In Search of The New Myth

This week I am taking a break from the smoke in Southern Oregon. I joined friends at a cabin on the Russian River in Sonoma County, California where there is no smoke, but there is also no water in the river bed. The landscape is reliably as beautiful as ever, with or without water. But the absence of water does give me pause.

With the flooding on the east coast, and the drought in much of the west, I can see the next five years or so being dominated by movie titles like “Water Wars,” or “My Kingdom for a Glass of Water,” or “Chocolate for Water.”

If there's one thing that holds my sibling group together it's stories. Even though we’re related by blood, we are very different people, but we all appreciate stories, and stories have always united us. Lately I've been thinking about this power of stories in light of our polarized culture. What are the stories that will unite us?

Today my sister and I were bouncing back and forth the idea of “the new myth.” Ever since the late 1980s when Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers educated us on the “Power of Myth,” it was apparent that “Star Wars” had captured the collective unconscious (as measured in box office sales,) and had become the myth of our time. But many of us sensed this myth would need to change, if our planet and we as a human family were going to thrive. What is the new myth that will define the transitional era we are currently living through?

My sister mused that the old myth, with its good guys and bad guys, (as useful as it was for a time to explain our common experience,) now has new revelations from the realm of psychology to incorporate. Due in part to the work of people like Richard Schwartz, the idea of No Bad Parts has become more widely accepted. With all the different parts of ourselves welcome, each part having a positive intent, at least from its own worldview, what might be the implications for our collective?

What would that look like in a myth – no bad parts? The myth might include a process over a victory. It might include multi-dimensional actors, all having good and bad parts. It might even require a new way of communicating, that transcends the black and white binary of words.

This morning as I was waking up, nestled among the coastal redwoods towering hundreds of feet above my bed, I could hear them living. Their wisdom likely to be here long after humans, what I heard was something about our evolution. That basing ourselves in Goodwill for the whole is something our languages do not yet do. Instead of arguing over laws and legal systems that consider every possible logical contingency, what if we were all working toward an actual united cause? What is that uniting cause? What are the stories we now need to reveal that cause to us? This is a matter of “buy-in,” for lack of a better term. If we were all unquestionably bought in to the singular idea of human and planetary welfare, what could we accomplish with our glorious days upon this magnificent earth?

I would truly love to know your thoughts. Please communicate them with me as a comment on this Substack post rather than emailing me. You can do that by clicking the little word bubble just below my name, which is below the title of the email, which will take you to the Substack post to post a comment: