I’ve bound you from within
and while you yet recline
with that chair against your spine
I’ll speak to you of history

You’ll forgive my lack of tact
a tactic inexact
Yet both hurried and unworried
I’ll spin a story without lack

For ideas I care not
you can have the sorry lot
but for dreamers and believers
I’ll sell everything I’ve got
(yes, for dreaming and believing
I’ve done things I once could not
yes, for dancing and romancing
for story
and for glory
yes, for all of that and more
I’ve rushed far beyond the door
that stood right between
both me and righteous gleam
of dreaming
evermore)

So this story it begins
without virtues
without sins
It begins inside a heart
(you’ll know it from the start)
a heart that beats
and never cheats
that often cries
and does not lie
Yes this heart does begin
this tale somewhat grim
within a wounded breast
and we will put it to the test

We have hurt it
true indeed
and it weeps
and it bleeds
but will it do the same to us?
will it curse?
will it cut?

If only we can convince it
we will win
and we will show it
that by not feeling
or revealing
any signal or sign
of bleeding
only then
will it start winning
any battle worth one dying

yes by lying
and not crying
the heart will win the fighting

and it will curse
and it will cut
and it will die without regret
having nothing
knowing no-one

who has won?
well now you have me
I conspire
and I satire
against joy
against levity
I’ve told you insincere
what I would not want to hear
but I rather
would see you gladder
with a heart with both grief
and laughter
knowing someone
having all
but nothing bought
nor nothing sold

(yes by crying
and never lying
the heart will abandon fighting
by weeping
and by bleeding
it will give the Earth a greeting:
you may touch me
and inspire me
you may wound me
you may tire me
but I’ll always keep on beating
because you have born within me
what I call: a perfect free thing).

For fans of Daniel Quinn…an old posting stemming from a contention over the difference between Leaver paradigms and Taker ones, a long time ago, at Ishcon. Kudos to Julie Cramer for writing it, and apologies to Daniel Quinn.

in The Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy, paragraph 80:
When the Confederate Council of the Five Nations has for its object the establishment of the Great Peace among the people of an outside nation and that nation refuses to accept the Great Peace, then by such refusal they bring a declaration of war upon themselves from the Five Nations. Then shall the Five Nations seek to establish the Great Peace by a conquest of the rebellious nation.

Some non-Iroquois folks interpret this to mean: Those who do not accept the Peacemaker’s Great Law of Peace will be conquered by the Iroquois Confederacy and subjected to it by force, as it is the One Right Way for everyone to live, and it is the Confederacy’s sacred duty to spread it across the whole world.

Me: Ishmael, how can the Iroquois possibly be Leavers, according to paragraph 80 of their constitution?

Ish [grumbles and shifts]: I can see we’re going to have to start this one from the beginning.

Me: What do you mean?

Ish: Well, why don’t you tell me what Mother Culture tells you this piece of the Iroquois Constitution is saying?

Me: Mother Culture? What does she have to do with any of this?

Ish: Well, she’s the one who has taught you what is obvious, correct? She’s the one who has convinced you that it’s obvious Iroquois are Takers…so if I’m going to prove any different, I’ll have to speak with her directly.

Me: Okay

Ish: So, in Mother Culture’s words, if you please.

Me: Well, let me see. “When the Confederate Council of the Five Nations has for its object the establishment of the Great Peace among the people of an outside nation”…That means, if the Iroquois see another nation that is not the way that it should be…

Ish: I’m sorry, what do you mean, “not the way that it should be”?

Me: I don’t know. I guess, they aren’t living the right way. Maybe they are too cruel to their women or something, or aren’t living as peacefully as they should.

Ish: Okay, I just wanted to get that more clear. Continue.

Me: Okay. ” and that nation refuses to accept the Great Peace, then by such refusal they bring a declaration of war upon themselves from the Five Nations. Then shall the Five Nations seek to establish the Great Peace by a conquest of the rebellious nation.” That means that, if the wayward nation doesn’t comply, doesn’t see the error of their ways, the Iroquois will be forced to make them see how great peace is…by being forced into it…through war…I guess.

Ish: I guess? Why do you guess?

Me: Well. That just doesn’t make any sense. How could you preach “The Great Law of Peace” and spread the word by conquering, warring, forcing others to accept it? That doesn’t sound very peaceful.

Ish: I agree.

Me: Well, it doesn’t make any sense, but I guess that’s exactly what makes them Takers. That’s just what our country does. We say, you really need to have democracy…and even if you think you don’t want it, even if you were to vote not to have it, we would help you see the error of your ways by demanding you adopt it! Ridiculous! But, I guess that’s what a Taker is. But still, I guess I have trouble imagining the Iroquois not noticing how foolish that sounds…right in their constitution!

Ish: Again, I agree. And it does sound foolish. But, we have already established Mother Culture is guilty of the occasional doublespeak. Lets thank her for her opinion and try moving on. Now, you’re accusing the Iroquois of being Takers, but certainly not of being fools, right.

