The future is not a destination. It’s a direction.*
Ed Catmull

Life is an expression of bliss.**
Joseph Campbell

In her book about learning from nature, Janine Benyus offers four steps for living in tune with and learning from nature which also provide a way of journeying towards the futures: quietening, listening, mimicking, stewarding.

Quietening is to come aside from the rush and noise of life, often alone.

Listening is to be open to the whisperings that come to us in our quietness: whether it be a walk or some reflective exercise, reading, journaling, doodling or other art.

Mimicking as in giving expression to what is presenting in whispers.

Stewards as both preserving and developing these expressions.

Forty five years after Joseph Campbell identified our need for myths if we are to live fully and meaningfully, and following a winter visit to the Artic Circle, Katherine May experiences this for herself, reflecting:

Few of us inherit the rich and complex mythologies that the Sami pass on – the sense of the world alive around us, and of ancestors keeping a gentle watch in the very rocks we stand one, the very wind that buffets us. Most of us have to make our own, if we think to do it at all.^

These mythologies, or stories, offer ways for containing our quietening, listening, mimicking and stewarding, Robert Bly offers a place to begin, picking a myth and seeking to live it out:

the student would choose one myth that attracted him and then spend time in college seeing how far he lived it and how the myth lived him.^^

Have fun.

*From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc.;
**From Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey;
^From Katherine May’s Wintering;
^^Robert Bly, from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey.