This year, Ganesha’s birthday is celebrated in the Hindu month of Bhadrapada, which on the Gregorian calendar falls on August 24th. A festival of celebration, called a Chaturthi, lasts for eleven days ending on September 4th. Ganesha is often regarded as being “the remover of obstacles,” and is among the most popular of the Hindu gods. He is a favorite household deity in India, and his popularity and acceptance are amazing, particularly since he comes, seemingly quite literally, out of nowhere around the 4th or 5th cent of the common era (and of course, there is debate as to just how old Ganesha is), beginning to appear in the late texts of the Puranas around c. 600. Perhaps that shouldn’t be too surprising since we often experience solutions to problems or obstacles as “coming out of nowhere.”  Being a favorite god of traders, and therefore sailors, Ganesha traveled widely and became popular in Indonesia, Southeast Asia, China, Japan, and even reaching into pre-Islamic Afghanistan. Ganesha’s skills in obstacle removal were called upon and he provided a rallying point for the Indians against British Colonialism and India’s successful efforts to recover self rule. Images of Ganesha depict him with the body of a man and the head of an elephant, which depicts the unity of the microcosm, man, and the macrocosm, the universe. The man part of Ganesha represents the manifest principle, inferior to the unmanifest or immaterial realm symbolized by the elephant, and why the elephant is therefore the head. Ganesha has a mouse as a companion, which probably symbolizes Ganesha’s ability to penetrate, mouse like, to the most secret and hidden places. It’s not uncommon that when one can uncover, or become conscious of the most hidden, secret places within oneself that what initially seemed to be obstacles melt away, or even become transformed into opportunities. Size is a concept one cannot escape in contemplating the images of Ganesha, the immensity of the elephant and the tininess of the rat; it’s almost as if, in the iconic representations of Ganesha, one might see into the deep nature of the universe: vast, yet atomic. Of course, Ganesha is often depicted with many arms and a massive belly, features which represent the infinite abundance of compassion that he possesses for other beings. In addition to being the remover of obstacles, in his manifestation as Ganapati, he is the Lord of Categories embodying everything the mind can grasp. All that can be counted or comprehended is a category or gana, and simply put, a category is a collection of things. Alain Danielou writes, “The principle of all the classifications through which the relations between different orders of things, between the macrocosm and the microcosm, can be understood is called the lord-of-categories (Ganapati)” (The Myths and Gods of India). Among other things, the Lord of Categories is a scholar, a patron of schools, and a scribe, and to him is attributed the recording of the Mahabharata, one of the two major Sanskrit epics. The relationships between the microcosm and the macrocosm comprise nearly the whole of religion and philosophy; the effort toward reconciling the material with the immaterial, the known with the unknown, is the defining human enterprise. No wonder humans admire Ganapati, that theriocephalic genius who, in his categorical knowledge of everything becomes “the giver of gifts who destroys obstacles” (Ganapati Upanishad 15). Thanks for reading,

Yesterday, on August 21, Americans living within the “umbral cone” had a ring side seat to the latest total solar eclipse visible from the U.S. for the first time in 26 years. As you know, a solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the earth and the sun veiling the bright sunlight of day. Because of their relative distances and size, when it is closest to the earth the moon appears large enough to completely cover the sun, creating a few minutes of uncommon, otherworldly duskiness during an otherwise sunlit day. Umbraphiles from all over the world will travel to various places within the U.S. to place themselves in the pathway of the eclipse. Solar eclipses are not all that unusual (averaging one totality, somewhere on earth, every 18 months), but to witness a total solar eclipse at the same location, one would have to wait about 375 years. The Chinese began keeping records of eclipses around 720 BCE, and Shi Shen predicted eclipses based on the relative positions of the sun and moon as early as the 4th Century BCE. By and large, though, eclipses have not always provoked cool, rational, scientific inquiry. We get the word “eclipse” from the Greek word ekleipsis, which means abandonment, and often during an eclipse when daylight abandoned them, people reacted with fear and panic while regarding eclipses as bad omens or ill portents. Certainly the disruption of the natural order—night erupting into daylight—was a cause for real concern. A surprising number of cultures created mythologies of an animal of some kind swallowing the sun. Mayan paintings show a giant serpent swallowing the sun, for the Chinese it was a dragon, for people living in the region of Hungary a bird was responsible. In southern Siberia a bear swallowed the sun, while in southeast Asia, a toad or frog was the culprit. In Norse mythology, a wolf named Skoll steals the sun with the intention to eat it and local residents make as much noise as possible to scare Skoll away from his feast. While there are many other cultural examples of animals eating the sun, there are other mythological motifs to explain the disappearance of the sun. For example, in some African myths the sun and moon are fighting during an eclipse; in some North American indigenous eclipse myths the sun and the moon marry and, since stars and planets are visible during an eclipse, the solar-lunar romance seems to result in the birth of other heavenly objects. Misunderstandings of the nature and power of eclipses have even persisted into contemporary times as evidenced by the surprisingly common belief that an eclipse is dangerous to pregnant women and may cause birth defects in unborn children, or that one should not look directly at an eclipse lest one become blinded (the use of solar glasses and viewing a total eclipse with the naked eye at the moment of totality is encouraged). Fears are attending the upcoming eclipse too, although perhaps less fantastical, but people fear shortages of food, water, bathrooms, and gasoline due to the people flooding into communities along the path of the totality. One researcher even suggested that eclipse mania in these parts of the country will resemble a “zombie apocalypse.” Now, I doubt that there will have been a zombie apocalypse, but we humans have great difficulties dealing with experiences that seem to subvert the natural order of things, of events that trigger the primal feeling in us that unusual powers are at work, and we create narratives to explain those moments when the distinction between imagination and reality are erased, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary or impossible appears before us in reality. It is then we discover that those primitive fears which we are confident we’ve surmounted seem once more to be activated. We rely on the power of myth to deal with the production of the existential anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free. Image: A very special thanks to wildlife and adventure photographer Ted Hesser for sharing this extraordinary image he made at Smith Rock State Park, Terrebonne, OR during the 2017 solar eclipse.

We tell stories about who we are, to understand what makes us different - what makes us alike - what connects us what our families might be and look like - and who our families and tribes are. We tell stories of the place that we live in - and how we connect back to that place -  and how we love that place - and how it loves us. Or maybe how we hate that place and it hates us. But we tell stories of belonging. And ownership. And having a right to something. Having a right to live. Having a right to be. And having a sense of our own identity and our own power. Sometimes our stories get ugly. We feel that we must tell our stories about who we are - and where we live - and what we own - and how we must live on this, on our land, because this land is our land.  And is not your land. And sometimes we drown in the stories about who isn’t like us. Who isn’t worthy of us, of where we live, and who we believe ourselves to be. This weekend those stories erupted in the United States, in Virginia, in harsh ways. These stories erupt every day around the world; we don’t always hear them, particularly when they feel far away.  But this weekend in the US was about this story: if you are not like us, you are not like us. You cannot own this place, this land, this identity. My tribe is different. My tribe is better. And my tribe is based on the color of my skin. With that in mind, I think about those moments where I’ve gone to places where I don’t ‘belong,’ into places where how stories are told and the flavors, scents, and gestures that populate those stories are unilaterally different than in those my tribe tells (whatever my tribe might be). I am reminded that when we go beyond where we belong, something rather extraordinary can happen.  As we hear the stories of others, their myths, it is somehow easier for us to see them as stories, for they are outside of us. But if we sit with this, we can allow this to remind us that ours ours are just stories as well. And while they can be big and powerful and can catch us, ultimately they still sit, somehow, outside of us too. This truly is not easy! I’ve been reading Campbell’s Asian Journals, his explorations of India and Japan in 1954 through 1955, and found myself fascinated by how he navigates stories – his own as well as others – as he travels so far afield and has a seminal experience of the 'other,' shaping his identity as a mythologist. It is not always easy for him, either. He is distressed to hear widespread anti-American sentiments and what he sees as wrong stories that were being shared and breathed life into by the people he was meeting in India. At one moment, he begins to wonder if perhaps India wouldn’t have been better explored from a distance, that maybe he got more out of India and its mythologies before he landed there, and that the real stories were less than those he’d learned and imagined. This is so powerful. It points, I think, to how hard it is not to be entrained (and even chained) by the stories we tell. That Campbell could be so drawn to the mythologies of a place and still get gripped hard enough by his own stories and expectations that he had trouble at times understanding the value of the one he was stepping into exemplifies how hard it can be to step outside the power of the mythologies we live within. I think that’s why I find these journals so intoxicating: he is so, utterly human in them. And he is surrounded by people as utterly human as he, and that begins to be enough. As he seeks vastness, he finds, more often, the poesis of everyday life. But he then begins to find the mythos in this experience of finding the other, and is changed. I think we all can be, if we wander into one another’s stories.

