Finding Mythic Ground

Modern life is a paradox. We are more connected than ever through technology, while technology also isolates us from the physical world. How many of us miss that connection on the bus or coffee shop because our eyes are glued to a phone? How often have you missed the hawk soaring over your head, or the sparrow bobbing for crumbs at your feet, entranced by social media feeds and emails?

For many of us, certainly collectively, our vision has shrunk to the size of a screen in our palms. Our ears, assaulted by simulated explosions and endless traffic, have not only lost their ability to hear the unstruck bell, they’re unable to hear the truth, even when sirens are going off. Our navigation systems are down. Many of us believe the simulations more than the real world.

It is time to purify our eyes and seek a higher vision, for ourselves, and for our culture.

It is time to take out the ear buds and listen to real flowers. And yes, their sound is still coming out of temple bells.

Mythic ground is not something that existed a long time ago. It is right here and now. It’s a parallel dimension that’s existed all these years as civilization has ground down our senses to the endgame we are facing now, our precious human awareness trapped in a screen that harvests us as data to feed the machines of perpetual consumerism.

But the body is not perpetual. Nor is it a closed system. The body has a time limit. We die, but the material of our body is an open system, recycling back into the elements that make up the cosmos itself. We cycle through earth, water, fire, and air—all the way back to the stars.

All the consuming in the world won’t change the fact our bodies die. We can go the gym, eat all the right foods, take all the vitamins, and bio-hack our way to perpetual youth, but ultimately we have no control.

Am I scaring you?

Good.

If you’re scared, switch the letters of the word around. Look what you get: sacred.

The Coracle is a vessel I’ve developed distilling elements of my own journey to holistic awareness as an offering to assist others to reinhabit mythic ground. I didn’t know I was on this journey for most of it, so you’ve got some advantages here if you join me just by knowing you’re on the journey in the first place!

Through trial and error, I purified my eyes and began to see in a new way. I learned to hear the stories beneath the stories, the ones that poured into my body’s cells from all directions, flooding me with ancient wisdom I learned to channel, calming the floods into navigable waterways. I anchored in the earth’s iron core and, firmly tethered, journeyed out to the stars where I heard stories about where we came from, why we’re here, and where we’re going that differed from the ones I learned in school. I became my own oracle.

Most of the news we hear from the media is what we consider “bad” news. I’m not going to say the mythic news is good news, but I will say that being able to hear the mythic news could help you navigate your way through this challenging time on earth with more ease, and with the grace of being connected to a higher power. Most of all you’ll find the contentment of being of service to something beyond yourself.

So where is this mythic ground

and how do we get there?

When you are able to hear the mythic news, you’ll know you’re on mythic ground. It’s right there under your feet. It’s always been there. It speaks to us in hurricanes and floods, in melting glaciers and extinctions. Birds at dawn call out the mythic news each morning. Whales broadcast it for thousands of ocean miles.

Whales are so desperate for us to hear it the mythic news, whole pods of them strand on beaches, calling us to the shore where we frantically try to roll their heavy bodies back into the waves before they collapse in on themselves, dying from suffocation. (I can’t breathe! George Floyd cried out while Derek Chauvin knelt on his airway, one hand in his pocket, gun on hid hip, looking the camera filming him right in the eye.)

Mythic news also broadcasts itself through bumper stickers and murals, pop songs and television shows. This can be fun, but I, for one, stand with Marshall McLuhan’s claim: “the medium is the message.” How we get the news matters. If we continue to degrade our attention spans, critical thinking, and imagination through dehumanizing mediums designed to worsen our amnesia, our empathy and compassion will continue to wane. If things continue this way, there’s a good chance, this time around, humanity will forget about mythic ground completely. We will live on a stripped Earth as ghosts, stealing from the future by not offering our vitality to the world we’ve been given now.

Yet, another time will come around. All cycles eventually complete. The expression of life known as the human being will eventually recover from amnesia in whatever form it finds itself in the future. But it might not be here on Earth.

Think about that. Go lie on the ground and feel the layers of soil, stone, water, and fire supporting you. They created you. Animated by air, you, a human being, are water, fire, and earth. Father Sky, Mother Earth, Holy Spirit.

Knowing this, do you really think you are unworthy and incapable of bringing Heaven down to Earth?

