Greetings Traveler,
Welcome to the archives of my lore... This is a place to craft my own mythology, flesh out ideas, sharpen my perspective and clarify my thoughts through the crystalline process of writing. All is subject to change, any resemblance to reality is pure coincidence. This first entry was started a few months ago and finished within the last few days. It’s a bit of a ramble on cosmology, the power of myth and the importance of cultivating the sacred fire of creation as a means to communicate the ineffable. My hope is that it stirs something in you, feel free to leave your thoughts below or contact me directly.
Let's just dive right in.
It is my (current but ever evolving) mythos that "I" am an eternal being that has chosen to live here on Planet Earth as a hybrid spirit/animal, for the purpose of transmuting collective suffering through a process of inner alchemy that accrues wisdom and hones my individual spirit while aiding in the evolution of planetary consciousness. I believe that condensing our spirits to a dimension constrained by time and duality provides the necessary friction which generates the energy required for this transformation process. Therefore, the embodied experience is of utmost importance and a spiritual practice must strike a balance between the rooted and the visionary.
As Carl Jung said: “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
I view my body as a genetic archive of all lived experience in the web of the human race, filtered down through a unique blend of ancestral blood, sweat and tears. I view it as a piece of incredible biotechnology specifically and uniquely suited for my consciousness, a diverse and massive ecosystem and network that acts as a kind of quantum node for “me” to exist in, temporarily.
Since childhood, I have carried a felt sense that spirit is contained, but not limited, by the physical body. Certain self dissolving experiences facilitated through trance states have affirmed and strengthened that feeling, but without a direct transfer of those experiential memories, how can we have a consensus on the nature of reality between us?
If that was already too much woo for you, then I suggest you stop here, this is not rationalist territory, we’re doing things.. *a bit different ‘round these parts* (tips hat). I make no claim on anything I say being provable or true at all. How do you prove a subjective experience of reality anyways? All I have are my memories, my experience of the present moment, and a vision of possible futures splayed out in front of me like shimmering rays of light. The best I can do is to convey something about that, in hopes that it resonates with others.
This is where myth enters the frame, where the expressions of archetypal forms channel universal truths through us. Truths that resonate in our beings and tremble in our bones. As a child, and I do not think myself unique in this, I was adept at world building, I spent my days imagining characters and stories and whole universes for them to play out in. I would live in these worlds and commune with the spirits and presences they evoked through the forests and beaches of the San Juan Islands.
As I grew older and spent more time in large metropolitan centers, our modern world began to squeeze the magic out of my life. I felt a distance with the childhood capacity to live immersed in myth. Music had always been my pathway to access those places, but that path became overgrown at the end of my 20s due to a number of coinciding emotional, physical and spiritual challenges. The magic was stripped from my life and all that was left was the bright and unforgiving clarity of pain and grief. My connection to music felt increasingly distant, but another impulse was quietly gaining power. This impulse lied beneath the music, a yearning to become a builder of worlds again.
What does this mean though? I mean practically, when do you fit in being a magical world builder between making breakfast, doing the dishes and everything else that keeps the fire of adult human life burning. I wrestled (and am still wrestling) with this question for a long time. The answer that is burgeoning is somewhat simple. Instead of trying to fit in the magic with the mundane, wrap the mundane in the magic. Which is, in my mind, to put it in its proper place.
As we can all attest, no core memories are of all the laundry that you've done or how well you cleaned the bathroom. In the worldview of life as an RPG, those are simply the daily tasks that we have to do to keep playing the game, but no one plays the game just to complete their dailies. If that's your jam, go for it, I won't stop you. In fact, no one will stop you. No one will stop you from accepting that the game of life consists of a cycle of working, getting paid, and spending that money on useless loot. But this acceptance is what keeps the project of late stage capitalism going.
That disembodying and stagnating force, fattened on a diet of greed and hubris, is the real antagonist of my story whose stage deserved to be set here. However, in my mythos (as in Tolkein’s), it is eclipsed by a larger benevolence that has divinely orchestrated the evolution of these opposing forces to become threshold guardians on our path of collective evolution. Testing our ability to wake up to our own divinity, these forces teach us of our place within the cosmic web of life as we become creators of worlds rather than those who endlessly consume, and in doing so, are themselves consumed.
That tangent aside, my point is this: allow aliveness into the everyday, bring ritual into your life, center the act of cultivating the magical fire of creation, and allow everything else to revolve around that. That is my current waypoint, and from what I can tell I’m still a ways away, but this map sure can be hard to read sometimes…
Just getting myself to the point of writing down these thoughts has taken years. I'm sitting on this veranda overlooking the pacific ocean in the 90 degree heat in El Salvador and so many choices, big and small, brought me here. Many of those choices were uncomfortable, but over time, listening to my heart, something clicked in me that the magic needed to be stirred from my own volition, that I was no longer a child without responsibility, that if I wanted to really play this game, I would need to get up and play it. Many times, we do not choose to commit to what we truly should be doing with our lives until our choices become limited, often through great loss and pain.
Perhaps I'll write more on those painful experiences in the future and what they continue to teach me, but suffice it to say: I needed the magic taken away so that I could appreciate how much I wanted it, how much I wanted to be in right relation with my creative spirit, my muse, and my own inner world.
So I come to that place today with humility and gratitude, I honor my name and all that lives and passes through me: Ronan, Nettle, Lychen and many others; nature spirits, elves, fairies, human and non human forms whose names have been forgotten or have yet to be learned.
Are these just ‘parts’ of my psyche or archetypal emanations from the collective unconscious? Was I really speaking to angels as a child or did I just have an active imagination? Depends on how you look at it. Does it matter to me? Not really. What matters is what you make of it, what matters is music, dance, art and storytelling. It’s all essentially the same thing, an unfolding of something fundamentally true channeled through the specific and appropriate vessel for that truth. As such, I will not limit myself to one medium to channel these voices, as it does not feel appropriate to the shapeshifting spirit that I am. But here, I will write, and through that, I will persevere to know myself ever more deeply and hopefully it will inspire you, my dearest other, to find out what lurks and frolics in the hidden places of your mind, body and soul.
-r
may 2024 - atami, el salvador
Reading this is just what I need as my mind floats for hours of walking on this mythical path called “The Camino”. There are so many beautiful souls unhitched from tedium seeking light and clarity on this journey. In the day we cross the curve of the earth to the western shore. At night we sleep and dream in common shelters. Blessings and Imagination thrive.
To spiraling upward ❤️