“Tell me your myth that the whole world may turn to myth.” Nikos Kazantzakis The Talking Heads were right. We can’t truly know where we are going without reflecting upon where we have been. We look backwards to understand ourselves today and to prepare ourselves for the future.This spiraling, paradoxical movement is inherent within the logic of myth and, as Wolfgang Geigerich would phrase it, the logic of the soul.  In The Soul’s Logical Life, he concludes, “The subject matter of psychology, the soul, is the contradiction and difference.” (38) The soul is the place of paradox. We must go back to move forward, go down to come up, be consumed to be whole. As we tell each other our myths, we step outside the action for a moment to hear the story. And in that outsider moment, we can catch our breath and begin to see our big stories as constructs that live larger than we do, architecture that can help us reflect into and back out from what we understand not only about ourselves and the world around us. We rarely learn when we are in the heat of the experience; we need distance to see. Myth can exquisitely give us that distance. It’s very tempting, as we try to climb into these big stories, to want them for our own. To talk about one or more of them as our ‘personal myth’ and settle into the idea that it belongs to us as an individual. “I am Persephone,” we say, for example, “always stepping into the underworld…” It’s a sexy idea, this image of the personal myth, offering us a glimpse into patterns and meanings larger than our generally work-a-day lives, and, if we grab it literally, offering us a dose of mythic mojo to bolster our sense of mattering in the world. It’s far more fun to be Persephone in all of her divine tragedy than just someone who hasn’t figured out how to climb out of feeling trapped in our own dark corners. I think this is a dangerous move, seductive but ultimately reductive. In order to see the small, we look to the large. And while we can see the large in the small – the mythos in our own lives – to begin to see ourselves as somehow mythic loses the paradox and point of myth. Myths are inherently vaster than we will ever be, and while we may have deep insights that emerge when we find stories that resonate in and for us, if we believe we can claim them, we have lost them.  If we decide that this myth is the story of our lives, we have weakened both stories: by presuming to believe that a collective mythos could be claimed by one person, we deflate the meta-story, and by broadening our exquisitely complex human-scale lives into the stroke of a mythic arc, we lose our nuance. To know ourselves, we must hear the stories of others.  To know those around us, we must see our reflections within them, and to know ourselves, we must see their reflections in us. So, perhaps the personal myth is simply the myth that we have, today, chosen to tell.

This past week, from Sunday, July 23rd through Friday, July 28th, Joseph Campbell Foundation President Bob Walter led a workshop called, Your Hero’s Journey® Redux: A Mythological ToolBox® PlayShop. Bob is a theatrical playwright and director, an educator, a publisher, and he was Joseph Campbell’s friend and editor for a decade or more. Through a range of deceptively playful exercises, participants in the workshop remember and explore significant life events and by recognizing the tendency to mythologize aspects of their own lives, they gain a deeper understanding of the similar ways in which myth grows, evolves, and often coalesces into one singular narrative. Participating in this workshop, one sees that the way one became oneself—how one was shaped and the patterns one’s life formed—isn’t accidental or a kind of supernaturally assigned destiny. The “self” is formed by a narrative woven together from a unique constellation of biological manifestations and personalized perspectives. Throughout the workshop the theme of questing, a crucial element of the hero’s journey, is ever-present, and at first the quest is merely a personal one—a quest to discover oneself, to attempt to understand why I am who I am, and transmute that understanding into greater self-mastery. But a larger realization grows that in order to be truly heroic, the discoveries one makes, the boons one receives on the journey, must be shared somehow with the larger community; the hero’s journey culminates not in personal gain, but in the melioration of an entire civitas. Research suggests that through service to others one finds a stronger realization of purpose, meaning, and significance in one’s own life. In the universe of the Grail Legends it seems that everything and everyone is connected, and in Wolfram’s Parzival this is particularly so, and through recognizing those connections, Parzival receives help at every turn. In the beginning, Parzival is utterly helpless, it’s true, but it is precisely that helplessness which becomes the greatest tool in his toolbox; helplessness inspires magic—another way to say this may be to say that helplessness catalyzes creativity—and is the activator of enchantment. Perhaps it is helplessness itself that desires and searches for the Grail. Helplessness is also the spring from which morality flows, it helps us recognize the good, the just, and even love. In his book, The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud saw