Thank you James for your astute insights.

A few additional thoughts that I can offer.

A good question to often ask ourselves is, ‘How is my relationship with the unknown developing?’ Bearing in mind that the unknown doesn’t always mean dangerous.

Our wounded ego often manipulates our energy so that there’s no room for the unknown. And we can’t manage chaos through the strategies of our old self. We can’t grow by staying where we are. But there’s a part of us that struggles to trust that this cycle has its own intelligence and timing.

To meet chaos we require spaciousness within ourselves first. If there’s no space inside, we can’t do anything with the insights, which chaos brings. It’s like a blocked funnel that gets stuck. It’s why meeting chaos takes alignment, not time. We’re yielding to the spirit, allowing the sheer force of divine creativity – an ephemeral vitality – to flow through us.

And it’s not that there’s anything ‘wrong’ when depression or chaos visits us, it’s just that there’s something else that life is trying to show us. We’re given a chance to recalibrate our truth. Rather than binary thinking of right or wrong, it’s about the revelation . . . or its possibility. We withdraw to hear something brand new that wants to live inside us. And we find ourselves in the apparent emptiness, not in the reflex actions. This is why we need our temenos, to place all that which we have previously censored and not given voice to, so it can be held, witnessed and integrated.

And this is what I referred to in the essay regarding self-sabotage. ‘Am I incubating a new self? Or am I stuck in the slow lane with imaginary blockades of my own making?’ When we make chaos or depression an ally and hold it close like a dear, beloved companion, the less power it has over us. It only wants to be seen. To be recognised and acknowledged.

And thank you for posting the descriptions too. Most helpful – Kristina.

Always a pleasure to be here in this forum with you Stephen and the COHO community. And thank you for calling the essay a meditation. It certainly felt like that for me when I was writing it, despite the subject matter.

My first thought is, ‘Is disruption chaos?’ Our intellect doesn’t function well in chaotic periods, so we’re required to defer to our intuition and imagination, but I notice that many people cope quite fine intellectually with disruption. It may be semantics, but just as an example, ‘chaos’ is necessary for alchemy, but is ‘disruption?’ I would argue ‘no,’ so I’m going to address your question via the word ‘disruption.’ And forgive me if I digress, but I’ll try to answer the essence of your questioning tangentially through the lens of the workforce, not specific industries.

I feel many people in the corporate world approach disruption in the ‘wrong’ way. Namely, you can’t plan for disruption. It exists in real time. Many companies struggle with this because most of the data they look to create with is coming from the past. But when working with disruption we must make ourselves a ‘verb’ in present time, not a ‘noun.’ And we disrupt not as a one-off event, but so that it becomes an intrinsic part of us. Those who have successfully brought disruption to the market by reimagining new possibilities have done so because within themselves, and those they work with, they spend the majority of their time with present data and being ‘verbs.’

But, if you were a manager thinking about your next hire – and be honest here – would you choose the most disruptive person for the job? You may like to think that you’d say ‘yes,’ but most people would say ‘no.’ You wouldn’t want them anywhere near you as they challenge everything about who you are, and what you believe in, and your comfort with the known world. And what do we like to call them – trouble makers, whistle blowers, people who rock the boat – until they become a Steve Jobs or Elon Musk and the like and then we call them geniuses, visionaries and pioneers.

Very few individuals have enough self-esteem, well, I’d actually say soul-esteem, to be around someone that disrupts them. And very few people want a disruptive person on their team. Are they going to show up for work today? Will they embarrass the team? Will they be communing with nature for inspiration rather than trawling online reports for something supposedly new and inspired like the other sheeple? (a portmanteau of sheep and people to describe herd behaviour) If they march to their own beat, how will we control them?

And if you were a CEO, would you hire the most disruptive person for the board who directly challenges the mediocrity of other board members that didn’t gain their position through meritocracy? Would you select the most disruptive candidate who highlights the current, uninspired vision and poor performance of the board? You’d say, ‘get real’ and choose safety, though the inner rebel in you wishes otherwise. This is the challenge, which confronts many CEOs, department heads and HR managers, while in the same breath (and often while they’re speaking at conferences) they’re espousing the need for an innovative, creative workforce!

To disrupt requires disruptive thinking, allowing disruptive feelings and taking disruptive actions on a daily basis. Many in the corporate world think that they can just ‘strategy away day’ this topic, or put someone else’s disruptive ideas into a PowerPoint presentation and try to implement them second-hand, or vicariously, by reading the latest bestseller out of Silicon Valley with ‘disruption’ in the title.

