Oh dear, I think I responded to week 2's readings, not week 3. I'll catch up later.

Touching in here with reflections on this week’s readings. In the first article, Craig asks, what use is mythology? And I answer, thank god(dess) for mythology, those “deep symbolic truths” that give meaning to existence. As a child raised without religion and actively prevented from learning its stories (my father a recovering Jesuit priest, my mother a fed-up-with-it-all Catholic-Chinese), I could never grasp the meaning of life and experienced a bottom-less free fall through time and space. In my own adolescent way I sought answers, resulting in some good and some not so good consequences. The good ones drew me to the natural beauty of the world around me, like the snow falling at dusk as I walked home from school, the bells on the Lutheran church gonging, the street lights illuminating the bare branched trees over the street, the cold against my skin. And the not so good moments of seeking revelation through pot, or alcohol, recklessness and risk. Coming from what I experienced as a cultural wasteland, I knew there was a promised land and I was determined to find it. But I didn’t know where to look exactly. Yoga, buddhism, psychology, somatics, foodieism, sex, relationships, poetry (and not necessarily in this order)? And then I found Inanna and things began to make more sense, structually, emotionally, in a life-passage sort of way.

In the second piece, “What Good is an Archetype,” I love the initial quote by C.G. Jung: The least of things with a meaning is always worth more in life than the greatest of things without it. My version: I’d rather eat a baloney sandwich sitting on the curb surrounded by a sense of presence and joy than a eat a three-course meal in a fancy restaurant unconscious and tense.

Constellated archetypes: what’s in the air these days brings me hope as I see the local bread and pickle makers, the community farmers, the Mom and Pop shops still growing in my neighborhoods.

Since cultural psychologists/mythologists are a necessary part of any human community, I am wondering how we can walk our beat, make ourselves available and accessible to the community, and remove a sense of too much witchy woo-woo from our presentation. Because I believe that, like a good mechanic or the dentist, everyone needs a good mythologist.

I also love that archetypes “give movements of the deep psyche an imagisitc face or form. And it could be an interesting project to update these images. For as much as dragons are a part of the canon, it is a stretch for me to relate to them and what they stand for. That’s why I believe it is necessary (and fun!) to collaborate with artists of all genres. And I'm reminded of some of the ritual work I've done with Anna Halprin, which, if I were to conceptualize it through the lens of myth and archetype, I would say that she creates a form for her performers to embody/act out mythic phenomenon.