helplessness as “…the primal source of all moral motives” and we learn through the experience of helplessness that what’s good for us is often good for others. I need to be clear that I’m speaking of a particular kind of helplessness, a generative helplessness, a helplessness that is curious and determined to learn, helplessness that is anxious without panicking, earnest without being innocent, a helplessness born of the awe one feels standing uncertainly, smack in the middle of an impenetrably sublime mystery. Neurotic helplessness is needy, desperate, dependent, grasping, and greedy; the wrong sort of helplessness repels and nullifies love, but generative helplessness inspires love, perhaps that’s why the grail stories spend so much time describing romantic love and the helplessness and vulnerability that attend it. If we refuse helplessness, if we simply recant or disclaim our helplessness, we are simultaneously refusing bliss. No helplessness, no bliss. It really is that simple. The hero simply cannot find herself in a strange new world without feeling helpless. Without her helplessness she could never attain the Grail because it’s helplessness itself that seeks the promise of wholeness which the Grail offers. The hero’s journey is not about discovering a new world or finding a new life, it is instead about plumbing the depths and the mysteries of the only world and the only life we have. The French poet, Paul Eluard, wrote, “There is another world, but it is in this one.” We may say the same of our own lives—we have another life, and it is in this one. And the more radically we can accept ourselves and the world, the more enchanting we are, and the more enchanted it becomes. Thanks for reading, and thanks to my new friends for a very special week!

Every year in Northeastern Arizona, around July, the Hopi Tribe celebrates the Niman Kachina Festival. The word “Hopi” is shortened from Hopituh Shi-Nu-Mu, a Hopi word meaning “The Peaceful People.” An important use of the word Hopi is to describe one who behaves with civility, manners, respect for all things, and being at peace with those things. Historically the Hopi lived along the Mogollon Rim of present day Arizona in large villages, often in apartment house-like structures built into cliff sides overlooking canyons prevalent during the 12th to 14th centuries, after which time these large villages were, for reasons not entirely clear, abandoned. Today, the Hopi live in villages spread out across northeastern Arizona on ancestral land surrounded by the Navajo Indian Reservation. The two nations used to share what was called the Navajo-Hopi Joint Use Area, but a great deal of controversy was generated by this arrangement and the area was partitioned by an act of Congress, also controversial, in 1974. The Hopi city of Oraibi is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, continuously inhabited city within the present boundaries of the United States, dating back to before the 12th century. The Niman Kachina Festival is an important part of the Hopi tradition; it is also known as The Going Home Ceremony. Kachinas, the central feature of the ceremony, are the ancestral spirits of the Hopi and, in the Hopi tradition, the personifications of all things. Everything has a spirit which may be personified by a Kachina: people, animals, plants, minerals, the elements, features of the landscape such as mountains, water, and sky, all have a Kachina. For six months of the year Kachinas visit the tribe, bringing with them rain for the crops and good health for the people. Their January arrival is celebrated in the Powamu Festival, and the Niman Kachina Festival celebrates the Kachina’s return to their mountain home on the San Francisco Peaks outside Flagstaff, Arizona. The commencement of the Kachina season coincides with the winter solstice as the Hopi begin to prepare the ground for planting and lasts through the first harvest in July. The Kachinas don’t actually leave for the mountains until the second morning of the festival when a brief sunrise ceremony allows the Kachina dancers to be seen leaving the village heading west. They disappear just as the sun rises over the eastern horizon, apparently returning to the mountain, bearing the people’s gifts and prayers for the gods. Hopi mythology is an example of a mythology so complex and nuanced it is frankly impossible to convey an accurate sense of its significance and influence in the short space allotted for a MythBlast, but one of its aspects, the concept of cyclical time, is a feature shared by many mythologies and conveys ideas of the sacred or numinous in ways that the modern notion of linear, advancing time simply cannot. Cyclical time emphasizes the cycles of life and death, darkness and light, cold and heat, solar and lunar progressions, ages and epochs that give way one to another. Cyclical time is the essence of Mircea Eliade’s notion of the eternal return, making each new year, season, or important day, a recapitulation of the referenced mythic period. Joseph Campbell noted that myths are bound inseparably to a particular time, place, culture, and even geography, and yet there is something fundamentally, perhaps even universally, human reflected to ourselves in myth, and one may do well to engage it in the spirit of the word Hopi: with civility, with respect, and with veneration.