Me: No, I guess not.

Ish: So, lets start off by assuming they are not fools.

Me: Okay.

Ish: Lets start off by assuming that, somehow, this statement can be made with full sincerity, no hypocricy.

Me: Okay.

Ish: Heck, lets just try reading that quote again, from an entirely different point of view. No Mother Culture this time. This time, you’re going to read it from the point of view of a Leaver. Pretend a Leaver wrote that quote.

Me: I don’t see how that would change anything.

Ish: What?! My goodness, I’m a lot further behind than I thought I was! Do you think a Taker would see the same thing when they looked out on the open prairie as a Leaver would?

Me: Well, no.

Ish: What would be different?

Me: Well, a Leaver would see grasses, homes for various animals, probably all sorts of things like that. The Leaver would see all sorts of relationships, interacting with each other, a place full with abundant Life.

Ish: And the Taker?

Me: Empty space, I guess.

Ish: Perfect for 1,000 acres of potatoes, or a mini mall or something, right? Just empty space good for the taking.

Me: That’s right.

Ish: Okay, so we’ve reestablished that Takers and Leavers have a completely different frame of reference for perceiving the world, and that would lead that when they expressed what they perceived, even using the same words, it would mean something different, wouldn’t it?

Me: I suppose it would. I don’t completely understand.

Ish: Just give it a go.

Me: Okay, I’ll try.

Ish: [grumbling a bit] Now, try again. Read that quote from a Leaver point of view.

Me: Okay, here goes nothin’. “When the Confederate Council of the Five Nations has for its object the establishment of the Great Peace among the people of an outside nation” Well, that’s a tough one. A Leaver would never do that! A Leaver nation would never have for its object ANYTHING for another nation. Its, live and let live. As long as you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you.

Ish: Exactly. So, from that point of view, why would a Leaver take it for its object the establishment of their international policy of Peace on an outside nation? If they are only concerned about being able to live their own relatively peaceful lifestyle?

Me: Well, I guess, they would do that if they weren’t able to live that peaceful lifestyle…

Ish: Yes…and what would infringe on a peaceful lifestyle?

Me: War?

Ish: Yes! Pretty simple, huh?

Me: Oh! I see. So, for a Leaver, its not that they would see that others were living in a way that was wrong and not seeing their own errors. A Leaver would be concerned that another nation’s warring lifestyle was making it impossible for them to live their lifestyle of peace!!!

Ish: Excellent. [after settling down and nibbling on a branch for a bit, he resumes]: So, do you think they would go to all of this trouble over some stolen horses?

Me: No, it seems like it would have to be a bigger deal.

Ish: Not some missing bushels of corn?

Me: No.

Ish: Not some philosophical differences of opinion?

Me: As I said, it seems like if they were going to commit to war, which is expressly against the whole point of the Great Law of Peace, and since we are assuming they are not fools, and would only do that when they had no other option, it would have to be something much much worse. Something worth dying over. Full out attack against them. It would have to be violence, not just a missing horse or bushel of corn. It would have to be the kind of violence they worked so hard to move away from in their own history.

Ish: So what is at stake here?

Me: Something a Leaver would value.

Ish: Which exempts…?

Me: Well, they wouldn’t value the annihilation of a competitor. I imagine they would value an improvement in quality of life…more peace. So, I guess, that’s why they give them the option of adopting the Great Peace, which basically means, not fighting the Iroquois, and leaving them to live their peaceful lives.

Ish: Exactly! Not so foolish, eh?

Me: No. But.

Ish: What?

Me: Well. Even so, even if they said to their aggressors, Hey, we’re trying to be peaceful over here. Would you mind just playing nice with us? It makes sense that they would then be forced to use war if their offer were refused, simply for self defense…but, it sounds like they plan to engage in a borg-like assimilation of the outside nation as a result of that war. That doesn’t sound like a Leaver thing to me.

Ish: Me neither. A Borg-like assimilation sounds very Taker, indeed. Lets find how you came to that conclusion.

Me: Well, it says, “Then shall the Five Nations seek to establish the Great Peace by a conquest of the rebellious nation.” They intend to CONQUER the other nation and force their One Right Way of peace on them! Even after they have won the war and gotten them to stop fighting. If they were truly a Leaver culture, they wouldn’t try to conquer another nation at all.

Ish: Well, there’s two bits in there. Firstly, how does erratic retaliation work?

Me: You fight me to show how strong you are, kill one of our sons or something, and then we show you how strong we are by killing one of yours, and so on and so forth.

Ish: So, it continues. You don’t end erratic retaliation by winning a squabble.

Me: No, I suppose you don’t.

Ish: So, just winning a war does not preserve your peace does it?

Me: Well, I guess not.

Ish: Okay, so now you’ve decided to conquer, and include them in the confederacy. What does conquest look like?

