The title of this MythBlast is borrowed from the title of this Mark Strand poem: Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of the light. You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, sending up warm bouquets of air. Even this late the bones of the body shine and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.   In my personal associations, celebrations that occur on or around the Winter Solstice, like Christmas and Hanukkah, are entirely about hope. Even though it comes on the shortest day of the year and is ever only a moment, at the moment of Winter Solstice, light and dark are perfectly balanced and ancient humans recognize important information about the progress of the seasons which allows them to make triumph of light over the increasing darkness. Celebrating the birth, or rebirth in some cases, of solar deities at this time of year was, and is, a common theme across many cultures. Neolithic and Bronze Age solstice structures seem to abound in the Northern Hemisphere, and sites such as Stonehenge in the U.K., Newgrange in Ireland, the Goseck Circle in Germany, even the more recent Chaco Canyon and Cahokia in the U.S. are among the most well-known. Strand’s poem captures an aspect of the hope found in the symbolism, in the imagining of solstice, when he writes, “Even this late it happens,” suggesting that love and light, relief and comfort, may still be found long after one’s rational thought process has precluded their existence. We use the phrase “being in the dark” to describe all manner of discomfort, confusion, and ignorance; being in the dark is also often synonymous with being exposed to one’s fears. In the refrain of an Iron Maiden song , for instance, this sentiment is reflected in the lyric, “Fear of the dark, fear of the dark, I have a constant fear that something’s always near. Fear of the dark, fear of the dark, I have a phobia that someone’s always there.” In the darkness, one’s perceptual faculties seem altered and familiar shapes may acquire eerie or grotesque, threatening forms, and the play of shadows makes us imagine predatory somethings are moving nearby. Orienting oneself becomes increasingly difficult the darker it gets, and a solitary, noiseless, blackness unnerves and provides the perfect environment for one’s personal demons to run amok. As the Psalmist wrote : “…weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” The return of the light reassures, sunlight allows us to see more clearly, with more detail, with more color—light is primally soothing; if you don’t believe me, turn off your toddler’s night light. Something in us is reborn with the return of the light; we are reacquainted with possibility, with resilience, with vision, when the light returns. For these reasons and more, an organization called Suicide or Survive uses the winter solstice and its message of hope to “give thanks for the year that’s been, to remember loved ones, and to shine a light for hope by lighting a candle for the year ahead.” Contrary to Strand’s beautiful poem, candles don’t light themselves, someone must light them. But from the perspective of the dark-enshrouded beneficiary of the light, it does seem as though the candle lights itself. We need each other to make the darkness comforting, and when we can do that for one another, joy does come in the morning.Thanks for reading, and remember to leave the light on…

Meister Eckhart, a German theologian born in the mid-13th century, once remarked that if the only prayer one ever uttered was “thank you,” that would be enough.  Eckhart reminds us of how important it may be to actually give voice to the feelings of gratitude that we so often are aware of only as a sensation or a feeling of gratification, satisfaction, relief, delight, self-worth, competence, or a generalized sense of  amour-propre.  These are the feelings we have witnessing the babble of infants, the happiness of our children, the sounds of sea gulls and a breath-taking ocean view, soft summer nights and the sounds of crickets and flashes of lightening bugs, comfortable communities and loving friends. It’s impossible to not feel gratitude at the recognition of life at its best. But where do we find gratitude when life isn’t at its best—an arguably more important task. Perhaps not surprisingly, Campbell has something to say about this as well. In a 1976  Parabola  magazine interview Campbell is quoted saying, “I’ve described in my books what I call the four main functions of myth […] The second is the cosmological function of relating us to the cosmos  as now known  in such a way that its mystery can be experienced,  that we can relate to it with gratitude ” (italics are mine). First, and this is extremely important, Campbell notes that the cosmological function relates us to the universe as we now know it; that somehow in the ongoing mytho-imaginal conceptualization of the universe, contemporary science and cosmological cartography have an important role to play. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, myth allows us to relate to the cosmos—the universe of all that exists, including everything that is in our lives and all that we presently experience—with gratitude. Finding and expressing genuine gratitude for everything we are experiencing is a tall order, a difficult thing to find within oneself in difficult times. And yet, finding gratitude in challenging times is an essential component that leads one to continue building the psychological quality called resilience. Resiliency is predicated upon a series of struggles—gratitude may be born of a single struggle—and a willingness to explore deeply for oneself the meaning of the impact of the events one faces and not dismiss or hurry through painful and often tragic situations by uttering the banal and insipid platitudes we all hear all too often in times of pain and tragedy. Gratitude results from being willing to sit with and slowly wander through, as best as one can, all the nuances of one’s life in this particular moment. I think it’s important to give voice to our gratitude, to say it aloud, or as Meister Eckhart put it, utter the prayer of thanks. It’s important to talk about gratitude even if only to ourselves, because as most of us have found, speaking about something, naming the experience, makes it seem more real. Words are magical that way. Witches and warlocks, for instance, cast spells via incantations, a word derived from the Latin word,  incantare , which means “to chant upon,” and suggests that words somehow have the ability to materialize image, power, and desire, among other familiar artifacts of magic. In the  Gospel of John  is the phrase, “The word became flesh…” and that suggests to me that words, quite literally, matter. I am grateful for your reading and your interest in the work of Joseph Campbell; thank you.

Our theme at the Joseph Campbell Foundation this month is gratitude. We are celebrating both Campbell’s ideas and works, and all of the people around the world who have brought their own particular genius to the ongoing relevance and understanding of mythology. As you may know, Campbell spent almost fifty years married to one of the pre-eminent dancers of the 20th Century, Jean Erdman. Together, they created the Theater of the Open Eye, a home for dance and theater pieces that celebrated the intersections of myth and the performing arts. We are thrilled to announce a brand new book from our publishing partners at New World Library : Ecstasy of Being , a collections of essays written by Campbell on mythology and dance.  It’s edited by Nancy Allison , a choreographer, dancer and longtime creative collaborator of Jean Erdman’s, who is the founding Artistic Director of J ean Erdman Dance .   As a former dancer, in gratitude to artists who keep myth alive in richly powerful ways, I’d like to share this excerpt from the chapter “The Jubilee of Content and Form": What do we learn? Well, we learn that over the entire inhabited world, in spite of many colorful and distracting variations of nomenclature and costumes, the episodes and personages of myth, legend, fairytale, and fable remain, and have remained throughout all time, essentially the same. Also we learn that these mysteriously constant personages and episodes are precisely those that have been upsetting or delighting us in our personal fantasies and dreams. Oedipus and Orestes, the Sun Bird and the Serpent are known not only to the scholar’s study but also to the lunatic asylum and the nightly pillow. Mythology, in other words, is not an outmoded quaintness of the past, but a living complex of archetypal, dynamic images, native to, and eloquent of, some constant, fundamental stratum of the human psyche. And that stratum is the source of the vital energies of our being. Out of it proceed all the fate-creating drives and fears of our lives. While our educated, modern waking-consciousness has been going forward on the wheels and wings of progress, this recalcitrant, dream-creating, wish-creating, under-consciousness has been holding to its primeval companions all the time, the demons and the gods. Apparently, then, the archetypal figures of myth undercut the rational interests of our conscious life, and touch directly the vital centers of the unconscious. The artist who knew how to manipulate these archetypes would be able to conjure with the energies of the human soul. For the symbols are as potent as they ever were. The artist who really knew their secrets might still play the magician—the priest of the potent sign—working marvels purging the community of its pestilential devils and bringing purity and peace. Only, we should tend to explain his effects in psychological rather than theological terms: the heavens and hells being now reinterpreted as chambers of the unconscious.And we should revere him no less than he was revered in the days of yore, when his poems conjured thunderheads and his dances moved the spirits of the soil.  (pp 18-19, The Ecstasy of Being) I hope that your "educated, modern waking-consciousness" has a chance to find this mythological power in the art that you encounter this week.