We must break the spell of thinking disruption is doing the same thing just better, faster, and cheaper. Disruption is a state of being, not a technology. And the best way to avoid actually changing is to go into our heads and endlessly argue about what ‘disruption’ even means. Our minds love to evaluate, oppose, critique, judge etc. but rarely do we hit the streets embodying the discussion of our feverish, small minds, so with that, I shall stop here.

I look forward to engaging the plethora of ways in which chaos meets and finds you this week – Kristina.

Dear NT,

Thank you for your message.

I didn’t interpret the quote as a distinction between extroverts and introverts at all. For me it spoke to a belonging of perception. Today with our preoccupation with data, we might say that the focus is on data scientists and their interpretation of numbers and algorithms, but what of the data artists? We need both data scientists and data artists for sensemaking. Instead of the either/or polarity, which we mostly exist in, can we embrace both/and instead? How do we make both grounds sacred? For example, we don’t ‘live’ in either the upper or the underworld but both the upper and the underworld. We both descend to the land of the dead and also attend to the land of the living.

To me the quote spoke to one’s mystical participation in life, as well as to where one finds sacred nourishment. Where to find this camaraderie in the sharing of our tender hearts as we marvel at both the finite and the infinite, both the groundedness and the grace (even the grounded grace!) and both the literal and the symbolic, which you so aptly mention, when so many of us feel that our mystical longings must be reduced to a tough-minded practicality?

All the books in the world containing mystical truths don’t have any value until we begin to live these truths. And it’s a challenge for us all to read and listen without opinion so that something greater may reveal itself. To me it’s not about solely dissecting the biases, but also embracing Rumi’s words: “Out beyond ideas / of wrongdoing and rightdoing, / there is a field. / I’ll meet you there.”

Very best, Kristina.

Dear R³,

Thank you for the message. No, it wasn’t intentional but I do love the U2 song ’40’ with the lyrics:

“I will sing, sing a new song

I will sing, sing a new song

How long to sing this song?

How long to sing this song?

How long, how long, how long

How long to sing this song?”

This version live in Chicago is my favourite (with Yahweh): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEV-Y3b_hvw

Very best, Kristina.

PS In Lithuania we have the Black Madonna of Vilnius.

Dear R³,

Thank you for your message. Yes, we are a product of seasonal ebbs and flows. I feel today though that we’ve often lost the ability to sense ourselves into the seasons, other than say through seasonal eating. How can we feel these rhythms viscerally? Can we internally sense ourselves blossoming, ripening, maturing and waning? Can we enter into our own seeding and sprouting? Can we simultaneously experience the musical and poetic moods that accompany the seasonal transitions? And how can society and our environment provide us with an invitation to reflect, re-image and re-imagine these seasonal energies? To vision and re-vision our experience of time?

There’s a potent, dreamy quality that comes from living in images, myths, symbols, fairy tales, the incantational rhythmic nature of poetry, musical melodies and the seasons. They contain worlds calling to us beyond the quotidian life. But can we unplug from our devices for long enough to notice them?

Very best, Kristina.

PS This comment on the YouTube clip you posted says it well. “Possibly the greatest cover of this song ever produced. Also possibly the most awful video ever made.”

Thank you for the thoughtful questions Stephen. And hello dear audience! I look forward to being in conversation with you this week.

I found in my Inbox a horoscope I saved from 2013 by Rob Brezsny: “PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): After studying the myths and stories of many cultures throughout history, Joseph Campbell arrived at a few conclusions about the nature of the human quest. Here’s one that’s apropos for you right now: ‘The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.’ He came up with several variations on this idea, including this one: ‘The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.’ I urge you to consider making this your operative hypothesis for the coming weeks, Pisces.”

I’m sure that it’s like this for many people. You don’t know who Joseph Campbell is one day, and then the next day, you’re spending all your time wanting to know just exactly who this person is! And then a few years later he appeared in one of my dreams.

And something obviously ‘clicked’ as I cashed in my life insurance to go to ‘The Mythological Toolbox™ PlayShop’ at the Esalen Institute in 2016!!! I felt there would be far more safety and security found in the week at Big Sur, California with a group of strangers revisioning our hero’s journey than in any false security that the future could potentially provide. I find the myths protect me in a very different way and are a separate type of life insurance policy.