Me: Mother Culture says it means you take over the land of those you conquer and make them adopt your worldview, your lifestyle…and give up all of their resources to your tithe.

Ish: I thought we were done with Mother Culture. What does a Leaver’s conquest look like?

Me: I didn’t think Leaver’s had such a thing.

Ish: What do you suppose conquest might mean to a Leaver? Keep in mind, this is a Leaver who values the “Great Law of Peace”.

Me: Well, involvement, I suppose.

Ish: What do you mean by that?

Me: Well, if the confederacy is a coming together of nations to solve matters peacefully in council, to avoid losing so many sons, conquest would simply mean being involved in that.

Ish: Interesting. Lets take a look at what the Iroquois thought of as conquest. Read paragraph 84 of the Iroquois constitution, which reveals their evil plans.

Me: Paragraph 84?

Ish: Yes. You have read the whole thing, haven’t you?

Me: Well…

Ish: You didn’t just excerpt one paragraph out of context of the whole?

Me: Well, someone else told me about it.

Ish: Well, lets give you something to tell THEM about! Read paragraph 84.

Me: Ahem. “84. Whenever a foreign nation is conquered or has by their own will accepted the Great Peace their own system of internal government may continue, but they must cease all warfare against other nations.” What…Is that all? That’s the consequences of being “conquered” by the Iroquois?

Ish: It gets even more Machiavellian. Read 99.

Me: “99. The rites and festivals of each nation shall remain undisturbed and shall continue as before because they were given by the people of old times as useful and necessary for the good of men.”

Ish: This isn’t to say there were no other consequences of resisting “the Great Peace”. In another paragraph you will read :”The conquered nation shall have no voice in the councils of the Confederacy in the body of the Lords.” So, conquest does not necessarily mean full involvement, simply compliance. This may simply have been leverage to encourage nonviolent participation from the outset, however. Essentially saying, listen, sooner or later, your going to have to stop fighting us, and if you go along willingly, we can all play together. That sort of thing.

Me: Wait…

Ish: Yes?

Me: So, if they keep their government, they keep their culture, what exactly are they “losing” by joining the Confederacy? They must lose something.

Ish: It’s not what the outside nation is losing. Again, you keep going back to Mother Culture. That’s what war is about for Mother Culture, fight ’til someone loses, and winner take all. Leavers just want to live. That’s all. For the Iroquois, it was about what they would be gaining. Think of it yourself…what exactly is all this “Great Peace” and “Iroquois Constitution” fuss about…what exactly is it all driving at? Keeping in mind that we are assuming it was invented by Leavers.

Me: Well, it was established because of an intense ongoing cycle of blood feuds that no-one could stop - erratic retaliation gone amuck, I’d think. And if the Confederacy itself consists of little more than agreeing to a “Great Peace”, with no loss of culture or religion or self-government, and if done willingly provides full participation in the Confederacy government, then…holy shit…

Ish: And, just to add, notice they mentioned that adopting the Great Peace ONLY means you swear not to fight with the nations of the confederacy. You can fight with others all you want! So, are the Iroquois telling anyone how to live?

Me: No, I suppose they are just telling them how they insist on being treated themselves.

Ish: Sounds pretty Leaver to me.

Me: Me too!:

Ish: It sounds like you have it.

Me: Well…I first should say that I’ve never been completely happy with the concept of erratic retaliation. That’s not it exactly…it’s not the concept, I know it works for Leaver cultures, it’s just that, I always thought that there could be a better way.

Ish: “Better?”

Me: Well, by “better” I mean, a more nonviolent way. A peaceful way.

Ish: It sounds like you’re about to make a leap.

Me. Yes! I mean, my god, obviously I’m not the first one to think that erratic retaliation is not the only way to relate to other native nations. If the Iroquois Constitution is the product of a Leaver culture, a culture dissatisfied with their current experience of erratic retaliation, and they wanted an alternative to violence, raiding, and chest beating as ways to maintain cultural boundaries, then this was the result of it!

Ish: You’ve got it. The Iroquois are not “one” culture either, they were a Confederacy of cultures - Mohawks, Onandagas, Senecas, Cayugas, etc. Each is a distinct culture with its own language and traditions, which can be easily seen today, as the Confederacy has been through the grinder. If anyone doubted the lack of interest in assimilation of the Confederacy nation-members, the proof is that each culture even after 300+ years of European extermination is still distinct. Would this be possible if Takers had written this document?

Me: No, the Takers would have quickly begun hierarchical infighting between each other, and needed a way for everyone to live - they would have had to invent laws that applied to everyone, to force workers to support the internal hierarchy. But the Iroquois Constitution seems to mainly apply to relations between nations, not within. It really is a Leaver anti-dote to the unpleasant side effects of erratic retaliation. Amazing.

Ish: So, would you say that this paragraph, then, could have been written by Leavers?

Me: No.

Ish: Excuse me? Come again?

