After more than two years of the Covid Pandemic, the long war in Ukraine, and monthly mass killings, we long to go back to the ways things used to be: When there were no masks, we enjoyed large collective gatherings, the price of gas was affordable, and children were safe in their schools. Going back to what is called “normal” is what many are longing for. Michael Meade advises us that we must break the spell of normalcy itself and we must accept the presence of uncertainty. However, the good news is that with every ending there is a new beginning. This deep dialogue explores the collective rite of passage we are experiencing and how using the wisdom of myths gives us a roadmap to the renewal of life itself. Meade says, ”When nothing else makes sense, Myths make the most sense… At the first level (the literal, material, logical, measurable world) people are forgetting the deep wisdom, they fall out of awareness. [The second world] drops into the psychological level which connects the inner with the outer. And if [wisdom] isn’t found and captured, [we must] drop into the mythological level… When nothing else is working, myth tends to have the answers that are missing… Stories bring us back the kind of living wisdom that is part of the natural inheritance of the human soul, and always has been… The mythological expands beyond the psychological and includes the spiritual, the power of imagination, and the connections to the deep archetypes that are the patterns that everybody keeps living out…The earth is trying to show us how to be. Myths are trying to show us how to be like the earth, the earth is trying to show us how to be part of this life-death renewal process.”