While I was raised in Australia, all my grandparents are Lithuanian and so I was vaguely familiar with the work of Marija Gimbutas and it was so wonderful to visit her and Campbell’s library that same year as I also travelled to Pacifica Graduate Institute for the ‘Climates of Change and the Therapy of Ideas’ conference. It was certainly a rite of passage for me. Now being in Lithuania during the pandemic (we are still currently in lockdown) and being able to connect to my ancestral and mythological roots in the old-growth forests on the Baltic Sea coast, it puts what first drew me to Campbell – the Grail Mysteries – into context.

Interestingly I purchased ‘The Flight of the Wild Gander’ during the PlayShop (where I also happened to partake in way too much of Campbell’s favourite whisky during his 112th birthday celebrations!) and the book travelled home with me to eventually sit on a bookshelf in Adelaide and is now in storage, never once having been opened. Reading the PDF to write the article for this MythBlast I realised how often we need life to initiate us before we can meet certain ideas, people and experiences. The book may have always been sitting there waiting for us to read, but we’re not always ready to meet the content that waits for us inside. An inner dimension first needs to be carved and hollowed out in us so that the words have a place to land. Can we be that empty vessel to receive the wisdom?

When I grew up Campbell was only known amongst a certain audience in Australia but now the popularised monomyth and films like ‘Finding Joe’ means that there’s a growing recognition amongst more people of the importance of developing a mythic consciousness and an archetypal eye, as well as engaging a poetic and symbolic imagination. After the PlayShop, as I travelled the furthest to attend, it was my responsibility to take some stones from our week-long death and rebirth initiation ritual at Esalen to Uluru, and so in some very tiny way, I feel that there is now a connection with Campbell’s work and the Australian soil.

Thank you also for your kind comments on my essay, Stephen. Like in nature and our own lives (personal and corporate), it can’t always be spring. But we don’t know how to make space in our psyches and in society for the destroyer archetype. Destruction is the right hand of creation. We can’t have constant creation, constant growth, nor constant spring. We need exnovation as much as we do innovation. (Exnovation is characterised by the deconstruction of systems, practices or technologies that no longer serve what wants to emerge.)

There are few spaces in the industrial growth society for rest, decay and putrefaction. These things run counter to the capitalist agenda and a growth economy. There’s rarely time for reflection, a harvesting of what’s been learned, nor the stillness that a fallow field requires as new growth seeds and buds. As the Persephone and Hades myth articulates, there’s the necessary abduction from engagement with a life lived solely on the surface. We need to know what calls us to our depths and we’re often positioned in Hades to learn to trust the cycles of nature and that what comes to life is seeded by what is unseen.

The liminal space is where transformation occurs for it’s the calling card of the fertile void. The process of decomposition returns richness to the soil, which in the meantime provides regeneration and is the midwife to many varieties of a renaissance (in the greater meaning of the word). We have to question though why doing nothing is often times linked to laziness, when in fallow times what’s occurring is highly constructive – but invisible – to the naked eye as new growth is germinating and waits to be born. The undoing, unlearning and unknowing of ourselves is the very compost for seeding the fecundity of imagination.

So how to bring this into a corporate setting? I usually begin with exploring how we are nature. What we breathe out affects the world around us: we exist within a greater ecosystem. All life breathes together. The cycle of birth, growth, full bloom, harvest, decay, death and rebirth occurs in the sun, moon, seasons, plants, animals, humans and businesses. And lack of rhythm can be disastrous in business.

We cannot break the patterns of nature, only ourselves against them. And once people admit and witness the cost of going against nature – as well as their own nature – and grieve what’s been lost, only then is there the possibility to make way for the new. By turning away from the obsession with infinite, linear growth on a finite planet and shifting our attention to new frames of growth – flux, constant change, death and rebirth (both individually and collectively) – we then begin to sense the fragile web of creation that yokes us all.

By living in alignment with the patterns of the natural world, and the illumination that the mythic and archetypal world bestows, we fixate less on prediction and concern ourselves more with presence. This enables us to better relax into the future as we learn to make the mysterious and the unknown our permanent home. Rather than constantly being consumed with ‘what’s next,’ we can instead focus on ‘what’s sacred.’

Thank you all for the listening ear. I very much look forward to hearing from you – Kristina.