Me: I would say it HAS to be written by Leavers. Thats the only way that it makes any sense!

I almost died today. Which got me thinking.

If we became human, through ages of evolution, following the call of our bodies, as wild beings, than what have we lost by relegating the body to notions of “base animal natures”, “primitive urges”, “the weakness of the flesh”?

What if most of our confusion stems from our thorough cultural conditioning in ignoring the wisdom of the flesh?

When I feel cold, and I resist it, I feel colder. By ignoring the message of the cold, and its insistent song, I create my own suffering. When I stay in my body, and feel the cold completely, it releases me.

I’ve had the same experience in conversation with other human beings. When someone feel angry, but I think they “shouldn’t”, the crisis swells, but when I say “ok, absolutely, you feel angry”, and I accept it, the crisis de-escalates and disappears.

One denies the flesh (while fleeing to a mental world of what “should” happen), the other embraces the flesh, the living reality at hand.

I almost got hit by an SUV today; in the driving rain, after sundown, dressed in dark clothes, I walked across a crosswalk. I have a philosophy, that the world only wants me to pay attention, to notice and honor its wildness, and in return it will always take care of me. So, with my vision spread wide, I noticed coming up from behind me an SUV with blinding headlights racing for my right side. With a bunny-hop I stepped out of the way, and it screetched to a halt after jerking a little past where I had stood a moment before.

I couldn’t see the driver, but the passenger, an old white woman, stared wide-eyed at me through the rain-smeared window. I could feel my heart racing, my adrenaline singing. The car continued on, I crossed to the far sidewalk, and I felt a swirl of voices in my head. They wanted to know who to blame, what to do, who did what wrong, to point fingers, to shame.

And I realized, that nothing wrong had happened - one person could not see another in the rain, nothing more. In a culture free of insanity, my death would have indebted the driver to my family in some fashion. We don’t live in that culture; in any case I felt happy because the universe told me:

Even though I don’t always say so, you make me happy when you pay attention. Accept this little goose in the rear as a token of my gratitude.

Imagine the madness of resisting the need to pay attention, because “drivers should just watch out for pedestrians”. In this case, it could have caused my own death or horrible injury. But I don’t think drivers should just watch out, because I know sometimes they don’t. Simple.

When you live in “the Flesh”, honoring the gods of the Flesh with your care and sensitivity, this becomes an everyday occurrence. Living in the hands of the gods starts to feel a lot like an embrace.

Join instructor Willem Larsen in unraveling the web that ties ancient Spoken Traditions with the human experience in the mystery and beauty of the land. Explore how far your senses can reach, the capacity of your memory to re-experience past realities with astounding clarity, your intrinsic ability to speak and write fluent poetry of place, and the traditions of exploring mystery both physically through animal tracking and imaginatively through the solving and creating of riddles. Gain knowledge about a specific sampling of local plants, trees, and animals, through the applied use of your skills in Spoken Tradition. Edible, medicinal, ecological, metaphorical, and survival uses and relationships with our neighbors in the living world all come together in this workshop which reawakens the Bard in you.

1pm-6pm, Saturday August 19 and 9am-1pm Sunday August 20th. Location in Portland, Oregon, to be determined.

$25 per student, before July 28th. $40 after. Enrollment limited to 12 students.

Email Willem for more info, at mythic dot cartographer at gmail dot com.

I have an image in my mind, of a river, along its banks I see the rotting bodies of salmon, and I hear a voice speaking: the salmon feed the forest, bringing the vast wealth of the ocean far inland, the salmon feed the life that feeds their soon-to-hatch babies. The salmon, rotting, falling apart, barely held together, on this one you see a chunk of its back missing, its spine exposed, but still it pushes and swims upriver, only to spawn and die, feeding the world in its death.

I find this notion unspeakably beautiful. I can’t imagine anything more perfect or more profound. I feel sometimes that my life has shrunk to a tiny pinprick of irrelevance, not for some innate reason specific to my own nature, but rather the opposite…the thing that my body hungers to die for, the thing that my heart hungers to bleed for, I haven’t done this thing. I don’t do this thing. I watch. I wait. I let this thing pass.

For the first time today, I really learned something about the salmon, by watching a DVD on their lives here in the Pacific Northwest (obviously a real world experience will teach me even more). I feel like I’ve come to the edge of some great abyss of unknowing knowingness, some vast well of transformation. I’ve studied and watched animals and their sign for several years now, yet I’ve always avoided the in-depth study of fish and aquatic life. They just didn’t seem to matter.

I come by my foolishness honestly, at least. A fool, convinced to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, who can blame this fool when he continues to watch the pretty show on display, instead of digging, asking, questing for the root.

Well, I’ve found the root, or a piece of it. The salmon’s lives ring to me of Marv’s life in Sin City: The Hard Goodbye. Given a body, given strength, and finally given love and a purpose: who wouldn’t do absolutely anything at that point? Absolutely anything, as one’s body rots away around them, in unbelievable pain, pulling themselves closer to the place where they can finally feed the children in their death.