In a 1907 letter to his wife, Clara (a fine artist and sculptor in her own right, who had studied with, among others, Auguste Rodin), Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Only as though with their radiance can things reach us, and just as the magnet rouses and organises the forces in something susceptible to it, so they, through their influence, create within us a new ordering” (The Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 121). Like art, the potential of myth to facilitate the creation of a new inner order is, perhaps, the primary reason behind Joseph Campbell’s lifelong love of and scholarly fascination with myth and its relationship to the human psyche. In his work titled, The Ecstasy of Being (releasing this month as an eBook), Campbell asserts, “In a work of proper art every aesthetic element has a psychological value equivalent to that of some mythological image or idea” (74), and I think that the psychological value accompanying the mythological image is often one of ecstasy. Ecstasy is derived from the Greek word, ekstasis, which literally means to be standing outside of oneself, carried beyond individual, rational thought to a psychosomatic state in which rationality and personal volition are suspended. Ekstasis dissolves the sense of the bounded, the contained, the self-inspecting and self-experiencing sensation of the world, and plunges one into a transcendent experience, an experience of the world, the universe even, as unified, timeless, unbounded, and harmonious. Several years ago I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the intent to enjoy the Greek and Roman wing of the museum when, finding myself with time on my hands, I wandered into the modern art section and was gob smacked by a 6 ¼ foot tall, 18 ½ foot wide work of art by Anselm Kiefer called “Bohemia Lies by the Sea.” I’ve since learned that Kiefer is a German artist born in 1945, an author of several books, and his body of work wrestles with recent German history such as Nazi rule, the Holocaust and other controversial, sometimes even taboo, issues. The ecstasy I experienced looking at this piece was no doubt abetted by its composition—a thickly painted oil, powdered paint, charcoal, shellac, emulsion on burlap—and three-dimensional quality. But even more influential were the qualities of the artwork that didn’t initially register in my conscious awareness during the initial viewing. The title, for instance, very subtly confuses or disequilibrates as one struggles with the thought, Bohemia doesn’t lie by the sea at all does it? I’ve always associated it with Prague, land-locked in Eastern Europe. And is that a hint of the sea at the top of the painting, or is it sky? Where does that road take me? All of my associations to Bohemia, even the ideals of Bohemia were activated: Puccini’s opera, the Broadway play titled Rent, the notions of free thinking, experimental art, and free love; a vigorously energetic and spirited, impecunious and thread-worn existence cloaking a richly baroque intellectual and spiritual life lived in a vaguely communal coalition of artists, intellectuals, and marginalized souls drawn together by a common Utopian dream. Later still, I learned of this poem by Ingeborg Bachmann, titled, “Bohemia Lies by the Sea,” which almost certainly served as some inspiration for Kiefer’s painting. An excerpt from that poem says: If it’s me, then it’s anyone, for he’s as worthy as me. I want nothing more for myself. I want to go under. Under – that means the sea, there I’ll find Bohemia again. From my grave, I wake in peace. From deep down I know now, and I’m not lost." Well, suffice it to say that I am unable to ever again leave The Met without having at least a glimpse of this painting; its aesthetic, its ekstasis-inducing power remains with me still. As Campbell put it, the image “synthesizes the ‘pulse of life’ with the ‘stillness of death’” allowing one to see through the literal painting to a background of mystery normally occluded to the eye, which is finally, he says, the function of both art and mythology (106-107). The ecstatic experience is bigger than the momentary “real,” bigger than the painful or the unbearable elements of life; it is somehow full of inner awakening and soothing validation. When looking at proper art we are turned toward the Outside, but when we are most so, momentous things are happening within us, things that we might not know how to describe or name, things that put our mundane anxieties to shame. One discovers one’s true self living in a place that isn’t on any maps, ineffably radiant and powerful, in an inner Utopia, a Bohemia near the Sea. Thanks for reading.