In  Anne of Green Gables , L. M. Montgomery wrote, “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” I understand her sentiment; oaks, maples, sumac are everywhere ablaze, the morning air is crisp enough to invigorate but not yet cold enough to drive one back inside. Animals are busy preparing for winter, preparations important enough that this time of year they don’t mind being watched by fascinated humans. Fall is beautiful everywhere I’ve ever experienced it. And yet, fall has always made me sad, made my hope a rather fragile thing, and therefore I relate more to Hemingway than to Montgomery, as he writes, “You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason” ( A Moveable Feast ). When cold rains continue to fall, one may well be comforted by the consoling power of myths. As you may already know, Joseph Campbell posited four explanatory functions of myth, the second of which is called the cosmological function, and it serves to illustrate and explain aspects of the natural world and, to some degree, the universe itself. For instance, a Huron legend tells of a deer and a bear who passed over the Rainbow Bridge and into the Sky Land where they fought. During a fierce and long battle, the bear’s flesh was torn by the sharp, cruel horns of the deer, and they both fled along the paths of the sky as the wolf arrived to break up the fight. As the deer ran, drops of the bears blood fell from his horns into the lower world turning the leaves of trees scarlet, yellow, crimson, and brown. The Huron say that each year the blood of the bear is once again thrown down from the sky onto the trees. The cosmological function of myth is an attempt to explain why the world is as it is, or perhaps more importantly, why we experience it as we do. To that end, the last of Campbell’s four functions is the psychological. Myths read through a psychological lens help us understand the unfolding of human existence, the challenge of living life with integrity, greater self-awareness, compassion, and community. When Hemingway wrote, “Part of you died each year when the leaves fell,” he is relating a psychological truth to a cosmological one; the death of hope, running out of time, a colder, darker world,  are all sentiments psychologically  apropos  to the fall season. Fall is a reminder that even the most beautiful, the most vibrant life ends. Life’s brevity, Autumn’s brevity--if these were not brief, would they be as beautiful? Autumn is a time of richness, of fullness, and it is the year’s last and loveliest reminder of just how beautiful this world is. Fall creates a kind of liminal space in which, nearly simultaneously, we must hold the whole of our own live’s most brilliantly colorful expressions as well as the knowledge that it will soon end--and it  always  ends too soon, and that it ends is right and proper and suitable for humankind. And such an awareness, coming I hope, before one’s brittle, shrunken, palsied leaf falls from the tree of life, is one of the last, and most meaningful realizations of a life lived following bliss.

Note: We continue our theme of gratitude this November, with an article written by former teacher and JCF Rights and Permissions wrangler, Michael Lambert. As we do, we thank all of the people who bring mythology to life around the world in creative ways, inviting people to engage their imaginations, creativity, and explore their sense of self as they do. Especially kids! Back in November of 2014, Bob Walter, President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, received an email from Meghan Stengel Gardner, inviting a representative of the Foundation to visit her Wizards & Warriors Camp , a program designed around Joseph Campbell’s concept of The Hero’s Journey®. She was introduced to the work of Joseph Campbell through the acclaimed PBS video series, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers. Bob handed it off to me since the camp is outside of Boston and I’m not that far away in Eastern New York. But life is full of details and this one slipped off the table and rolled under the couch. The universe, however, will not be denied its desires, so when I saw a post on a mythically oriented Facebook page I follow describing a summer camp program, with a picture of interestingly costumed kids, I clicked the link. Sure enough, Wizards & Warriors . I contacted Meghan, author of the Facebook post, and found that not only is she the founder of this camp program, but used to live in my neck of the woods and is good friends with people I know. Okay then. Road trip! I met Meghan outside Gann Academy in Waltham, Massachusetts, the summer home of Wizards & Warriors on a gray, drizzly August afternoon. Her passion for this work was immediately evident. She explained the basics of the program and took me on a tour of the facility, and wherever we went, we came upon costumed camp groups moving between activities. The costumes, it must be stated, are not Walmart quality rubber masks and nylon suits.  