(This is Friday’s blog and doodle (30 June): I must have got distracted at the important part of actually posting it! Apologies.)

Without mythic keys we have neither culture nor religion, no art, architecture, drama, ritual, epic, social customs, or mental disorders. We would have only a grey world, with little if anything calling us forward to that strange and beautiful country that recedes even as we try to civilise it.*
Jean Houston

Whenever we attempt something difficult there is always a sense that we have to wake some slumbering giant inside ourselves, some greater force as yet hidden from us.**
David Whyte

All that we think of as human life
Resides upon story –
Stories we tell ourselves collectively, and
individually.

David Whyte tells us that work is a story that
provides us with safety from
“the wilder, nonhuman forces of existence,”**
And Robin Wall Kimmerer’s telling of the Skywoman myth
assures us that we will survive:
we are always falling …
spinning into someplace new and unexpected.
Despite our fears of falling,
the gifts of the world stand by to catch us.^

Our stories help us to understand our falls,
To pick ourselves up,
And to keep going.

Whyte goes on to ponder the modern-day lives that have become
mythical for us:
Parks, Churchill, King, Mandela,
How they were simply living into or upon
their own stories –
Something we too must aspire to;
Not to live their lives, for we cannot,
But to daily live upon our stories.

*Jean Houston’s A Mythic Life;
**David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea;
^Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.