I think of the horrors of the grindadráp in the Faroe Islands, where locals drive pods of dolphins and pilot whales onto the shore and savagely slaughter them. They say they do it for the meat, but these are not traditional people with a hunting tradition founded in reverence for the whales’ lives who sustainably hunt for what they need. Nobody is singing to the pilot whales’ spirits before they hunt, or offering them a drink of sweet water before driving a lance into their heads and carving them up while still alive. This is blood lust, plain and simple, slaughter for the hell of it, killing for power.

Mentally I can understand how weak someone must truly feel inside to kill like this, but emotionally I cry and rage when I see the photos.

I don’t look away. This is the story we are living now.

Then I think of photos I’ve seen of whole communities standing waist deep in icy water for hours trying to push beached pods back into the sea, and of how, when it’s clear it’s too late, people resting their heads on the whales’ flansk and weeping, staying with them till it’s over, and hugging each other on the beach.

All of us contain both stories. And even if your freedom has been limited somehow, you always have a choice, even if it’s just how you respond to what you’ve been dealt. How you respond is actually your most powerful action and the key to genuine freedom.

Why not choose to hear and act on the mythic news instead of blindly believing what the TV and internet tells you?

I’m not saying the TV and internet are wrong. I’m saying there is a deeper truth, and within those depths, answers beyond the scope of our current limited imagination, could be waiting for us. All we have to do is lean into the mythic news. Mythic ground will meet us more than half way. Two by two, we become a collective, just like the animals and humans Noah invited on his ark to repopulate the earth after the flood. I don’t know about you, but the rest of my life is dedicated to the collective channel switch.

Here’s my proposal:

This time,

let’s skip the flood.

Let’s choose cooperation with the elements; the orobouros instead of the scorpion sting of catastrophe.

And you—what myths do you hear in these words? Do you year good news or bad news? Are you scared? Angry? Shaky, elated, or high?

I’ve got a story for whatever emotion you throw at me. Some words the wind, waves, and rocks whispered in my ear the years I walked and walked around a small island until I walked right over the water to a bigger island where I learned to hear the fire. Talk to me.

Mythic news, which we hear when we put ear to mythic ground, is the news that interests me. Yes, it could possibly save us. I’d like that, but I’m not counting on it. I’m not hopeless, but I’ve learned that putting my faith in certain outcomes isn’t the way to contentment. And I’m not apathetic. I care passionately about Earth and all her creatures, which includes us, which is why I created The Coracle, the rites of passage mentorship through myth, folk tales, and Mū Hawaiian wisdom, that I will soon be officially launching, but not until I’ve got the language to describe it exactly right. It’s taking a long time because I’m a fluent channel, only I’ve realized sometimes I write things I don’t actually believe, things I picked up unconsciously from people I thought were better than me, or more successful, or who seemed way more self-assured. So I’m taking the time to question every word. It’s exhausting, but I’m exhilarated and proud of myself for slowing down and taking the time to receive and translate my truth. I’ll know when it’s ready when I don’t get an uneasy feeling when I read what I wrote. You probably know that feeling. The body doesn’t lie. We just ignore it when it tells the truth. No more.

A coracle is an ancient boat made of willow reeds and sealskin, a round vessel, the shape as a human cell. An average human is composed of 30 trillion cells. Those cells are contained by our skin, a permeable boundary. Air passes through, and the finer forms of water like mist and sea spray, yet we remain anchored to Earth. We don’t float above it, or slide over it. Gravity holds us to solid ground.

Gravity itself exists because the goddess Hina sacrificed having it on her home the moon. so we could have it on Earth. Without gravity, water would not adhere to Earth’s surface and we would’t have developed the atmosphere that makes life possible.

We wouldn’t need boats, or have skin, or be able to go on wondrous voyages.

They say Hina wasn’t sad about sacrificing her chance at an atmosphere so that we could sprout, flower, fruit, and seed ourselves They say all she wanted for us was to enjoy life.

I say that’s what she still wants, even though we’ve made a mess of Earth and some other gods and goddesses might say we don’t deserve it.

How do know, you may ask? What’s my authority?

I heard her thrumming in my body’s 30 trillion cells when I turn over and float on the ocean waves.

Buoyant, writing you in the dark waiting for the moon to rise, I hear her still.

The moon, without vegetation and with oceans empty of water, may look barren, but they say Hina is content there.

She gave her gift.

Now, what are you going to do with it?