I wonder sometimes how domesticated I’ve become, and how I can possibly escape it. I usually think of myself as a wild and iconoclastic thinker, one who gets out of the box as easily as breathing. I’ve always noticed the flip-side to this…the dull grinding daily ache of finding the box still there, all around me, and what have I done exactly?

What have I done to nourish the Earth, and my Grandchildren, exactly? I feel like I play with toys, broken toys, made of repellant day-glow plastics. I want to break them further. I want to break out of this heaving nightmarish prison, and reclaim a life worth living, or losing. Maybe right there I’ve said it: I want a life worth losing, a life that has earned real feelings of loss when it goes, rather than simply fear and hollowness from resistance to change.

I want to go out with a “bang”, as they say, a bang that may amount to no more than a richly joyful extended family, connected to all life, full of sorrows and celebration, who needs no masters to tell them how to live, or what to think, or sing, or do.

I find the work inherent in that goal unfathomably immense, however, and I have no idea on god’s green earth how I’ll get there. None.

I think back to Powhatan’s family, his people, in the movie the New World. How do we get there? How do we build that life again? I know some might hear that as “going back” instead of “going forward”.

Well, hell. If I simply needed to “go back” to accomplish that, I’d do it in a heart beat. Just going back? Just try it. Just try to build a life a fraction as enriching and full as that. We can’t go back, not because we’ve “advanced” too far, but because “back” didn’t wait for us to go to it. I’ve read and listened and discussed enough on this to know that the treasure-house that native peoples (our ancestors included) possessed held human riches beyond the imaginations of the most earnest anthropologists. We had so much. And we have to put it back together again, for our own sake, and the sake of life as we know it. And everything in this culture wants us to forget that.

The Mythic Cartographer bundles up his possessions and wanders onto the land, in search of the day’s lessons.

Today the spiders want to teach about mapping.

The Orb Spiders speak up first: ‘Well, my fine sir, notice what we’ve woven…an interlacing of routes, of strands, of paths and ways. Some sticky, some dry, some dangerous, some safe. Look here and notice what we’ve woven. A Map.’

The Trap Door Spiders speak up second. ‘Truly, look down here, at this little hole in the ground…and covering it, see the little flap I’ve made of web and soil. Underneath I lurk. I guard this place. I, hermit and gatekeeper, wait and wait for who stumbles here. I keep the intersections on my brother’s map.’

The Hunting Spiders speak up third. ‘Ah-ha! But who makes the paths that intersect, my friend? I do! I crawl and stalk through an inch-high jungle, I, the wanderer past crystalline boulders, rotting carcasses, gaping crevasses. I find the safe paths, and wait alongside them.’

Then the Jumping Spiders speak up fourth. ‘Safe, indeed! And who will bridge those crevasses, my friends? Who will jump high, and far, and string a line out behind them, for those that come after? I, the ever-searching Scout, the eyes of the spider people. I make connections where others claim it impossible. I make the edges of the map.’

And so the day ended.

At the College, we consider Dreams, Riddles, Poems, Memory, and Story the same beast. To study any of these, you must study all of them.

I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest are details. -Einstein

If a divinity had thoughts, would they not most closely resemble dreams?

Myths are public dreams…Dreams are private myths. - Joseph Campbell

Listen to a world of riddles that comes to us through folktales, myths, and dreams. A riddle, spoken by a character in a myth, represents a double riddle: the riddle itself, and the riddle as a single line in the great riddle of the story itself.

Riddles ask us to associate, to think in metaphor, to see things as layered and poetic. Could we describe a riddle as “a poem with an (as yet) unknown subject”?

In panoply of painted feathers
I shrug off a cape of small sooted wings
Rising resplendent from the pavement
Born of outcast crumbs and forgotten foods
I’ve died crushed underfoot
I’ll die again torn by talon
After I scatter my spirit to the sky.

So to write a riddle, study your dreams. Learn the dream language of poetry. And write a poem with an unstated subject.

Sweat on the table
Yet chilled to the bone
At first, kissed and cradled
Once drained, left alone

But why stop there? Why not use riddles as a vehicle to a sense of place.

Big hands catch the glint of coin
though it may remain forever out of reach
I’ve learned to stand tall and spread my arms wide
Lest golden fortune slip between my fingers
And when those around me perservere
begging for handouts though the coins
have begun to fade
I withdraw my begging bowls
I retreat deep within
Nourished on the syrup of my soul
And wait for better days
to spring forth.*

We propose that riddles originally served that exact purpose. To awaken our minds, and to connect us to the knowledge of our place.

*Acer macrophyllum, Bigleaf Maple tree

In this story I want to tell you, a great deception took place, long ago.

Long, long ago.

