As humans we’ve long been forged on the anvil of the mysteries.
Why are we here? Why do we die? What is love?
We are tuned like a cello to vibrate with such questions.
What is entirely new, is the amount of information we’re receiving from all over the planet. So we don’t just receive stress on a localized human level, we mainline it from a huge, abstract, conceptual perspective. Perpetual availability to both, creates a nervous wreck…
…Myths feed the underneath in us - the ceremonialist in us - they nourish places in us that are secretive and fond of beauty. Work like this has been so undervalued and marginalized we can barely glimpse it’s implications, but our feeling nature is energized by hearing of it.
– Dr. Martin Shaw
I think he’s right.
There seems to be always a surplus of uncertainty to go around - this week, no different. I was lucky to get to spend a few days in the pine barrens, collecting pollen cones, and in the spruce-fir forest collecting evergreen tips. These places take your uncertainty, peel off its mask, and hand it back to you, a living lump of clay.
Pine barrens and evergreen woods are ripe for myth-making - you don’t even need an imagination, really, they come fully stocked with characters and plot, hell, there’s even gold dust in the air, but I’ve found that if I’m in myth-making mind, every other place has these things, too. My everyday sense-making mind never actually makes any sense of what goes on in the world, what we see on the news, but when I tune the dial to myth-making, it’s like turning on a John Williams soundtrack - it brings to the surface some underlying meaning in things even murky or mundane - it cranks up the contrast, colors are saturated, I recognize patterns, I can connect what were before, only dots. Try it sometime, I think you’ll see what I mean. I’m not saying it solves anything - most things, I think, are unsolvable, and the trying to solve them only heaps onto our agitation. It’s more about beholding. This reframing has been helpful, and dare I say, pleasurable in otherwise uncomfortable, uncertain times. If you press “play” at the top of the page, I’ll read to you about a shit day that I beheld and took the time to write down, called “Our Myths Are In The Mosses.” Have a seat, put your feet up, close your eyes, and have a listen.
I used to poo-poo myths and tall tales, but I relish them now. They’re the antidote to my seriousness, which is unbearably bland, in the same way that Sal is the antidote to my humanness - they keep me open - they keep things appropriately weird.
There is this indescribably soothing pond, an oasis, almost a mirage, out in the middle of the very hot, sandy, Mad Max-esque, pine barren, and on a day this week shot through with uncertainty, I sat there a while and made this short myth.
Oasis
On a scorched earth
there is an oasis
rippled only by the beaver, gliding
the knee of heron, lips of trout
and you,
as you lie on the bottom of the calm, cool, pond, vibrating with grief.
It will absorb it.
What would, on land,
send shockwaves
here, will only nudge the turtle softly toward the shore,
spill over the top of the dam,
float lightly down the tea-brown stream
with other flowers
bloomed, blown open,
touched by waiting river rocks
held by roots who want to hold it.
I hope you find an oasis, too.
If you want to learn more about the pine pollen I was collecting and how it interacts with and protects the human body, which is a goddamned ready for the big-screen myth in itself, watch this video of Maine’s own legendary botanist of the ages and place-based skills teacher, Arthur Haines, describe how they function, like no one else can.
If you want to learn how to forage and eat evergreen tips like these fir, spruce, pine, or hemlock, you should find everything you need to get started in this recent piece of mine:
How To Forage For Evergreen Tips
If you need any more prompting to become your own mythologist, I cannot recommend this episode of the Emergence Magazine Podcast with Dr. Martin Shaw more fervently.
"Navigating the Mysteries"
Life doesn’t feel certain, but it feels succulent. Life doesn’t feel assured, but it feels vivacious.
It doesn’t feel safe, but it feels pregnant with possibility. And, like every human before me, I’m going to have to make my peace with that arrangement. To repeat, it was always like this. — Martin Shaw
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