody every day. And the strange thing and the only thing that I've experienced is when a person, a young person, taps into the core of their self, which I think has a genius in there, that unique genius that brought them to life, but also that that core is connected to the roots of creation, they have access to the very opposite of the collapse of the world, which on one level, is vertical imagination that reminds us that we come from the stars, and we have some speck of the original explosion that people think brought the world into existence. And therefore we can tap into our own being and somehow contribute to the healing, to the meaningful change.
But I want to put the other side of it there. So psychologically, the parent psychologically is Youth and Elder. The old idea was a culture falls apart in two ways at once, where its elders are forgotten, and where its youth are rejected or not welcomed. And so we've already gone through that - we already have the loss of the functioning of the elders, we have ‘olders’ instead: people who live longer and longer, but don't necessarily get any wiser. I call it the olders versus the elders. And on the other hand, we have young people, really not feeling welcomed into culture in a meaningful human way. They're more given the substitute of technology as a way to allay the kind of youthful experience of isolation and deep doubt in the self. And the function of culture, which would be to welcome them and connect them to nature, is not there. And yet, if it's true that everybody inherits the deep meaning and all the qualities of being human, and those are universal, regardless of background or anything like that, then we're going to have to somehow tap into that to reimagine all the connections, and one of the core connections is between the awakened elder and the awakened youths. And just to say one more thing, because I'm getting rolling now, the environmentalism and the longing to make nature and culture come together and to heal the earth as we say, it cannot happen in my mind without this awakening and reconnection of youth and elders. I mean youth carrying the dream of the future, but elders are supposed to be carrying the wisdom of the moment that illuminates and substantiates and confirms that dream of the youth.
Ayana Young I want to talk about your book, awakening the soul. You eloquently described how what we may initially perceive as limits are actually the seeds of our soul's purpose. And when we feel like we're merely condemned to an unfavorable fate, we fail to engage with our genius or our gift. And you share the particular example of your experience serving time in a military prison in Panama during the Vietnam War in which, upon later reflection, you share this encounter and the difficulties that entailed, you know, “I challenge you to turn inward and down a path of self discovery.”
And so I'm hoping you're willing to share more on the alchemizing of so-called unfortunate circumstances and life passages. I have a series of thoughts and questions around this such as, how can trauma guide us? Or why is it that in order to live close to our gift, we must live close to our wounds? Or maybe another one is, how can we not only sharpen our ability to notice these opportunities for growth but also courageously and boldly stand in our truth? And then the last thought I was having around this is how might we find agency to do so in a system that requires and feeds off of our disconnection from self? So I know that's a lot of questions. So please feel free to pick up on any or all of these.
Michael Meade Oh, they’re great questions. Thank you. So just a direct route to the gift and wound thing. Carl Jung, the psychologist, wrote that “the gifts hide behind the wounds” and that became meaningful to me. Because you know, growing up a very wounded person in the world, winding up in prison, not for doing something wrong, but trying to stand up for something right. And then going through the dark night of the soul, which for me was several months in solitary confinement, eventually, without any food. And I found at the bottom, you could say, on the ground of the soul, which is where I fell to, I found both the gifts and the wounds. I didn't understand that I just experienced it and later I had to study psychology to figure out what it meant but a way to understand why it's meaningful. In other words, why would you have a world where everybody's wounded, because that's the psychological idea, everybody's wounded, everybody's carrying trauma.
One way to understand it is when you have someone who is in complete denial about their own woundedness or trauma (Donald Trump), and you put them in a position of power, they have no empathy for those who are suffering, they have no sympathy for the wounds of other people. And therefore they have to by definition, misuse power. And so the old idea was, you only want to give power to a woman or a man who has both found a sense of their own giftedness because realizing that a person is carrying a gift makes a person grateful, and grateful gratitude is you can only be grateful when you feel whole. And a person who knows gratitude knows that they are not in charge of all this, they're on the receiving end of the gift of life. And then the other side of it is, if a person knows how they are wounded, they should (because it's a very easy move to make) make the move to realizing that everybody suffers in this world. And therefore we are all connected, partially through the gift of life, but also through the wounds of life. And it's through that sympathetic kind of caring connection that we feel a full connection to nature, and eventually can feel connected to the world and what I like to call the cosmos.
