This morning I built a new altar for spring. Isn’t it pretty? And then I had the weirdest experience. I was in the middle of my PT appointment and things were going okay… I've been trying to do too much, as is my wont, but I think I was going to recover, and then Julia asked me what I do, and I started telling her about the intersection of storytelling and politics, and she answered that she feels so much despair about money and politics…
And my body went totally fucking bananas. Seizures all up and down my spine, down my left leg, up my left rib cage, the whole left side of me freaking the fuck out. It didn't calm down until suddenly, in the middle of us doing an exercise to try to rotate my hips to fix things, I started thinking about myth. On purpose. I thought: What is the antidote to this hopelessness about politics? And I thought Myth and down by my spasming ass, Julia said “Did you feel that? Something just changed here!”
And then tonight, while I was making dinner, I watched the latest episode of The Good Wife. "Dark Money" it was called. It was about our heroine doing what it takes to get elected, accepting the money even though she knows that the donor is a homophobic dickhead. I've seen enough campaigns to know that this is true, that people who mean well take bad money.
A voice in my says that there is something better. To my ears it sounds trite and small, but I think it is no coincidence that the change happened when I started thinking about myth. I don't know what that means, I am so tempted to try to say what the answer is right now...
But the other thing that happened today was that I was talking to Susan about the tasks in this story. The myth of Vassalissa’s initiation includes three tasks. Baba Yaga says that she can’t give Vassalissa the fire unless she works for it, so she has to do mythic things like find a million poppy seeds in a pile of dirt.
Not that this in going to be neat and tidy, but I do feel like I’m on Task 3, Navigating in the Dark, and Task 4 is Facing the Wild Hag, so I’ve been wondering about what that might look like. Poppy seeds and dirt? What? I made a list today. I told Susan about my list, which had mostly to do with teaching and writing and world change…And do you know what she said? “What about healing your body?”