And yet, the world had left its youth far in the past, by this time. In fact, if one stacked the bones of every human grandmother and grandfather that had lived till then, it would look just as big as that mountain over there.

In this story, only the Gods had a newborn’s face. Of all in their time, they, the youngest and the freshest, wobbling on their newfound legs, wavering in their newfound power, they destroyed and imprisoned a nation of beings. But let me describe these Gods.

The Goddess of the Harvest. The Goddess of Weaving and Spiders. The Father of the Gods, lightning bearer. The God of War. You know the roll call, for every culture with gods of this sort, a farmer’s gods, had these same ones, though by different names.

These gods all had this in common: the lack of family ties to the humans over which they ruled.

But since when did the Gods belong to our family, anyway?

Grandmother Spider. Sister Corn. Father Sky. Brother Coyote. Grandfather Pine.

Once upon a time they did, all around the world, in all human cultures. Once upon a time humans shared the common bond of looking out at the entire world and saying, “All my relations”. So what happened? How did we go from sharing our family with Sister Corn, to looking to the heavens for the aid of an untouchable and remote “Goddess of the Harvest”?

…”One of the most remarkable features of mythology is that the Giants (greek: “earthborn”) could only be overcome by the joint efforts of a god and a man. Zeus required Herakles to dispose of Porphyrion. The god laid him low with his thunderbolt and the hero finsihed him off with his arrows…”

Around the world, every farming civilization that emerged, seems to have a story about the battle between the Gods and the Giants.

“…Apollo blinded Ephialtes in the left eye, but needed Herakles to complete the killing by shooting the giant in the right eye…”

“…but Vishnu, concerned lest the gods should lost the advantage….immediately…transformed himself into a mighty hero, joined the gods against the titans, and helped drive away the enemy to the crags and dark canyons of the world beneath…”

“…Norse myths…say that the gods fought and conquered the race of giants…”

Giants…monsters, of course. The size of hills, made of stone and ice, cruel and capricious, responsible for earthquakes, falling boulders, blizzards. Look at them. Terrible. But wait, doesn’t that monster’s face look a little like a mask…

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! -the Wizard of Oz

Before civilization, a globally prevalent value system existed, called animism (and continues to exist today, where its cultures remain intact). Though the details vary according to region, all animists share the perspective that they belong to a community of life, and everything in the world has intrinsic value, has life.

The farming gods seem to have emerged to justify a new way of relating to the world. Denial.

…The world period of the hero in human form begins only when villages and cities have expanded over the land. Many monsters remaining from primeval times still lurk in the outlying regions…They have to be cleared away… -Joseph Campbell

I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country. -Plato

And this denial unleashed a great expansive power, for to deny the intrinsic value of the world, heavy with metaphors and lessons to teach us, means you can do whatever you want to it. Look out there, at those vast forests, open plains, what do you see now: untilled land, of course.

…The elementary deeds of the hero [of the city] are those of the clearing of the field… -Joseph Campbell

…The gods emerged from a spot in the primordial ice, warmed by the licking tongue of the Cosmic Cow… - Norse Legend

Where does this “new” mythology take us? We knew it even then.

When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain he wept,
for there were no more worlds to conquer… -Legend

It takes us to the very end of all things for the human family. It takes us to the loss of the world as a human habitat. We’ve almost arrived…perhaps, before it’s too late, let’s look again at the giants. Who hides behind those masks? Perhaps an animist would know - these giants must have existed before the farming gods came into the world.

Let’s ask an animist.

In Japan, where the some still practice the animist Shinto religion, something noteworthy happens. Japan, with its orgiastic industrial economy, should look like Manhattan by now. Why doesn’t it? Why can you still find rolling countryside, forests, uncut mountains, in a tiny island nation that prides itself on its technological progress?

The nature giants have slowed them down.

Sometimes the winds bring nourishing rain, sometimes they bring the hurricane.

Sometimes Godzilla saves Tokyo, and sometimes Godzilla attacks Tokyo.

They haven’t killed Godzilla yet. They haven’t made up their minds. They’ve made her ugly, they’ve made it palatable to destroy her, but they haven’t dropped the axe yet. And so their green lands last for a while longer, their sacred mountains stay pristine for just a little more time.

Take that mask off of Godzilla, and you’ll find Sister Wind, you’ll find Grandmother Ocean, you’ll find all our relatives who we’ve hidden, like unloved and neglected grandparents exiled in a locked attic, you’ll find the mass deception that each one of us perpetrates every day.

The lie that we don’t belong to the rioting, celebrating, evolving family of the living earth, sky and stone.

We do belong. And we must unmask the Nature Giants, and release those within: flocks of faeries, spirits, angels and demons, lords and ladies, all our relatives hidden within those monster’s bodies. And we can’t blame the agricultural gods for our trouble, because remember:

…the Giants (greek: “earthborn”) could only be overcome by the joint efforts of a god and a man…Apollo blinded Ephialtes in the left eye, but needed Herakles to complete the killing by shooting the giant in the right eye..

