Reply To: Myth: The Grammar of Creativity,” with Bradley Olson, Ph.D.”
Ok here is part two.
My Mom, the astronomer once told me about nature: “reflect the beauty you feel.” For her the heavens she observed were inextricably linked with poetry…her favorite Rilke’s “You darkness that I come from…” and she loved the natural world and all its colors as she was an earth scientist and artist too.
Walking in forests I understand her love of green…I’ve been happily arrested by the green of trees beyond my imagining suspended in the experience which becomes a physical sense as I remain transfixed in this greening and I happily both reflect and in reflecting disappear…not losing myself but finding Self. Fall too my favorite time of year…colored leaves, flying hawks, cold apple cider and crisp wind with adventures just waiting to happen!
It’s the same when deer appear reminding me I share the world with something More than myself. And to not wallow in melancholy when there is so much more to behold!
IF I remember to pause. And allow the winds to blow away the webs of thought and mind chatter. (My Dad-the math teacher—loved nature and poetry too…and hearing him recite Tolkien’s Misty Mountains poem may also have informed various life adventures and loves and delights!)
Perhaps this muse on deep delight is also another way of looking at Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” the last line “Though time held me green and dying…I sang in my chains like the sea.”
Or Gerard Manly Hopkins, “Inversnaid where he celebrates and delights in the weeds and wilderness…or the Whitman Yawp! That delight exists in spite of all the other shadows of the world and along side. Not all is lost in darkness, where there is darkness sometimes there are stars…or meteors and braving a cold November night is always worth the chill and solitude the radiance of each meteor piercing my soul for the memories once shared. I would have it no other way!
Alas! Now I’ve leaned more toward the poetic than the mytho but suppose it brings it to the human experience?
Now I need to dig back into your lovely essay and my other Campbell books! Thank you!