Meghan showed me the Logistics room, or the Command and Creation Center as she calls it, where costumes and props are stored and made and makeup is applied. Her daughter, Marin, a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art & Design, is the program’s costume artist and hand crafts much of what is worn by staff and campers. The campers, referred to as Heroes, at Wizards & Warriors actively participate in a mythic narrative that evolves day by day. There is no set script. Staff conference at the end of each day to determine where the story is going the next, as determined by the choices and actions of the campers that day. Consultants are utilized to ensure that the stories reflect accurately on the cultural traditions being expressed, and each year a different cultural tradition is researched and embedded into the narrative. Thus, the story seamlessly continues, year after year. Half of the stories utilized have to be from outside the European tradition. But it’s in the details that this program proves itself. “We hire teachers, we call them Guardians,” Meghan told me, “who design our story-based curriculum where the Heroes learn Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Literature, Latin, History, and much more in order to succeed in the adventures. We have seven year olds who can recite and demonstrate Newton's Laws of Physics because that's what's necessary so you can learn your first level of spells.” New spells have to be carefully researched and science based; if approved, they are added to the Book of Spells. “Heroes” record their adventures in The Book of Deeds kept in the Library. The stories now go back seven years. Though the work of Joseph Campbell is a primary inspiration for Wizards & Warriors, you don’t see his name very much. “Follow your bliss” is not posted on the walls. But you will find his ideas embedded within the DNA of the philosophy of this program’s design. A Hero, the campers are told, is a person of courage, honor and compassion. Then they are directed to define these words for themselves. “Our ‘Library,’ Meghan says, “is actually a Greater Spirit in our world, who bestows upon the Heroes clues about the stories as well as helping them engage in a discussion around how they can take what they are learning about at camp and apply it to their life outside of camp.  This is what we call ‘Transference.’” “Wonderment,” a new application in the planning stage, will consist of an online community to help the Heroes transfer their new skills into the rest of their lives, and share with each other the changes they experience both in themselves and in their outside communities. I left Meghan where we’d met. Though there was still a light drizzle, the sky to the west promised a finer day for my drive home. I promised Meghan I would share my experience with my colleagues at the Joseph Campbell Foundation, and how impressed I was that this program that speaks directly to, and fosters, the creative imagination of children in no way rides the coattails of Joseph Campbell’s notoriety. What she’s accomplished, it seems to me, is to have done what Campbell would want us to with his work: synthesize it into our own work which puts us in service to our passion to the fulfillment of not only ourselves, but to the larger community.

If you peel back the frivolous mask of a holiday that inspires $8.4 billion in candy; decorations; and costumes sales for little kids, grownups looking for a moment of escapist fantasy, and long-suffering pets; you’ll find a swirling memories of much a darker, more magical dancing with ideas of life and death. Since the Iron Age (about 600-800 BC) Celtic cultures have been marking Samhain, the end of the year at the death of summer, and an opening, if only for a day, into the world of the ‘other,’ of long-dead ancestors, lost loved ones, and the energies that sit outside of bright daylight’s logical understanding. Imagine, for a moment, living in a culture when the last harvests, cattle driven down from high summer pastures and slaughtered for winter, mark the end of the abundance of summer, and the cold darkness of winter lies ahead. It is a liminal time – liminal from the Latin for ‘threshold’ – a doorway into how humans wrestle with mortality, and both our fascination with and dread of death. Roman writers describe wild festivities (as they often did about the Celts and Gauls; pursed-lip morality about pagans being a fairly common thread in Roman writings) around the ritual bonfire.  What captures my imagination about their writings about Samhain, though, are the descriptions of Celts donning the skins of slaughtered livestock as central to their rituals, to honor, propitiate, and connect with those animals. With this image, the costumes of a contemporary Halloween suddenly seem to have far richer meaning, far deeper than the mumming and guising traditions of Celtic countries and their offspring, our fairly benign, secular, “trick or treat” nights out along suburban streets. In “ Art as Revelation ,” Campbell describes the work of “sympathetic magic” – evoking and invoking the spiritual world by adopting its personae. He quotes Abbe Henri Breuil, describing Paleolithic cave art:   “hese are hunting or ceremonial masks, or either ghostly or mythical beings. The man with a mammoth’s head, the one with a bird’s head, and all the other masked beings, here or elsewhere, are perhaps hunters in disguise, ready to start on their expeditions. More probably they are members of the tribe performing some magic rite, or mythical beings from whom favors must be requested and who must be conciliated. (114)   When we don the costumes of the mythical world, we imaginally enter into a relationship with the archetypal energies we are wearing. As I muse on how Stone Age peoples and Iron Age Celts sought connection with this magic, I find myself wondering if we are as far removed from this instinct as we assume. As you slip on a costume or mask this Hallows Eve, what sympathetic magic are you conjuring? Could you be inviting or perhaps protecting yourself from the archetypal energies you are wearing?