I was struck just last week when I was studying the reports of the tragedy in Christchurch, New Zealand, when the shooter went to the mosques and killed 50 people. It happened on the day of Friday For Future, when young people all over the world left school and went on strike in order to bring the idea of healing climate change to more people's awareness. And it also happened from the news reporting that right near where the shooting occurred, there were a bunch of students striking for climate change. And it kind of hit me really strongly that there's the gift of the young people right next to the wound of the culture: someone acting out of the madness of white supremacy, which is a rejection of other people in saying some are better than others and we're not really connected, right next to young people saying we're connected to each other, we're also connected to the earth and the insects and the butterflies and the trees. There was in one moment, you could say in one day, the gift and the wound, and there's no way we're going to heal those wounds and use the gifts, I would say if we don't find the gifts in ourselves and the wounds in ourselves because that becomes the embodied experience that gives us knowledge as opposed to simple opinion or information. So I don't know if that helps.
I found that kind of connection in a solitary confinement cell after months of being with just myself. It allowed me to realize that, well, prior to being in that state, I was blaming a lot of people for my own unhappiness. But I did find down there in the depths when there was no one else around that it was really my own woundedness that I didn't know how to deal with. By the way. That's what got me interested in initiation as the old archetypal process for a person transforming their lives and finding everything from spiritual connections to connections with nature, which are often connected to each other, and maybe realize that what's missing in the modern world is a genuine understanding and experience of initiation. In the idea of a collective initiation everybody awakens to greater knowledge, real gnosis of the moment we're living in and then inside the collective awakening, each person awakens in an individual way: their own gifts and what they have to give in to their own wounds, and what they have to heal, and in turning to heal that realize they're connected to all wounded people or all people are wounded and therefore connected. And then you get, it's really easy to make the empathic move to nature into everything, the animal world and all that. But if I don't know my own wounds, and I'm denying them seriously, again, Donald Trump and many others, then I can deny that I actually have feelings for the animals and even the insects that are threatened. And so, by knowing our wounds, we actually learn a lot about the world.
Ayana Young Mm hmm. Yes, I very much agree with that. And I want to talk more about initiation. But before that, I want to dive a little deeper into this time when you are in solitary confinement, and in Awakening of the Soul, you recount learning of the old Irish tradition of ritual, fasting, and context to your own fasting in solitary confinement. And you write, “I understood that my decision to fast while in prison was not simply personal, it was also part of an ancestral tradition that, under pressure, had awakened as from inside my bones, and from the depths of my soul.” So what do you think is the importance of studying the cultural-specific mythology of our ancestors? And to what degree are we unconsciously reliving and rewriting the tales of our ancestors?
Michael Meade That's another really good question. I put those things in a book so that people that happen to be reading the book would get a sense of where I'm coming from: that I studied things - and I like what they used to call the sacred path of knowledge - but my test for things is “what have I experienced? Can I back it up with some lived experience?” And so that was, in some ways, the worst experience of my life. I mean, as a young person it was. I didn't expect to live, no one thought I was going to live. Because in the midst of being mistreated and punished in various ways and thrown into solitary confinement, I realized that the authorities did not understand what my objection was.
I couldn't sign conscientious objection papers, because the papers actually said you had to claim that it was for religious reasons that you weren't willing to go to battle. And I said, hey, first of all, I’m Irish and I was raised as Catholic. So I don't think I can claim that the purity of having nothing to do with war or battles, and I said, “what I'm having is a conscientious objection from my own soul.” And that didn't qualify, so one thing led to another. But taking a stand like that, I was 20 years old, made everything in my life change. And whereas I never would have chosen to fall that far into a dungeon of loneliness, and so on, it actually turned out to be the best thing for me. And so I came out of it having an awareness that there was a voice in my soul, there was a presence in my soul. And for instance, it wasn't simply that I wasn't willing to kill someone for reasons I couldn't even understand - that was true. But it also was, I didn't want to die in the wrong way or having not lived my own life. I was willing to die if I couldn't live my life, but I wasn't going to die living someone else's idea of my life. I had that youthful exuberance for meaning. And now I'm going to get lost talking about it because even in talking about it, I go right back into the experience of it.
But what happened was, when I got out of there, there was no counselor waiting or therapist waiting. I was actually more alone when I got out than when I was in the dungeon in some ways. I didn't know where to go, I didn't know how to fit in. But I did remember this idea of initiation or rites of passage that I associated with tribal groups. But I found out through that process, that the knowledge of that is in our bones, this is just how it felt to me. And so shortly after I got out and I was trying to figure out “what do I do?” I'm a stranger in a strange land because no one knows who I am now. I went through life and death repeatedly. And now my friends don't actually know me, I had to move away from everyone I knew because people, I couldn't relate to them, but they couldn't relate to me, either.
