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The Four functions of a living myth and the evening news
In The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, 1968, Joseph Campbell identified four major functions of a “living myth:” 1) ” To awaken and maintain in the individual an experience of awe, humility, and...
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Weekly Photo Challenge: Horizon
Bandon, Oregon, 2013 Elle est retrouvée. Quoi? – L’Éternité. C’est la mer allée Avec le soleil. – Arthur Rimbaud, 1872 Bandon, Oregon, 2011 It has been found again. What? – Eternity. It is the sea gone...
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101 Things that Made America
Apollo suit. NASA photo, Public Domain The Novermber, 2013 issue of The Smithsonian Magazine is devoted to 101 things that made America. The magazine lists 33 contributors who chose these items from...
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Delisting the Wolf – Your Help is Needed!
Morgan Mussell:If wolves are removed from Endangered Species protection, the day may soon return when there are none in the lower 48. I’ve worked with these magnificent creatures as a volunteer at the...
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Assurance: a poem by William Stafford and autumn photographs
Wawona, CA. November 2013 We were fortunate enough to be able to spend most of last week in Yosemite. Though all seasons are wonderful there, late fall is my favorite in the Sierras. It had recently...
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Heat and Air
Day 1 – a portion of the old ducts Here’s why I may be a bit light on blog posts for the next week and a half: we have an obsolete heat and air system and a lot of collapsed ducts. We also have a...
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Yule ~ The Beginner’s Guide To The Wheel Of The Year
Morgan Mussell:Just in time for the solstice, here is another of Lily Wight’s wonderful “Wheel of the Year” posts, with beautiful illustrations and commentary on the Celtic and Nordic stories...
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Wild Eating
This post isn’t really about food fights in school cafeterias – some of us have matured (a bit) since those days. Actually, the photo of John Belushi was a classic bait-and-switch, a ploy to draw you...
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Silence, Stillness
Wawona, Ca, Nov., 2017 If we have a bit of quiet time and pay attention at the turning of the year, we can feel a pause in the world and rest there. It’s easier to experience this in the natural world,...
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The White Snake – An Enigmatic Tale from the Brothers Grimm
Illustration for “The White Snake” by Walter Crane, ca. 1886, Public Domain I once had a professor who made an extensive study of world folklore and said the greatest predictor of success for a...
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Stories…again.
Pre-Columbian, Mexico. At Art Institute of Chicago. Public Domain. Yesterday, at the monthly breakfast meeting of the Sacramento Branch of the California Writer’s Club, someone asked what I blog about...
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An Avian Stray
The wounded magpie Last Friday afternoon, I came home from various errands to find a magpie with a broken wing in the back yard. Seeming dazed, it was swung its head back and forth, as if its vision...
View ArticleWho and What Divide Us?
Embed from Getty Images A Camp Fire evacuee plays with an abandoned dog, Chico, CA, Nov. 15 Daily updates on the deadliest fire in California history are almost too horrific to take in. The Camp Fire,...
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The War on Beauty
I was in grade school during the height of the cold war, the decade of duck and cover hydrogen bomb drills and Nikita Kruschchev pounding his shoe and promising to bury us. But what I feared most from...
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Cycles, Gyres, and Yugas, Part 3: Soul in a Dark Time
Edvard Munch, “The Lonely Ones,” woodcut, 1899 “the darkness around us is deep.” – William Stafford, 1960 “In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo...
View ArticleMovie Review: This Beautiful Fantastic
This 2016 movie, available on Amazon Prime, is described as a “modern fairytale,” and is one of the most enjoyable movies I’ve recently watched. Bella Brown, the quirky heroine, had an appropriately...
View ArticleJames Hillman – on Changing the Object of our Desire
Watching this video in which Hillman so clearly shines a light on the core issues of so many of our current crises, it is hard to realize he left us 2011. It makes what so often passes for journalism...
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The Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens
Path through the Woodland Garden “For me beauty is the primary proof of the existence of God. Beauty is sublime, transcendent, and fulfilling. It takes us to the very edge of our capacity for...
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