The work of Joseph Campbell continues to resonate with people all over the world. Currently, fifteen of Campbell’s books are published in overseas markets covering twenty-three languages. Of particular note is the success of The Hero with a Thousand Faces , which has been translated into seventeen languages, with an eighteenth, Vietnamese, in production. Indeed, it recently came to our attention that Hero was referenced in a verse by the Russian rapper Oxxxymiron during a “rap battle” with another artist1. According to our Russian publisher, Vitaliy Stepanov at Piter Press, Oxxxymiron rapped about Hero for fully five minutes. The video of the event was released on YouTube in early August, and has already accumulated over 19 million views. According to The Calvert Journal, The Hero with a Thousand Faces “immediately sold out on Ozon, one of Russia’s biggest online stores." Joseph Campbell said, "I consider the artist the one who has to introduce us to the promised land in our own land, here and now. It's his vision that brings to us the vision of the spiritual radiance that shines through the world, which many of us do not see.” By using his art to bring the universal idea of the Hero’s Journeytm to his audience, Oxxxymiron is doing more than just helping sales, he is fulfilling that purpose. The work of Joseph Campbell shows us how our cultural differences can reveal our similarities, the essential elements shared by all human beings. While sales of foreign translations help the Joseph Campbell Foundation continue its work, it’s the spread of Campbell’s ideas that makes this work exciting. Especially today, when we seem besieged by turmoil, Campbell’s message of personal fulfillment through the hero’s selfless service to his or her bliss for the betterment of the community gives all of us hope that the world can be united through our common humanity. And that message is being read in Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Spanish, Polish, Korean and many more languages. Sincerely, Michael Lambert Rights & Permissions The Joseph Campbell Foundation

Tomorrow, Wednesday, September 20th,  Rosh Hashana  begins at sunset.  Rosh Hashana  is the Jewish New Year marks the time for inner reflection, atonement, and renewal.  Rosh Hashana  literally means head (or beginning) of the year, and on this day it is a common practice to attend High Holy Day services, during which one has ample opportunity to listen to the plaintiff wail and poignant sigh of the  shofar —a hollow, polished ram’s horn—and participate in a  Tashlich  (or  Tashlikh ) ceremony in which one symbolically casts off one’s sins by throwing bread crumbs into a naturally running body of water. The tradition underlying  Rosh Hashana  is that it marks the anniversary of the creation of Adam and Eve and the important role humanity plays in God’s creation. More secularly,  Rosh Hashana  marked the beginning of the economic year—the beginning of harvest season—in the ancient agrarian societies of the Middle East. Some foods, rich in symbolism and mentioned in the Talmud, such as dates, black-eyed peas, leeks, spinach, and gourds, are traditionally eaten during  Rosh Hashana . Other foods like pomegranates, apples dipped in honey, lamb, fish, and new fruits are often included in traditional meals as well. Everything that will occur in the coming year is decided on  Rosh Hashana , which is not simply the new year, for  Rosh Hashana  is also known as the day of judgment. Now, this may seem strange as one might think an omniscient, omnipotent creator could set up a universe that didn’t need renewal every year, or need to be reminded to return his focus and attention to his creation. YHWH, in fact, created an opportunity for human beings to collaborate on the creation of the world, and that through renewed intention we essentially co-create the world with Him. If the world exists another year, it is because believers demonstrate sufficient enthusiasm and commitment to making the world  and  ourselves anew; in this moment of the new year and its new beginnings, one has the opportunity to discard old judgments, offload obsolete perspectives, rectify mistakes and essentially discover that one has a blank slate on which to write new values and a new vision that may serve to guide the rest of our lives.  