And then I happen to hear about prisoners in prison in Ireland, who began fasting against colonial rule. And I realized that what had made me fast was you could call it an ancient Irish thing because the Irish had this practice of ritual fasting against the misuse of power. And I realized, in my own sense of the world, that's what had happened to me. And I had tapped into something that we're going to call ancestry. But then I found out that there was such a thing also in India. So I was tapping into something that in psychological terms wasn't specifically ancestral. It was deeper than the specific manifestations of ancestors. It's what you call the archetypal ground of the ancestors. And I don't know, I still tried to explain it to myself these days. But that felt to me like the ground of truth, like a ground of being grounded, of truth experience. And I tried to integrate that into my life, and eventually began working with young people who were in severe trouble using the idea that by the time you're in severe trouble, you're more ready to transform than most people. If only, there is an understanding that deep down in the soul is genuine meaning, there's truth, and there's beauty trying to awaken. And if you can put those things together, then the most troubling things can become the kind of irritation from which transformation can occur. If a person can hold on to that idea, personally, you can then transfer it to the planet, as we say nowadays, and say, when the planet is in this much trouble, we're in the dark night of the soul of the planet itself, then we are strangely closer to the seeds of imagination that can be used to reinvigorate life and also possibly heal not just personally, but on a collective and possibly planetary level.
Ayana Young I want to go back to this word initiation because I think that in our modern culture, we're so far from not just understanding it, but even having access to it, whether it's in our communities, or our schools, whatever it is. I mean, this question around initiation is something like, do we need to be tying it to something ancestral? Is it something that needs to be done with others and a community? Is it something that we can create for ourselves, we can create our own initiations? How does one come to initiation at this time, when we are so disconnected from each other, from the earth, from our ancestory many of us don't even know where we came from. So I'd love to hear your thoughts around this.
Michael Meade Yeah, it's a real puzzle. I literally have studied it since I was 21 years old and I've written about it at various times. And I've tried to put it in practice in various ways. So one reason I really became interested in gifts and wounds is because an initiatory experience, whether it happens randomly, like a person gets locked up and discovers themselves while they're locked up, or even a person gets an illness that they didn't choose, and they find themselves isolated, that the isolation is one of the steps of initiation, the first step is to be separate from other people, often not by one's own choice. And in that separation, there becomes, consciously or not, the challenge to get to know oneself. And then the second step of initiation is some kind of ordeal of suffering or a challenge that gets to the very root of one's being. And so it's in feeling ourselves separated from who we thought we were or something like that, which can happen accidentally, from an accident even. And then going through challenges and ordeals, which strip away the simple ego layer layers of things because you're challenged to become way more present. So, even though initiation doesn't happen in a meaningful way culturally, it's archetypal, and you can't take it away completely. But I think where it gets really interesting is the third step of initiation is a return as a transformed person, to a community that genuinely welcomes someone back and ideally can see some way in which the person is changed or in which the person has a heightened sense of their own gifts in life and their own ability to be present.
So what happens for instance in culture now is those who have power tend to be seriously uninitiated people. And in other words, they don't know who they are. And therefore they cannot really know who other people are. And then you give them power and they cannot help but misuse it because they don't understand how power is supposed to be used to bring people together, not apart, and so on like that. But the problem now is a lot of people go through the separation experience that happens in depression as well as it happens in an illness. And most people go through challenges and ordeals but very few people, I think, get recognized for the transformation they've gone through. You can see this even with things like something like cancer, or let's say breast cancer, which is a real modern scourge. And I know there are people learning how to do this but when a person comes back from a terrible illness, which challenges a person at all levels of psyche and soul, the soul expects people to be waiting, and to welcome them for having survived the brush with death, which is one of the old descriptions of initiation. And it makes a person not less of a person, but a more genuinely experienced person and they're on the path to actually becoming an elder, because they've gone to the depths of their own soul, and found a way back to life. And I keep seeing that as the parallel to what's going on with nature, in the sense of all the climate change and all the damages occurring, and so on. It says if nature is going through the dark night of its own soul, and if we can relate to it, personally, we're going to do better in terms of trying to help heal it and relate to it collectively.
Ayana Young I'm thinking about relating collectively, the last thing you'd said and I am thinking back of a passage I read in preparation that loosely outlines how some mythological worlds are built up only to be shattered from which new worlds are created. And so maybe a question around this is, what is the role of the mythic imagination in addressing global problems and shattering these old systems.
