myth

Quote for Today: Michael Meade

/ katmcdaniel / Leave a comment

There will always be the facts of life to contend with, and there are times when the facts can become overwhelming. Yet, there is a poem at the heart of things and a mythic story in the heart of each of us. At certain times it is the poetry of life and the mythic imagination of the soul that become necessary in order to heal the wounds inflicted by an excess of reason or an overuse of force. When we unfold the story wound within our souls and untie the knots within us, we add presence to the world and contribute to the spirit of life in a specific and authentic way.

― Michael Meade, The Genius Myth

Image by Gérard JAWORSKI from Pixabay

Quote for Today: Pat Barker

/ katmcdaniel / Leave a comment

Chrysalis(Pupa)_of_a_Common_Crow_Butterfly_(Euploea_core)

Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem for the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

— Pat Barker, Regeneration

Image: Chrysalis of a Common Crow Butterfly © Pon Malar with CCLicence

Quote for Today: Karen Armstong

/ katmcdaniel / Leave a comment

virgin_mary_religion_faith_christianity_christian_holy_religious-707075

 

We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a ‘resource.’ This is crucial, because unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet.

―Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

Public Domain Image via PxHere

Quote for Today: Julian Barnes

/ katmcdaniel / Leave a comment

road-405764_960_720.jpg

For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.

―Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
Public Domain Image via Pixabay

Quote for Today: C. S. Lewis

/ katmcdaniel / 2 Comments
children-while-they-play-725x483.jpg

The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.

―C.S. Lewis, “On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature”
image via publicdomainimage.com

Quote for Today: A. S. Byatt

/ katmcdaniel / Leave a comment

14886311949_f53494f32d_z

The black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge. This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot be explained and do not explain; they are neither creeds nor allegories. The black was now in the thin child’s head and was part of the way she took in every new thing she encountered.
― A.S. Byatt, Ragnarok

Image: Hubble Looks at Light and Dark in the Universe © NASA Goddard Space Flight Center with CCLicense

Quote for Today: Chaim Potok

/ katmcdaniel / Leave a comment
office-1094825_960_720.jpg
In our time… a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.
―Chaim Potok, Davita’s Harp
Public Domain Image via Pixabay

Quote for Today: Italo Calvino

/ katmcdaniel / 1 Comment

IMG_2812

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. The narrator’s voice in the tribal assembly is not enough to relate the myth. One needs special times and places, exclusive meetings; the words alone are not enough, and we need a whole series of signs with many meanings, which is to say a rite. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words. A silent myth makes its presence felt in secular narrative and everyday words; it is a language vacuum that draws up words into its vortex and bestows a form on fable.
—Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature
Holy Ghost Panel, Horseshoe Canyon, Utah, USA, Katherine McDaniel, 2012

Quote for Today: Jonathan Safran Foer

/ katmcdaniel / Leave a comment

couple-915987_640

If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller’s felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.

―Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
Free public domain image via Pixabay