That arrow belongs to us. The humans. Only we can pluck it out. It took the coldness of a human heart to finish the job the farming gods started. It will take a great thawing and warming of that same heart to heal the damage done, by our own hands.

Giants, Gods, and Spirits. Different words, for the same thing: a human relationship to the world.

Gods die…Gods miss each other…Gods miss us… - Martin Prechtel

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.

What does Mythic Cartography mean?

I developed the term Mythic Cartography to describe “the act of creating and maintaining sacred places, sacred paths, and sacred maps”. Some call these places, paths, and maps “sacred geography”. And the relationship we have to them defines our relationship to the entire universe. So Mythic Cartography involves the ongoing relationship with creating and maintaing sacred geography and thus our relationship to all the world.

Every indigenous culture, rooted in place, has (or had) a basket woven of sacred stories that maintains their relationship to the land around them. This basket encourages their care and affection to the land, which supports health and vitality in the people. When this relationship degrades, so do the people. This basket I call the Mythmap.

Nothing tells the story of Mythmaps and Mythic Cartography better than the maps and cartographers themselves.

From Invincible Warrior: A Pictorial Biography of the founder of Aikido, by John Stevens:

Morihei Ueshiba was born on December 14, 1883,..in…Tanabe, Japan…at the foot of the Kumano Mountains….Kumano is Japan’s Holy Land, the sacred place where the Shinto gods descended to earth; the gateway to Amida Buddha’s Pure Land is also believed to be hidden there. the entire district of Kumano is venerated as a mountain mandala–home, over the centuries, to a host of ascetics, wonder-workers, and sages….The grand shrines of Kumano and the sacred waterfall of Nachi are the meccas of Shinto, and every Japanese true believer, including the emperor, longs to make at least one pilgrimage to worship at those sacred sites and perhaps catch a glimpse of one of the Eight Great Dragon Kings who sport in the Nachi Falls.

Morihei Ueshiba, founder of the martial-art Aikido, had a grand reputation for skills and powers beyond belief, and his aging live-in students of more than half a century ago recount marvelous stories to this day. Often present in their recollections you can hear a question: how did he do these amazing feats? As students of Aikido, why don’t we have these magical abilities?

Centuries ago, En-no-Gyoja, the Grand Wizard, practiced Taoist meditation techniques in the surrounding mountains and used his magic to fly from peak to peak; modern-day yamabushi (mountain ascetics) insist that En-no-Gyoja appears to them in vivid visions. It is said that colors and sounds can be perceived in their original state in Kumano, and that ascetic practices conducted there result in unparalleled clarity of mind and clairvoyance. In the year of Morihei’s birth one such yamabushi named Jitsukage leapt from the top of towering Nachi Falls as a final act of sutemi-gyo, the total abandonment of body and soul to the Divine. From birth, Morihei was immersed in an atmosphere in which the supernatural, the mysterious, and the holy were palpably present.

When you live in the embrace of a MythMap, you have the chance to see the whole world with magical eyes. But…do some places have “the magic”, like Kumano, Japan, and others not?

From Long LIfe, Honey in the Heart, by Martin Prechtel:

The people of Santiago Atitlan had no concept of their town being part of somebody else’s country. As far as they were concerned, everything real in the world was inside their territory.

Because of this, their land was so big and magnificent that no human could comprehend it all. Only the Gods knew how to measure it. Its tiny physical size was simply an abbreviation of a cultural enormity that was carried inside each Tzutujil. Though it appeared to outsiders that the people lived off of and inside their land, the entire earth lived inside each villager.

And so we can perceive our task: to look around us, at the hills, rivers, streets and cemeteries, the parks and playgrounds, to remake them and retell them anew, and have them live inside us, magical and alive. For wherever we live, it lies at the foot of the Sacred Mountains, and wherever we stand, we stand in the midst of the Holy Land.

The central mountain is everywhere. - Black Elk

Why Mythic Cartography?

An abundance of resources exist, at this point in history, to explain and set the stage for this fundamental understanding, here on heels of climate change, mass extinctions, and reckless expansive human population growth:

Something has to change. The way we live here, on the Earth, has to change. Our situation has become perilous.

Now, you can look at this in two ways. One way involves breast-beating, despair, panic, doom-and-gloom prophesying, and focusing on all that we must give up to survive and atone.

The other way involves finally giving ourselves permission to belong, and claiming all that our hearts, spirits, and bodies have starved for since civilization first started its relentless march.

Have you ever taken a walk through a park, a wilderness, or any wild space, and reflected on how much you feel you belong there? Do you see yourself as a stranger? A trespasser? Do you feel welcome? Do you feel apologetic?

Do you feel celebrated?

