[mythicstream]

Wow, so many options to take into the forest. Thank you. I’m responding here more to your post prior to the one directly above. And as regards tangents from topics or focus, I am a regular in that. I value going off the trail and discovering what otherwise would not be seen. Being a lifelong backpacker, at one point I realized “Hey, we’re not exploring the wilderness here, not deeply, not if we’re stuck on this extremely thin curvy line called a “trail”). So I no longer travel with peak-baggers, record-setters in time from one campsite to the next, etc. I’ve discovered my fair share of mini grail kingdoms that way: off the trail, places within the map’s boundaries, but unmarked and unknown to the map.

You mentioned that saying I like, “the myths are messy” and I wanted to camp there for a moment, because it’s not intended as a broadbrushing (love that term by the way). And I’m confident you did not take it that way evidenced by your worthy suspicions of that term. Anyway, I’m really fond of it when I’m deep in the narrative of the myth or the myth of my own life, the actual scenes, plots, characters, and settings. We see the trees and rocks and creatures all doing and being what they do and are: and it is (in that context) random—or at least appears random which still counts as random for my psychic reality. In that random, disorganized space, “messy” can surely crop up.

And a common theme we’re always touching on in these posts is applying the patterns, centers of gravity, archetypes, etc., of the myths. And that’s the organizing force to me—the map—the pulling back and not just seeing the trees before me but rather the whole forest even though it is more abstract—a concept or at least we can say that a piece of paper with topography-lines and writing on it is not a “forest.”

Just felt like looking at that for a moment.

I like what you said about that certain point for a dancer where the moves “become rooted in the bodymind so deeply that it becomes second nature. Then the dancer just dances…” If I may call it “intuitive movement” at that point. And if that is acceptable, then “structure” (which so often is viewed as limiting, as the imposition of boundaries), ironically becomes supportive of that intuitive, natural way of moving, dancing.

I bring it up because I hear your appreciation and affinity for intuition when you mention it. It is my preferred of the four functions (i..e., Jung: feeling-thinking-intuiting-sensing). In fact, I’ve come to prefer it so much that I seek out those structures that I once felt were the enemies of intuition (like logic, rationality, etc.) so that their “form-al” presence actually deepens the intuition. Perhaps it is by contrast, as in working one’s inferior function, like a board on a fulcrum and I heave a chunk of logic on one side and intuition goes leaping into the air on the other.

If I compare with this idea of how we apply the “forest-view” of mythology to the “messy” or random “in-the-narrative” moments, then perhaps one’s practice/training in reading and reflecting on mythology provides that structure that awakens the natural, intuitive individual (as with Parzival’s second go-around). So that, while seeing the terrain, one sees the themes that saturate that terrain, and, ideally, without even knowing it.

Thank you for sharing so much good stuff. I enjoy diving in when and where the intuition takes. Surely there’s so much more you presented that is equally worthy of exploring/being with.