Yom Kippur , the day devoted to spiritual cleansing, the reparation of wounds inflicted upon others and making amends for the mistakes of the previous year, comes only a week later. I think that  Yom Kippur , the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, coming only a week into the new year is an indication that what we are being judged upon is not our actions, but rather, the genuine, earnest, heart-felt intentions and the depth of commitment to the revisioning and the revaluing we bring into our own individual conscious awareness. There is an ethical argument that states that actions are best evaluated by the actor’s intent rather than the action’s consequences. For instance, it may be true that people who intend to do harm will eventually succeed, but what makes them culpable, or even evil, is their desire to harm others more so than their actual actions undertaken to that end. Despite the fact that Dr. Johnson thought hell was paved with good intentions, given that we have so little control over the consequences of our actions, and given that so many among us seem to look for opportunities to belittle, hate, and hold power over others, well, I just think a world filled with good intentions would be paradise. Thanks for taking the time to read this MythBlast.

Like many Americans, I spent the day yesterday dancing between celebrating Labor Day and, well, laboring. I was editing an interview I did a couple of weeks ago with dance icon Twyla Tharp for a radio show I host, and her approach to art got me thinking about the stories that sit in the background about work. At one point in our conversation, Twyla resisted being defined as an artist, saying, “Don’t call me an artist! I’m a worker. I’m a working person – don’t I go in and pound and hammer nails?” Her point was to shake up the assumption that creativity is a gift that we are granted, that making dance is somehow more glamorous or genius-touched than any other sort of making, in an effort to help me (and listeners) understand that the barriers we construct between art and the rest of our lives are both artificial and destructive. And she wanted to make a point that she has stressed throughout her career: that discipline is the most important element of a successful life. She echoes, I think, one of the foundational myths in American culture, our deep mythos of the American Dream: a vision that if you work hard and well enough, you can succeed at the things that matter to you. It is a deeply democratic myth, one that suggests that fortunes of birth, or luck, or having or lacking particular resources are less important than what each of us bring to the fire of our own lives. It is, in many ways, deeply optimistic. It connects, I think, to Campbell’s ideas of following one’s bliss – that if you head onto the path that you must forge, life will open up for you. Like his working of bliss, however, the American Dream myth is easy to oversimplify. While it is seductive to imagine that following your bliss will make life easy, it is actually is often very hard work, and from moment to moment, often not particularly blissful. Hard work is truly hard – the Greeks intuited this with the disabled maker, Hephaestus, god of crafts, and with Ponos, son of Eris (strife), brother of Algos (sorrow), Lethe (forgetfulness),  Limos (starvation), and Horkus (curses for false oaths). Hardly an easy set of boon companions! However, with that reminder, I think that there is something oddly relieving about remembering the pains of hard work, even as we go after our bliss; reminding us that ease, while worth loving in its own right, isn’t always what awaits us when we toil away at crafting a life that has meaning to us and the world. Perhaps discomforts are less important if we can find labor that helps us do that, rather than simply get, from the words of a song from my childhood, boney fingers from working our fingers to the bone. As you labor on this day after Labor Day, are you laboring towards your bliss?

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.