An Introduction

My father used to like to tell a story about me of when I went off to kindergarten. It was my first time at a very large elementary school that went up to grade 6. He says that by the time I got home at the end of the first or second day I had the whole place mapped out— I could tell him where the library was, the gym, the nurse’s office, the cafeteria, the auditorium, the main office, and how to get to each place from my classroom. I don’t recall this, but it makes sense because I have always been compelled to understand the layout of how things work. And as an adult I’ve been particularly curious about the map that humans are operating on. 

As far as I can tell, it is laid out in layers that go like this: 

At the deepest layer are the laws of nature. These are essential patterns that are the building blocks of life. In a world of nothing but change, these laws stay constant and in so doing are really the only things we can point to as truth. 

The next layer is story. Human beings are storytellers because it is the way we make meaning out of life. We organize around the meaning that is created from the stories we tell. 

This organization takes shape and manifests through our systems and structures. Our systems and structures are the frameworks upon which life is organized. 

This is what creates culture. Culture is how we experience life. 

Our experience then is a direct reflection of the stories we tell. 

So why is our storytelling creating a culture that involves so much suffering?

To shift the experience, the culture must change. To change the culture, the systems and structures must be amended. To amend the systems and structures, we have to start telling a different story. 

But how? To answer that, we must understand why the storytelling we have now is failing us. Looking at the layers of the map again, the pathology seems clear. 

The dominant story on Earth for at least the last several thousand years, bypasses the deepest layer on the map – the patterns of life or laws of nature. 

Human storytelling split off from this deepest layer and began telling a human-centric story instead of a nature -centric story. 

In mythological terms, this entire field of human-centric story was identified and named by a mythologist named Joseph Campbell as the Hero’s Journey. It’s so pervasive and dominant that we actually came to the deluded belief that it’s the only story there is. The effects of this kind of mono-myth thinking have been heartbreakingly destructive. 

Interestingly, Campbell asked the question and then answered it himself of what the emerging mythology of the times we are in now would be and he said it would be a mythology of the unified Earth as one being.

I believe we are very much already in this emergence. The evidence is on full display in the disintegration of a collectively shared version of reality. Things like facts and history have become far more subjective than the operating system of the culture can bear. This is a symptom of what is happening at a much deeper level - one dominant mythology is disintegrating and another is emerging. 

If story is the way we make meaning out of life, then a unified Earth mythology creates the meaning that my well-being is only as robust as the well-being of the most vulnerable and disenfranchised among us—including our waters, land, air, plants, and animals. This storytelling then creates organization around a reverence for the sacredness of all life instead of what is dominant now – a reverence for power over one another. It delivers subjectivity to every living being instead of objectivity. It reclaims the inherent worth of each part as vital to the whole. 

It seems the Unified Earth story may have always been the mythology of Earth. It is only in a sort of vast human amnesia that we forgot. But the knowledge itself has been held for thousands and thousands of years in various wisdom and spiritual traditions and cultures, and also in the storytelling that never broke with the laws of nature. These are the old, old stories – myth, folktale, and ancient fairytale that retain a bone structure of Earth wisdom. It’s as if the stories have been waiting for the time when once again they would pass between the mouths, hearts, and minds of many, helping us to play a part in our own becoming. 

That time is most certainly now.

In various shamanic lineages the swan feather has been a powerful ally in journeying between realms. The swan feather cloak is at once both protection and initiation for the passage of return from monomyth to multimyth. These stories help me to get my bearings in a time of tumult. They help me welcome change and shed anxiety. I hope what is offered here may be a sort of bone broth for the soul.