Why did I pick this myth? Why Bluebeard? It’s so creepy and strange and it has always scared me.
Why did I pick this myth?
I mean, I know how it started. It started with a client request. This great woman, who I’ve been working with for a while now... we’d worked another myth together, and she’d gone out and put the lessons into practice… and then at the end of last year, she came to me and said “I need a new myth.”
And I thought: Don’t we all?
This one we are living in … well. I was going to say that this one sucks ass. Which is true. But while I value saying the hard truth, I also believe in setting intention carefully and that doesn’t really describe the story I want to live right now.
So I will say this instead: this myth requires a change.
Both of them do.
I mean on the one hand we have the myth of Bluebeard, in which there’s this really weird dude (with strangely colored hair, not that we judge on appearances) and this young woman, who turns him down at first, but then gets seduced by money and position into marrying this guy, even though she just knows he’s not a good guy. And for a while, she enjoys the stuff, and life isn’t so bad. But then he heads off on a trip and hands her his huge key ring and while he’s gone she uses the one key she’s not supposed to use and opens the one door she’s definitely not supposed to open and there she finds all the dead bodies of the former wives, who also didn’t listen and did look.
Plus a whole bunch of old Woody Allen films.
Which brings us to the other hand, this myth which we living and are writing with our lives, where we have… pretty much the same shit. But at least we've opened the fucking door, no?
At the end of Bluebeard, the failed magician with the weird hair can’t hurt women anymore because he gets killed and his guts are thrown to the vultures. From the parapets.
Some mornings when I wake up and our failed magician has done 12 sick things before I’ve had coffee, this doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. Kidding! Totally kidding. In fact, I would like to go on the record and say that I am not up for scattering guts on the parapets. Or anywhere!. No gut scattering, no disemboweling, no solving violence with violence… This is a myth that requires a change.
I want a new myth.
That’s why I chose this myth. Because I want, I need a new ending to the same fucking story, and this is what I know about how to invent it together.
But now... now we are at the point in the story where we have turned the key. Now we are peeking around the corner. The candle gives a dim light, it is too early to see everything, but there is a smell in the air and something gleams in the corner. We are looking at the forbidden. It is terrifying; it is a relief. We can't see everything, but we are finally getting clear about who's house we've been living in.