The time has come to reclaim our birthright, that we held and cherished for three million years of human history, to belong to the wild places, to celebrate and receive celebration in return. To receive life in return. Nothing less than the Story we tell about our relationship with the world must change for the most fabulous, mystical, and revolutionary healing to happen. A return from the brink, into the waiting, rioting, helplessly joyful and dancing embrace of the Family of Life.

Do not count yourself alone, with your thoughts and fantasies of another world filled with magic and meaning, of something better than the emptiness delivered to your door every morning, like a newspaper clad with headlines of disaster and tragedy. Despair and depression attack those who most keenly feel our culture-wide absence of spiritual nourishment and meaningful relationship to the family of life.

I use the word Family very consciously. Until we choose to take it back, we lose more and more of our relationship to everything Family means, every day. Everything about this culture urges us to leave our family, to go away: to distant colleges and careers that promise to fulfill us and make us happy, far away from the homes where our mothers gave birth to us. Consider the possibility, that leaving the land of our childhoods behind us, silently steals a wealth of daily meaning. I know when I rarely get the chance to visit the faraway places of my early childhood, as I walk the familiar yet unfamiliar streets, a strange kind of golden curtain descends over my vision, and I see the world as I saw it then, across the impossible gulf of time.

We can’t always turn our lives upside down to go back to those places, but we can take a stand. We can stop the hollow nomadism of modern life, and choose to stay where we’ve stopped, to reconnect with the magic in the place we find ourselves right now. To work with each other to recreate a MYTHIC MAP of the land all around us.

[Darkness. The void at the beginning of time. A SPARK enters, dressed in flowing white robes, androgynous, wearing the mask of an ancient face with long hair.]

SPARK: Small, I wander, playing alone amidst the VAST DARK. My bright feet step here, and there, touching nothing as I drift. In sweet loneliness, I have seeded my belly with a yearning, which becomes an ache, and the aching grows into fullness. What magic will this belly make?

[SPARK pulls out a large red cloth heart, as big as a bed, from beneath its white robes. It lays it on the ground, and sits on the floor, next to it.]

SPARK: I see the center of the universe, right here, and I hear your song, and sing to you in turn….

[With its index fingertip, SPARK pulls a blue handkerchief out from the eye-hole of its mask, and studies it for a moment as it hangs.]

SPARK: My first tear….

[SPARK cast the tear with solemn joy to the left side of the heart. Then pausing, SPARK pulls its index finger off its hand, the finger that touched the tear.]

SPARK: Oh little finger bone…I hear you sighing…you’ve kissed the tear haven’t you…go then, join her. I too love: right here, my heart, at the center of all things.

[SPARK tosses the bone to the right side of the bed. Both tear and bone turn suddenly into blue-water woman and grey-stony man. They come together tenderly on the heart-bed and embrace. A flash, and a rumble of thunder, and stars appear in the void…]

SPARK: [dancing]
I didn’t know
that my first wound would open me up
that spilling forth
would come one I love
a ground for my bright feet to touch
and in loving the first one
the children of my heart and me
would themselves seek out each other
they’ve seeded the void with stars
life has begun
For the first time in my memory
I rub my hands
Warmed by their Love
I call it: the First Fire

[Drums. SPARK dances off stage. Quiet for a moment, as STONY MAN and WATER WOMAN embrace on the heart-bed. A figure emerges out of the darkness, moving and looking like a marionette, with a bland smile painted on its face and rosy cheeks.]

PUPPET: Cold fills all I can remember. Alone I wander. Perhaps once I had someone to share my loneliness with. Now, solitary do I stumble here, and there. And there they lie. Envy fills my empty space within. I want what he has. The coldness inside gnaws at me. I will take her spirit and swallow it down.

[PUPPET MAN approaches WATER WOMAN and touches her. Her eyes open…she hugs her arms to her side, shivering, while STONY MAN remains asleep…]

WATER WOMAN: So…cold…

PUPPET MAN: [Miming pulling in some invisible essence of her into his mouth, licking his fingers.] Yes, delicious, all for me!

[WATER WOMAN dies, falling back to the ground.]

PUPPET MAN: More. I want more! [looking out at stars, laughs mirthlessly] I have a lot of eating to do… [PUPPET MAN dances/stalks/slithers off stage, humming and grinning to himself. A few moments pass and then STONE MAN wakes up, rubbing head.

STONY MAN: Water! [as if speaking for first time, inventing language as it comes from his mouth. STONY man suffers silently, hanging his head].

You crashed against me
wave against rock
and wore my rough edges away
ever since I tasted you
with that first salt-water kiss
I began to wake
I found my purpose:
Holding you against the dark
And making the first sunrise together…

Now left alone, perhaps
but your scent still hangs heavy on me
I will never forget
though touched now by loneliness
I will make it back to your embrace
here where it all began
but first, I will hunt it down
dark power that did this
behind every star, and all about the new forming world
I’ll catch it and cast it back into the Abyss
Though ruin stalk me every step of the chase

Here I come.

[darkness again as STONY MAN exits, determined.]