When I first was drawn to myth, it was through play. My sisters and I, nerdily passionate children of academics, spent a lot of time playing “Greek Gods and Goddesses” in a father-made fort in our suburban back yard in Pennsylvania. Armed with D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, we developed elaborate story lines based on myths that most intrigued us, in what was, as I think about it, a rather intuitive form of fan fiction. Not content simply to re-enact the stories from the book, we invented new adventures for our favorite divinities, each more far-flung and impossible than the last. One sister was almost always Artemis. The other, Persephone.  I most often cast myself as Demeter, drawn by the power of growing things, of abundance, and perhaps, a bit of authority over my younger sister. Those archetypes have rolled through all three of our lives in rather fascinating ways. (Though I no longer have any fantasies that I hold any authority over sisters, mythic or otherwise.) Even as fairly young children, we were drawn to those qualities that would lead us through the rest of our lives, metaphorically and even, at times, metaphysically. While we probably were the only kids in our neighborhood living into that particular set of characters and storylines, we were hardly alone in breathing life into our make-believe. And, I think, we were tapping into a deeply human instinct to make myth come alive through play. In "The Historical Development of Mythology", Campbell writes: We all know the convention, surely! It is a primary, spontaneous device of childhood: a magical device, by which the world can be transformed from banality to magic in a trice. And its inevitability in childhood is one of those universal characteristics of man that unite us in one family. It is a primary datum, consequently, of the science of myth, which is concerned precisely with the phenomenon of self-induced belief. (36) Play is, perhaps, the clearest way not only to conjure that magic and banish banality, but, is, I am increasingly convinced, one of the most powerful paths into the heart of myth. Campbell thinks that ritual play, ritual make-believe, brings us into the heart of the metaphysics of myth. I think he’s right.

In the United States, July 4th is a national holiday celebrating the Second Continental Congress’s approval of The Declaration of Independence, a document created to explain congress’s decision on July 2, 1776 to formally separate from British rule and form an independent nation comprised of the original 13 colonies. John Adams believed it would be the July 2nd date that would be celebrated in American memory “…from this time forward forever more.” But in the American creation myth, the founding fathers signed the declaration on July 4th, even though most Historians believe the Declaration of Independence was signed much later, perhaps even a month later, on August 2nd. Initially, when fighting began in 1775, Americans were fighting only for their rights as British subjects, and all out war with Great Britain was not an option anyone relished. Yet, in another year the Revolution was under way, and congressional action resulting in the issuance of the Declaration of Independence had been taken. The war was costly, both in blood and treasure; casualty rates were second only to the Civil War. Americans banded together to fight a capriciously tyrannical monarchy, and “mutually pledge[d] to each other,” as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration, “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” There are few documents, especially government documents, that transcend their functions as forms, records, certificates, authorizations, or mere reports, and actually live. The Declaration of Independence is one such living document; it seems sentient and discursive, at times angry, disappointed, insulted, anxious, and above all, determined; determined to honor its enduring pledge of justice, safety, happiness, and prudence to its citizens, encouraging Americans to live a meaningful life. In return, the pledge from each of us to give our best and our all to every person engaged in this bold, risky, and ultimately fragile experiment breathes life into that most remarkable of documents, resuscitated by every new generation of Americans. I think nothing is better than mythology at emphasizing the glaring discrepancy between individual perceptions and desires and the harsh inflexibility of external reality, and certainly countries may be similarly understood. A state is reasonably clear and objectively defined—it’s a necessary organizing principle—but a nation is a mythological, imaginal notion, a nation is a living myth. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, a pronouncement of individual freedom, is the first attempt at shaping and advancing the founding mythology of America, and we can see the discrepancies between aspiration and reality, individuality and plurality, when a little more than a decade later, the U.S. Constitution emphasizes the words “We the people,” and “a more perfect union.” Perhaps the best measure of independence is the recognition that I am interdependent; I am more free when I work to ensure that those immortal words—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—apply to each and every American.

