Click here to listen to Joyful Participation in the Sorrows of the World in the season 2 archives on buzzsprout
“Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.” Joseph Campbell
A lot has changed in a mere two weeks and I hope that you are safe and healthy.
In the recent podcast about Loki and the quantum cosmos, I suggested that we need to use our ability to question and cultivate a new state of openness. I received requests to talk more about this “openness,” which led me to consider these words from Joseph Campbell.
There is a connection between this wisdom and the old stories, one’s sense of belonging to the world, and the ability to live this paradox of joy and sorrow. Here is my attempt to knit them together for you, offered with the wish that you find some inspiration and encouragement here.
The need for physical distance compels us to spend more time at home and perhaps alone, yet we have technologies like the podcast to connect with each other.
Take good care of yourself.
Transcript for “Joyful Participation in the Sorrows of the World”
00:00 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and why myth matters to our lives today. I’m your host and personal mythologist Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.
00:30 Well, a lot has changed in a mere two weeks. Wherever you are, I hope that you are safe and healthy and doing all that is prudent to remain so. A heavy rain fell here yesterday in my corner of the Mojave desert, so this morning I went for walk to see the effects of it, to be with the joy of the plants who received some much needed moisture. I stopped by a creosote bush.
01:12 This is a place that I’ve walked many times and I’ve stopped in this spot before and yet this morning, when I looked down, I saw some bones. Not sure if it was a coyote, seems like it probably was…these bones that had been buried and were now revealed in the aftermath of the rain. This reminded me of the phrase from Joseph Campbell, “Joyful participation in the suffering of the world.” He said that our job, our role, was joyful participation in the suffering of the world. This is what I want to talk about today.
02:04 This is our starting point. In the last podcast, I talked about Loki, chaos, and the quantum cosmos. The story of Loki, I said, was a story about the futility of our controlling the large changes that sweep through life, and a story about the inherent necessity of events that often appear to us as a total loss. Necessary because endings and beginnings are two sides of the same coin and neither is possible without the other. Life isn’t possible without the constant, mysterious exchange between life and death, between form and emptiness. This is a process that is taking place in our own bodies 24/7, all of the time. And it is a process that’s taking place in everything that we perceive.
03:12 What we can hope for then, as participants in this process, is renewal. We can hope for the perpetuation of this cycle in actions that include us and what we love in this world, and do what we can to support that possibility. This is a position that is new and strange, I suspect, for many of us. A position of passionate engagement and detachment, that is letting go of expectations about outcomes and resisting the temptation to predict the future, while being moved to act out of love for what is. Like Ram Dass said, “Be here now.” Breathe. Take a walk, Call a friend. Savor a meal, knowing that you are in every moment a bundle of beginnings and endings, fueled by them, living as a result of them.
04:24 Joseph Campbell said that this awesome and awful mystery, these beginnings and endings, the cycle of everything which we commonly call “the relationship between life and death,” is the central problem or experience that mythology is meant to address. Our myths offer us a range of explanations and possibilities, from acceptance to denial. And many of them, over time in Western culture, have been used to distract us from the truth of our complete enmeshment, our dependence upon the world, of our need for all of the others, visible and invisible and even of each other as fellow human beings. The move from reciprocity to “resource” has led to a devaluing and disconnect that is, in my view, the soul sickness that plagues Western society.
05:36 I want to share a poem that Meister Eckhart wrote centuries ago. He was a Christian mystic who lived back in the 13th and early 14th centuries, and he wrote this poem called “When I Was a Forest.”
“When I was the Stream, when I was the forest,
when I was still the field, when I was every hoof,
foot, fin and wing, when I was the sky itself,No one ever asked me, Did I have a purpose?
No one ever wondered was there anything I might need.
For there was nothing I could not love.It was when I left all we once were that the agony began.
That the fear and questions came. And I wept. I wept.
And tears I had never known before.So I returned to the river. I returned to the mountains.
Mesiter Eckhart 1260-1328 ce
I asked for their hand in marriage again. I begged. I begged
to wed every object and creature.
And when they accepted,
God was ever present in my arms.”
06:58 We see how long we have been dealing with this in Western culture by the age of this poem by Eckhart, and yet I read it to you today because he speaks of returning. Yes, many of us are plagued by this soul sickness of disconnect. And yet each of us is in possession of the cure. We can re enter the world now with imagination and heart. I believe that the old stories can help us do this, as can the world, which is waiting for us like prodigal children.
07:40 Now the old myths and the stories, like the fairy tales I often tell, are based in the truth of our connectedness and belonging, of the intricate web that is life, material and psychic. Some of them speak of it directly in the metaphors of gods and prayers, but you can find it in the stories of heroes and the miller’s daughter, in calls to various forms of greatness, and the help that appears in a myriad of forms, from fairy godmother to valiant horse, to oak tree or queen bee. You can find the story of our belonging in “happily ever after,” and the rewards bestowed upon those who are kind, generous or brave.
08:28 You can hear it in the many stories about the cycle of life itself, whether that is Persephone returning with the gift of spring or the prince riding into a sleeping kingdom on the pre-ordained day, who happens to be in the right place at the right time to wake the princess and bring the kingdom new life. You can see these stories as invitations simply waiting for your acceptance through imagination and feeling. And the gift of accepting those invitations is a new sense of belonging, of connection to the whole scheme.
09:08 It’s that connection that makes joyful participation in the suffering of the world possible. Now, in the last podcast, I said that the ability to question is a powerful tool and that for it to work, we need to cultivate a new state of openness. Several of you asked me to say more about this new state of openness and well, this whole podcast is a response to that request. But let me attempt to summarize what I meant by that. New openness to all that life is, good and bad, easy and difficult. A new openness to your beautiful, mysterious enmeshment in this place and time. Openness to the way that you are necessary, needed and supported, and to the fragility, that is the transitory nature of our daily round.
10:15 Cultivating this kind of openness and asking questions from this place leads to a very profound inquiry, one that can enable you to dismantle the limits that you place on your vision and understanding of life. I found a poem by Rilke recently that seems to me to speak to the tension between the daily life that we’re conditioned to lead, and our belonging and the awareness of the fragility, of that constant cycle of beginnings and endings that is the nature of our existence. It’s called “I Am the Rest Between Two Notes” and you can find it in The Book of Hours. This translation is by Robert Bly.
I Am the Rest between Two Notes
My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me: I stand before it like a tree:
But I am only one of many mouths
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.
I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because death’s note wants to climb over –
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
They stay here trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.
Rainer Maria Rilke
12:01 And the song goes on beautiful. Now, lest there be no storytelling at all in this particular podcast, I want to share a small piece with you from a novel titled “Sexing the Cherry” by Jeanette Winterson. We are blessed with many artists and writers who are working in the mythic realms, and Winterson is definitely one of them. On the back of this novel, The New York Times describes this particular book as “marvelous and horrific, the mythic and the mundane overlap and intermingle in this wonderfully inventive novel,” and I do recommend it to you. It’s pretty interesting and funny in a dark away.
12:53 The book is an exploration of time and nature, and a large part of it is set back in the 17th century in England, so I’ll give you a tiny little bit of background to context this piece I’m going to read for you. During that time, there were very destructive and frightening wars going on between the men who would be kings, often disguised in the competing ideologies of Catholicism and Protestantism. During this time, also, Europe was suffering from waves of the bubonic plague. So the civil war that Winterson refers to is an historic struggle over the English throne. Here are Winterson’s words:
13:58 “At first, the Civil War hardly touched us. Opinions were high, and there were those, like Preacher Scroggs and Neighbor Firebrace, who would have taken any opportunity to feel themselves above the common crowd. But it was a quiet enough affair, local battles and the Roundhead mob sometimes descending on a lordly house and claiming it for themselves in the name of God. There was no real feeling that the king would not win as he had always won, as kings have always won whomever they fight. ”
14:34 “I like a fight myself and enjoyed baiting Neighbor Firebrace. Indeed I sorely missed his crooked face while I was at Wimbledon. With everyone in accord, what merriment is there?”
14:48 “At Wimbledon we were sure that at any moment Queen Henrietta would return with allies from France or Italy or Spain and sweep away the snivelling Puritans dressed in starch. But she found no allies. Well-wishers in plenty, but no allies. And the navy was against the King and controlling the ports and watching the seas for any sign of help.”
15:14 “When the King’s men came to the house and told us stories of “King Noll” as they parodied Cromwell, smashing the beautiful glass in our churches and closing up every place of distraction so that men and women might have nothing to occupy them but the invisible God, we grew to hate what had only been a joke.”
15:37 “I went to a church not far from the gardens. Acountry church famed for its altar window where the Lord stood feeding the five thousand. Black Tom Fairfax, with nothing better to do, had set up his cannon outside the window and given the order to fire. There was no window when I got there and the men had ridden away.”
16:03 “There was a group of women gathered round the remains of the glass which colored the floor brighter than any carpet of flowers in a parterre. They were women who had cleaned the window, polishing the slippery fish our Lord had blessed in his outstretched hands, scraping away the candle smoke from the feet of the Apostles. They loved the window. Without speaking, and in common purpose, the women began to gather the pieces of the window in their baskets. They gathered the broken bread, and the two fishes, and the astonished faces of the hungry until, their baskets overflowed as the baskets of the disciples had overflowed in the original miracle. They gathered every piece, and they told me, with hands that bled, that they would rebuild the window in a secret place. At evening, their work done, they filed into the little church to pray, and I, not daring to follow, watched them through the hole where the window had been.”
17:12 “They kneeled in a line by the altar, and on the flag floor behind them, invisible to them, I saw the patchwork colours of the window, red and yellow and blue. The colours sank into the stone and covered the backs of the women, who looked as though they were wearing harlequin coats. The church danced in light. I left them there and walked home, my head full of things that cannot be destroyed.”
17:43 What I hear in that bit from Winterson’s novel, is a scene in a time not unlike ours, a time in fact, with parallels much greater than I realized. when I first read it. I have returned to this scene in this book a number of times because I’m so moved by the actions of the women. They have a deep love for something, something beautiful. And while they can’t protect it from destruction, they can come together to reassemble it. Of course, the window will never be the same. I’m sure that it will show the mark of the repair and yet, it is restored through their shared love of it.
18:36 I’m also struck by the metaphor of the window itself. Now you may have mixed feelings about the content of the window, which is the story of Jesus feeding the multitudes with only two fish. But no matter your relationship to Christianity as an ideology or a doctrine, it is a symbol of the connectedness between human beings and the divine, between human beings and that great sustaining mystery, and a story of how what appears to be so little, can actually provide so much nourishment.
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
19:29 Winterson’s narrator leaves that church dancing in light, to walk home with her head full of things that cannot be destroyed. What could that be, in a time when it seems that everything is vulnerable and so much could be lost? Well, the experience of seeing those women come together, of their dedication to preserving something beautiful, something that they loved, and to be part of such an act, whether as witness or participant. This is a gift that we can all give each other these days.
20:15 So if our call right now is to joyful participation in the sorrows of the world, and if the ability to do so is supported by a feeling of belonging, in connection in the broadest sense possible, how can we cultivate that? As I’ve suggested, turning to the old stories and reading them or listening to them with your ear cocked for the ways that they illustrate belonging, is one way. I’ve shared a couple of poems with you in this podcast, and the poets, many of them, speak of this often. I’d also like to share with you a little experiment.
21:06 This past weekend I did a program in the Joshua Tree National Park that had to do with reentering the world, with reconnecting to our true place in the world. So I want to share one of those experiments with you. It’s very simple. It involves a little shift in perspective. Try going outside and finding something to give your complete attention. It might be the ground. It might be a cloud. It might be a bird song. It might be a plant. Wherever you are, there is something to which you can give your attention. Take the time to be with it and to note, maybe to write down, its qualities. Is it hard? Is it soft? Is it big? Is it small? Is it quiet? Is it loud? Is it green, is it brown? Allow yourself to investigate those qualities as thoroughly as you can, but do it without reference to simile. Do it without saying it’s “like’ anything else.
22:28 Don’t describe it in terms of anything else and do this for as long as you’re able. See what effect this kind of attention and observation has on you. I’m not going to describe or predict an outcome for you, of this a little experiment. I merely suggest that you try it and maybe try it a number of times, and see what happens.
22:58 And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth matters. If you’re new to Myth Matters, I invite you to head over to the Mythic Mojo website, where you will find information about the podcast, a transcript to this episode, and links to different platforms that you can use to listen to it.
23:21 If you visit the website, you will also find information about various ways that you can work with me, one on one, to use stories to reframe, shift your consciousness, make life changes, and explore the mythic dimension of your life. If you click on the “Consult’ tab in the navigation bar on the website, you’ll find more details.
23:47 I want to thank you so much for tuning into Myth Matters and for your support of this podcast in whatever form that takes. Please spread the word and share Myth Matters with other people in your life. If you have the means to support the financial part of this podcast, you can do that by joining Myth Matters on Patreon. Your $5 or $10 a month contribution goes a very long way for me. There is a link to Myth Matters on Patreon on the Mythic Mojo website.
24:22 Things are changing very quickly these days, my friends. I urge you to take good, good care of yourself. Thank you so much for joining me. Please tune in next time, and until then, happy myth-making, and keep the mystery in your life alive.
Links that you might find useful:
This quote from Joseph Campbell and many other valuable insights can be found in “A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living,” available as an eBook on the Joseph Campbell Foundation website