Michael Meade So it's an odd world we live in, where most people use the word ‘myth’ to mean that the thing is not true: a myth is a falseness. And yet, the old idea was myth meant emergent truth. So one of the problems we have is we've fallen out of story. And I mean the stories that carry people, the stories that connect people. We don't have enough shared mythic imagination to hold us together. You could even say it is the lack of meaningful in-depth shared imagination that causes the polarization in the culture, that people are now grabbing just a part of it. So people think you're on the left, or you're on the right, or you're conservative, or you know, you're progressive and all, and some of those things all used to have meaning. But now people are holding on to them as if it's a raft in the middle of an ocean being driven by a great storm, and maybe that's what it really feels like to the soul. So somehow we have to find stories or versions of stories that bring us closer back together. And, and that's a struggle. I mean, I usually think of finding new stories. I think it's more like a new interpretation.
A lot of what I write about, I take old stories and try to see how they apply right now. Because if you take a simple thing, like the Greek myth of Icarus, who has those techne technological wings that were made by his father Daedalus when the two of them are trying to get out of a prison. So here's the problem with technology. Daedalus, who's the inventor of that mythology, makes the wings and attaches them with beeswax to his youthful son, Icarus, and Icarus, of course, being youthful fly too close to the sun. This is the entire Western culture, trying to fly towards the light and thinking you can do to techne version of wings, whether it's rockets or planes or whatever goes on to other planets, and all that kind of stuff. That's all Icarus stuff. But techne can get us to where we want to go. And so when Icarus comes too close to the sun it melts the beeswax and he begins to plummet really hard, which on another level, you could say, on a meaningful level, that's happening to the Western culture as well. And so you can take an old myth like that - Daedalus, by the way, doesn't fly as high and he manages actually to escape and fly away, and he lives a long life afterward - and so it shows you something about youth and elders in one sense, and it shows you something about the limits of technology in another. And it's a fairly meaningful way of using an old story to talk about a contemporary condition. That's what I mean by mythology. So I don't know, I'm not trying to invent the new story, or the new idea. I'm trying to find myself continually and hopefully connect to others through what I see as old stories being reinterpreted or found anew. That's just the way I work out of it. I have concerns about a culture based on newness that had done great damage to the planet then trying to find something new to solve the damage by that quest for newness.
Ayana Young I'm thinking how we are indeed in these… we're at a time of these tragic stories. And it's also at a time that mimics apocalypse and a great uncovering by definition. So I'm wondering what mythologies might be told now that can guide us? And are there any myths that you carry especially close at this time?
Michael Meade Thank you, great question. So a lot of people when they have a kind of academic education around myth are mostly exposed to the great mythologies of the so-called ‘great civilizations’ (which, by the way, whenever very civilized). But I like to carry the, what I call the folk myths. they're much smaller stories that are harder to damage. So probably my favorite story of the last number of years is a Native American story that's told by a number of tribes in North America, or it was told. And it has an odd beginning in which it doesn't say, “once upon a time,” it starts with this time, whenever that might mean to the person hearing it and say every human born is always looking for knowledge. And, and it turns out, that real knowledge is available in a cave that is nearby here. They always say that here. And the strange thing is no one ever makes it to that cave, everybody now rushing this way, and that on highways and byways and, and even internet highways, and no one's making it to the cave, the place where the knowledge we're looking for happens to be. But if you found that cave, inside the cave, you would find an old woman. And the old woman is sitting in the cave, and she's weaving the most beautiful garment that anyone has ever seen. And she had been working on it for a long time. And because she wants it to be so beautiful, she's making the hem of the garment out of porcupine quills. And in order to weave them into the garment, she has to bite down on the quills to flatten them. And she's been biting down on quills for so long that she's worn her teeth down to where they're just nubs sticking above the gums, but still, she keeps weaving this beautiful garment. And every once in a while she has to stop weaving and go to the back of the cave. And in the back of the cave, there is a fire and some people say that fire is the oldest thing in this world. And hanging over the fire is a cauldron, and in the cauldron is a stew that includes all the seeds of all the plants, and all the bushes, and all the grains, and all the fruit trees that have ever grown on the earth and if she doesn't go back and stir the soup of all the seeds then the fire will get too hot and it will burn this seeds and we won't have the natural world. And so she puts down the garment and goes back to stir the seeds. But while she's going slowly to the back to stir the soup of all the seeds, the black dog suddenly appears. And the black dog sees a loose thread of that beautiful garment, and it begins to pull on that thread. And he keeps pulling until the whole garment is unraveled. And nothing is left but a great chaos laying on the floor of the cave so that when the old woman comes back, she sees all of her work turned into chaos on the floor. And she stands for a minute to consider, and she sits down. And no one knows what she thinks or what she might say about it. But eventually, she picks up a loose thread herself. And as soon as she picks up that thread, she sees an even more beautiful garment that she could weave, she sees the image of a greater garment. And she begins to weave that new garment out of the chaos of the previous garment. And as the Elders say, a lot of people say “damn that dog for unraveling everything.” But they say wisdom would say, this world has to come apart once in a while. Otherwise, it will come to an end altogether. Because the old woman is the old woman of this world, the one who is manifesting the world. And if she ever came to the end of the garment, it would be the end of the world. And therefore be thankful when things fall apart. And when you have the chance, calm yourself, look at the chaos, pick up a loose thread, and help the old woman reweaving the world again. My favorite story.