It seems to me, life on this planet displays a disturbing propensity for the powerful to further afflict the already afflicted. The personae non-grata, the sick, the powerless, the poor, are forced to live in the margins of society, a Hobbesian existence that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Not surprisingly, the temptation to “punch down” seems to be a primordial, enduring, and ineradicable strain of human nature, which Sophocles brilliantly described in his 409 B.C.E. tragedy titled, simply, Philoctetes. Sophocles was the defender and patron of those whom society had tossed aside, and writes movingly about betrayal, abandonment, and that last moral voice standing in opposition to unprincipled tradition or overwhelming force. Philoctetes was with the armada sailing to Troy (he was already famous for assisting Hercules to die as the latter suffered horribly from Nessus’ poisoned shirt, and for this assistance was rewarded with Hercules’ bow and arrows) when they stopped at a tiny island along the way to sacrifice to a local deity and Philoctetes is bitten by a snake. His groans of pain make the performance of the ritual impossible, spoiled by the ill-omened sounds of agony. Additionally, Philoctetes’ wound begins to suppurate and emit such a horribly foul odor that he is abandoned on a nearby deserted island where he spends the next ten years in tremendous pain and suffering: “On every side I looked, and nothing saw but woe.” Eventually, the Argives learn they can only defeat Troy with the aid of Hercules’ bow and arrows, and presumably, Philoctetes; they also learn that Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, must be summoned, given his father’s armor, and help secure the unsurpassable armaments. Neoptolemus and Odysseus set out to retrieve the bow of Hercules, but Odysseus has no intention to retrieve Philoctetes and is instead intent on gaining the bow through deceit, trickery, or force. Initially, cunning Odysseus convinces Neoptolemus to work with him to deceive Philoctetes. But the more Neoptolemus watches Philoctetes bravely bear his grotesque wound, his betrayal, and his suffering, the more he realizes he cannot treat so shabbily this noble soul, whom he is beginning to love. Neoptolemus decides he will lie no longer and tells Philoctetes about their mission to exploit him, and returns to him the bow and arrows of Hercules, an act of honesty and atonement that enrages Odysseus, but further endears Neoptolemus to Philoctetes. After some hesitation Philoctetes eventually agrees to return to Troy with Neoptolemus and Odysseus after a too tidy deus ex machina intervention by Hercules (who after his death became a god), directing Philoctetes to return to Troy, win the war, and be healed of his wound by the sons of Asclepius. All the ruined, broken-yet-unbowed, heroes of Sophocles’ greatest plays, Ajax, Oedipus at Colonus, and Philoctetes, remain—against all odds—people of remarkable virtue, virtue made all the more remarkable by their humiliating circumstances, and one has no alternative but to admire them. Due to their ghastly suffering, they no longer have regard for the demands or opinions of others; they are, in a moral sense, free. It is the nature of the powerful, like Odysseus, to focus solely on what materially serves their power and disregard values, humanity, and pathos; people like Philoctetes, the human, the invalid, the desperately needy.  Dissolving the deontological divide between Philoctetes and Odysseus is the young, guileless, humane, young man who sees another, not as a means to an end, but as a fellow human being whose suffering elicits empathy and whose dignity elicits love. To think generously and kindly toward others, not acting as though people are tools employed for naked self-interest, is our charge. If we fail, then as Philoctetes said,” I dread the woes to come; for well I know when once he mind’s corrupted it brings forth unnumbered crimes, and ill to ills succeed.”

