“I think there is an inherent wisdom-it's obvious at every level of the Universe; but I don't understand it, and I would be reluctant to define or limit it to any one idea or image. I try to avoid objectifying it. I'm just trying to trust it.”
Sister Miriam MacGillis.
You can listen to this edition podcast style above.
“Disorder is a kind of cheap trick to mimic the psyche’s desire for initiation. When it fails to be ritually provided, we try to compensate by creating the mayhem without the magic.”
—Martin Shaw
Unstructured chaos in other words can lead to deep woundings of the soul…
So…
“Call it the implicate order, or holomovement; anti-structure; liminality; the mandorla; the collective unconscious; the crossroads; the seat of the soul; the void; the wound; the abyss; the sole/soul gap; undifferentiated chaos; prima materia; call it whatever you like! It isn't nice, it doesn't fit, it shouldn't be allowed, and it doesn't belong; it is Otherness—and the language of Otherness is myth.”
—Daniel Deardorrf
So in times of “undifferentiated chaos” (which can last for years) “Otherness” can manifest itself and seat itself deeply in the deep self, and when it does we have to turn to story, we have to turn to myth.
But what myths, especially when it comes to men?
“In rewilding the myths of the masculine, we must understand that myths were originally situated in particular ecosystems. Just as mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of underground mycelia, so are myths the aboveground manifestations of specific ecologies. Myths are momentary eruptions of beings that have been growing for millennia belowground.“
—Sophie Strand
Which then took me to a favourite poem by Robert Duncan, Rites of Passage: I
“The damp submissive grass
now stirs from sleep,
now turns in every
green blade grown
alert
with listening.”
So, whilst chaos is natural and inevitable, we need ritual to contain it and release its hidden benefits, and one way of holding that paradox is myth, and for me, the myths that are best capable of doing that are not heroic but ‘ecological’ in nature, ones that can make our deep selves listen like an alert blade of grass.
Sunday musings, with some of my favourite teachers!
If anyone else has read, in particular, Daniel Deardorff, and would like to set up a study group, let me know, I sense it’s a terrain best explored with company.
I wish you well!
Will
PS - Fenland Musings will be all about Chaos this month, in Part 4 of the Mythology of Dance. I can’t wait to share what I’ve uncovered. So I hope you tune in on Thursday, May 30th.
Will, you were up early in Suffolk! Good for you, May goes so quickly.
I read Martin Shaw on Sundays, he reliably elicits response, but I do not understand his pitch on 'order', 'disorder', though I try to imagine it in the rising distress you can see in a child under particular stressors.
Likewise, Deardorrf, what drew his lumping of categories under 'otherness'? I have met the void, which had me running for cover, and once, a little differently seen the world with 'the rainbow hoop' withdrawn. This had me wondering just now about the identity of the horror visited on The Hall in the poem 'Beowulf', and has me turning to the intro of Seamus Heaney's translation of the poem, and I am starting to read this carefully, perhaps for the first time.
Lovely Will! Would always join in any of your groups. Bless you 🙏❤️