The Empathic Way cont’d: Awareness, Acceptance, Choice

Places have Needs, Feelings, and Ways too. Life on a mountain, differs from Life in a valley. Life in a desert face different challenges than Life in the ocean. A vital aspect of Mythic Cartography involves seeing the spirit bundle of a place.

To live in a place, you must live with the place. This requires three things: awareness, acceptance, choice.

Awareness of what the place tells you, its feelings and needs, of what you feel, and what needs those feelings signal.

Acceptance of these feelings and needs as happening, without resistance or denial, completely embracing them. We truly understand only that which we fully embrace. What we always keep at arm’s length, we will never understand.

Choosing, what action to take that will meet your needs, and the needs of the place. You might call this “flowing”, a cooperation with your loving relatives, who get angry, who may even hurt you, but who will always love you. I call it creating your Way, and the evolution of your own spirit bundle.

Those three steps: awareness of the reality, accepting the reality, choosing what to do about the reality. Each time you make a choice, you observe the results….staying Aware of the results, Accepting them, and Choosing what action to take to better meet your Needs.

This describes an upward and expanding spiral of healing, growth, and possibility. The creation of a beautiful Way that works. With this mind we can approach the Land, learn its spirit bundle, and hear the stories it wants to tell, without judgement or fear.

With this under our belts, we can learn to Dance with the land. Both of us Lead, both of us Follow, staying aware of our partner’s movements, accepting their energy, choosing how to flow with them. By Dancing, we also Court the Land, showing our intention: love, reconciliation, healing.

In this way we discover Life leads to Empathy, Empathy leads to Dancing, and Dancing leads to Courting that which gives Life.

What do you call the Courting of the Place that gives you life?

A Mythmap.

Call me King of my People
I rule no one, yet all their will comes together in me
I make no decisions, yet here I speak with you decisively
I have no demands, yet of my strength and weakness
I will sing sweetly
A kindness done to me, you do to all of my kind.

Call me Queen of my People
I punish no one, yet all find me just
I call you neither this, nor that
but instead invite you to share with me
the song in your heart
Though wounded by you,
I will not let the Sun set
on our tattered affections
We will weave a new robe together,
you the weft,
I the warp

The Empathic Way cont’d: The Ways of Needs and Feelings

Everything that Lives, has Needs. Everything that has Needs, has Feelings that signal those Needs.

To meet its Needs, every living thing has chosen a Way.

You can also call this Way, a “strategy”. For example, cougars live solitary lives, and hunt mostly through sight and the dance of the stalk and pounce. Wolves live social lives, and hunt mostly through their noses and ears, using the dance of the chase and wearing down.

Both animals eat other animals, but do it in different ways, according to their needs. Their Needs, Feelings and Ways influence each other as they evolve and adapt to a changing world.

Sometimes a living creature will follow a Way that doesn’t meet its Needs. Sooner or later, this being will die from its Way.

Wild animals role model for us a rigorous commitment to living in elegant Ways that work to meet their Needs. Their lives keep them close to instant and powerful feedback when a Way does not serve them.

A being’s Needs, Feelings, and Way, taken together, you can call its spirit bundle, the totality of its true nature.

For countless generations humans have looked to these spirit bundles in the community of life, all around them, and learned from them.

E-prime refers to the english language, without the verb to be. I’ve written everything on this website in e-prime, excepting a handful of old articles and stories (A Boy Named Num, Gold Coins For Copper Pennies, and one or two others.)

Indigenous (non/pre-civilization) languages all seem to lack a to be verb. In fact, it may have served instrumentally in helping build hierarchy and specialization. Inevitably you’ll find, that native terms for “hunter” or “runner” come out “he/she hunts” or “he/she runs”. Not labels, but activities. Labeling someone “leader”, “follower”, “mason”, “farmer” requires use of the to be verb, and the concept of static professions. Once again, we want to cross back over that line, from Hierarchy to Family.

A simple web search will reveal much more on e-prime that I don’t need to repeat here. Suffice to say, I consider it more of an experiment, than any kind of dogma. The staff of the College love linguistic puzzles, in any case. And just perhaps, together, we’ll create new language that will bring the world alive again.

The Empathic Way of Needs and Feelings

The Universe consists of two kinds of beings:

those we call Living….

and those we call Living, Growing.

Everything in our community, Rock, Tree, River, Sky, Dandelion, Fox, all of them pulse with Life.

All beings that Live, have Needs. All beings that have Needs, have Feelings.

When you need rest, you feel tired. When you continue on to exhaustion, you may feel despair, annoyance, sadness. Your feelings and emotions tell you about your needs, alert you to them. Without feelings we would die.

In order to Court all our nonhuman relatives surrounding us, and the sacred places that all together make the one great mythic-story body of the Earth Mother, we have to have empathy for them. We have to recognize our kinship with them as living beings.

When our bodies need water, we feel thirsty, until we drink, and then we feel joy.

When a oak tree needs water, it feels thirsty, until the oak drinks, and then feels joy.

When we need companionship, we feel lonely, until we meet a friend, and feel relief and happiness.

When a wolf needs companionship, he feels lonely, until he finds a pack, and feels relief and happiness.

Take care to not project human needs onto our nonhuman relatives. Know instead, that they have their own needs, each according to their natures. Learn their needs, by observing their feelings. No one can tell another what to feel or what to need. This understanding applies to all life

Can you do it? Can you take the mask of dumbness and blindness off of our nonhuman family, and hear them cry, hear them laugh, see their fear, their anger?

Try it. Next time you look at a stone, a tree, a lawn, a bird, the sky, ask yourself: what does it feel right now? And what need does that feeling point to?

Or go in the other direction - what need does it have, and how might it feel about that need? A leaf with a hole chewed in it, a songbird singing in the dawn, a cat staring out a window.

So goes the empathic way of needs, and feelings.

Anthropomorphize, v.: to ascribe human characteristics to things not human.
[American Heritage Dictionary]

Anthorpomorphize, v: to ascribe human values to things not human.
[Mythic Cartographer’s definition]

How do you do Mythic Cartography? How do you recreate and maintain Mythmaps?

Well, now we get to the meat of it.

In Lovesick Gods of Heaven and Earth we talked about the line our modern culture crossed, however long ago, from the living world as Family, to the abstract rule of Gods. From natural gods and spirits as our parents, grandparents, children and siblings, to Farming Gods, who rule over us from a distance, from unreachable mythic mountaintops, or from another realm of existence.

We want to cross back over that line. We want to get our Family back. How do you rebuild trust with someone with whom you’ve damaged that bond? You court them, of course.

ALL REALITY AS COURTING

You will have to romance your relations in the community of life, whom your ancestors rejected. You will have to put on the healer’s robes and do the work that has so long remained undone. In order to renew former ties, you will play heartsick songs of affection and love without conditions or qualifications. You will have to fall in love with Life.

ALL REALITY AS RIDDLES…

All riddles challenge you to learn the language of eloquence. To understand the poem-speak, and glimpse the heart of that whom the riddle courts. When you glimpse that heart, you’ve touched its spirit.

All the riddles worth telling, to Mythic Cartographers, concern sacred places and those wild children who live there. They concern our love affair with the goddess, the Earth Mother.