It is high summer in the Catskill mountains of New York where I live: green, lush, blooming, sparking with life. It’s an enchanted time. Every morning I walk my dogs in our meadows and life is bursting forth. We see and hear birds, from warblers, killdeer, and yellowthroats announcing their presence like characters in a Seuss story: ‘we are here!;’ to the wild turkeys that beat the air like drums as they thrash into flight, startled  by the dogs. And we stumble upon a host of treasures: a fawn, still spotted as she curls in the high grass, red efts looking oddly tropical against the forest floor, and wild roses and black cap raspberries indecorously in bloom. It is a time of year that seems to simultaneously stand still and rush by far too quickly. It is the solstice. We tend to think of the solstice as a day, but it is actually, formally, a moment in time. This year, in 2017, that moment happens at 12:24 AM – ironically enough, in the middle of the night. But it’s that moment – that standing still – that has caught my imagination today. Solstice is a word with Latin roots - solstitium, from sol - sun - and stitium – to stop.  For a moment, the sun appears to stop on each Solstice, and in this most solar of days, opens up a moment into the eternal. When time no longer moves, it no longer exists. Suddenly, in that moment outside time, the infinite unfolds, both in our fleeting understanding of the immanence of the universe and in ourselves. Of course, its mystery confounds us, except for glimpses, caught in a breath, or out of the corner of our eyes. It is so vast, we can only catch the slightest trail of it. This brush with the infinite, at its heart, one of the central virtues and points of ritual, of myth – to help us find those breaths, those glances, into what lies beyond our understanding. In Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, Campbell writes: The sun is our second symbol of rebirth ... When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die; that is the insight rendered in term of the solar mystery, the solar light. (89) What better time to imagine into that solar mystery and our own transcendence than on the day of the solstice?

Ramadan, celebrated this year between May 27th and June 24th by approximately a quarter of the world’s population, is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and commemorates the revelation of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. Ramadan’s most marked characteristic is the daily dawn to dusk fasting, the length of which is determined by one’s location and the time of year. For instance, the days of fasting get longer the nearer to the summer solstice and shorter as winter approaches. And this year, if you live in say, New York, you’ll rise around four in the morning and eat a breakfast hearty enough to get you through the day without additional food or water until the sun sets around 8:15 p.m. Iftar, the breaking of the fast, is a ritual often shared with family and friends indulging in dates, water, and sweet tea along with other favorite traditional meals often served buffet style to family and friends. The “night of power,” or Laylat al-Qadr, is the holiest night of the Muslim year, commemorating the night Muhammad received his revelation, and falls on an odd numbered night during the last 10 days of Ramadan. Of course, there is so much more to the celebration of Ramadan than the bare, simplistic introduction I have just provided, but I’d like to focus on one aspect of Ramadan in particular, the ritual of self-restraint through fasting. Participating in mythic rituals is a powerful way to more deeply understand the condition of being human and the challenges inherent in human development. C.G. Jung and Joseph Campbell believed that archetypes are among the constituent elements of the human psyche and, in addition to being reflected in myths, the rituals accompanying mythic narratives allow for a more conscious interaction with, and an examination of, the powerful energies of existence swirling around, in, and through individual lives. I believe it’s important not to mistake the ritual itself as the fulfillment, or the point of the myth. Enacting rituals is not simply a mandated, legalistic obligation of a myth but rather, rituals are a didactic, metaphoric, self-educating act of deepening and expanding one’s consciousness so that one may more fully grasp what it means to be a human being related to one’s self and other humans, to other animals, and to one’s world. So how then, do we begin to understand ritual acts of self-restraint such as fasting? Typically, when one initiates a fast, a condition of need quickly occupies one’s attention: lowered blood sugar makes one feel weak and perhaps a bit shaky, confusion and irritability are common and one often feels restless. Dehydration from a lack of water makes one’s mouth dry and begin to feel sleepy and headachy. It begins to become unpleasantly clear how difficult and complicated a proposition it is to sustain ourselves; we see that we are clearly dependent upon others for our own well-being. And as our instinctual needs mount how challenging is it to remain compassionate and humane--are we still able to be kind to our children and spouses, patient with the demands of others, and sympathetic to those who are forced to live on a daily basis with hunger, oppression, disability, desperate longing, and a host of other challenges, without the same resources and good fortune that most of us reading this essay enjoy? Fasting humans are not fighting humans; one simply hasn’t the strength, energy, or cognitive sharpness needed for conflict, and one’s energies may be more easily tuned toward reconciliation and the search for peace. Self-restraint creates the conditions under which humans may recognize and strengthen our best selves, try to relieve oppression and fear, and since we have ourselves tasted a bit of the diminishing, perhaps even dehumanizing effects of privation, we may be inspired to relieve others of the burden of need and comfort the afflicted. Thanks for reading.