Ayana Young I have chills, I could really listen to that story, and I will when I really listened to this episode over and over again, that was so beautiful. And I feel it embodied on a macro level and a micro level, individually/collectively. And I'm never one for hope. I'm not a big fan of the word hope. But that story instead instills in me a type of desire to keep going. And it feels right. It feels really right to hear that. So thank you so much. And in closing this conversation, I wanted to make sure we were able to touch on Mosaic a little bit. And I was curious about the work that Mosaic does regarding community and initiations which we've touched on. It seems that we can't initiate ourselves but at this time, and in this culture, it seems that self-initiation occurs, sometimes even out of necessity. So how is mosaic offering a means of accountability and initiation through your various projects when it comes to rites of passage?
Michael Meade Now, it's a good question about accountability. So we don't do, like, say, “We're doing rites of passage and come with us, and then we'll be initiated”. I have great concerns about that. In other words, if someone is shaping rites of passage, the implication would be that they've gone through that passage and beyond themselves. And I worry about that, I worry about that in a culture like this. So where mosaic started was, I'm trying to work with initiation in order to understand my own, unwanted in a sense, rite of passage that had me almost die and barely find myself. And I sure didn't want to pretend that I could take someone through that kind of passage that is still a little bit mysterious to me. So I decided the only accountable way to do it would be to work with people when they're already in the place of extremity. So mosaic formed around working with people who are outside the culture, or who are lost, or who are deeply traumatized - both individuals and groups. And for 35 years, that's really what mosaic was doing working in prisons, working with people coming out of prison, working with young people in gangs, working with homeless people on the streets, working with refugees, and all an exploration of turning the trauma into transformation and trying to learn more how to take the broken pieces and make a new mosaic, or in the case of the story, a new garment, out of the broken threads of a culture or even a person's life. That's been the practice. And so we've learned some things that I've been trying to write down or find ways to show the things that we've learned, but your idea of accountability is really important. The old idea was if you initiate someone you become accountable for them, and it's the opposite of what people might think. And so it's a very tricky thing to deal with and it's a very necessary thing. If we don't have a rite of passage that moves people from the entrapment of the modern world to a greater view of the world of culture and of nature, then we are kind of stuck. At the same time, if we do it with pretension, or erode pretension, we'll be stuck in new and more damaging ways.
And so it's hard to explain briefly but my study of ritual leads me to the place where the old woman in the story is sitting and considering beauty and chaos. And it suggests that that's the key moment in the transformation of the person or of the group. And so as long as that can be an honest approach that considers it's not that we know what to do. It's not that we're the ones that know and we're taking the young people through and they're gaining from our knowledge. I don't think that's it. I know young people that are wiser than I am. No, it’s that we're trying to learn how to get to that moment where the gift and the wound, the chaos and the beauty are both potentially there and we're then trying to pick up threads of meaning and help each other reweave ourselves back into life. That's how I think of what Mosaic is doing. And so it means we're always going to places that are unraveling. We're always entering situations that are chaotic, in order to find the threads of beauty, meaning, and pulling things together.
Ayana Young Thank you for listening to For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana young. The music you heard today was from Izaak Opatz. And our theme music is from the late and great Kate Wolf with Like a River. I'd like to thank our podcast production team, our podcast audio producer Andrew Storrs, Francesca Glaspell, our media researcher and writer, Eryn Wise, social media coordination, Hannah Wilton guest coordination, and Carter Lou McElroy, our music coordinator.