Dancing with the Dragon
On tricksters, tension, and the practices that help us dance wave after wave
The Stakes and Why We Need Maps
There is a lot of grief, fear, anger and overwhelm in rupture, chaos and collapse times.
We do not have to collapse in times of collapse.
We need bridges. Maps. patterns. Cycles. Community. Art. Songs. Nourishment. Hands to hold. Hands to make art with. Hands to write poems. Bodies to stand for what we believe in. To dance with.
Heart-minds to Imagine, inspire and lift consciousness.
The stakes are high. These times are sticky, drenched in devouring tales. Tales that want to devour what is good, what is holy, what is sacred, what is whole, what is kind. We are navigating massive tensions. Straddling great divides.
A few things in my toolbelt -compass points for my map: Mythos. Writing. Dance. Song. Art.
What is in your medicine bundle? What grounds you? Roots you? Moves the stories through you?
Why Mythos? Because the only war is the war against the imagination (I wrote about this last week ) thank you Diane DiPrima for these wild holy words. All other Wars are subsumed in it.
Mythos -the imaginal -archetypes - help me see the larger patterns and shapes of initiatory cycles and ordeals. Descent and return. Creation/destruction. Apocalypse/Emergence.
Writing, braided with mythos —that is spelunking into my creative cauldron, navigating memory, story, place, body, archetype, symbol and Story helps me sort, discern and see multiple perspectives and truth. Keeps my mind pliable. Flexible. Fluid. Helps me navigate to the interior. Spiraling to the center at the center. Contact with Divine. Inside and out. Psyche. Soul. Knowing. Wisdom.
We need imagination now, more than ever, in these upheaval times. Mythos, as described by Joseph Campbell, helps to make sense of this greater beast of the story of Life/Death/Life. Rites of passage are made for these times. Thresholds are everywhere. Grief is a doorway. Fear is a doorway. Anger is a doorway. The rising stories are doorways. Cross the threshold, but stay true to your map. Deepen in it.
If you don’t have one clearly laid out for you find one. Practice it. Follow what makes you come alive. What gives you Lustre. Follow what nourishes you. Stitch it to your marrow. Embroider it to your heart.
This substack weaves a few threads of inspired maps -threads of the maps that weave my living map. Lineage systems and streams that I drink from in order to nourish and sustain and dance the wave after waves.
I chose this piece of art below -because it feels like a map -a map for howling. A map for re-architecting the stories. Re-writing/Riting them. One paintbrush, one pen, one voice, one body at a time.
Artist: Hyunwoo Li, Call of the Wild, howl
Let’s delve into imagination for a brief moment. I’ve been going to sleep asking the question: what are the stories for the times? What stories do we need to touch and tap into, for wild re-membering. I woke up yesterday to this story in my mythic imagination. Thank you Norse wisdom. For your epic pantheon of story. And particularly, for giving us a map of life/death/life and creation/destruction. Apocalypse/Re-creation.
In case you don’t know -this is just a sketch, to remind you.
A POSSIBLE MYTHIC LANDSCAPE: Yggdrasil
In the Norse cosmology, the Yggdrasil or the Great World Tree is central to our understanding of the cycles of life/death/life and the constant tension that lives along its axis. It also illuminates the tension of good and evil. Out there. In here. Even inside interiority. I’ve got it. You’ve got it. This tension of opposites dances in equal measure -subtly and not so subtly depending on the person and situation. Life/death in the same breath. In breath. Outbreath.
Yggdrasil shows us a world tree with higher, middle and lower parts -representing the world/underworld/cosmos —but also —the body —higher nature, equanimity, lower nature.
there are so many ways to look at it. This image below is an inspiration of the energy that nibbles at the lower roots of the tree —also —the energy that nibbles inside of each one of us. We’ve all got a dragon. And an eagle. And a squirrel.
The most important thing to remember about fairytales and myths -
each character, each archetype -represents different elements of being human -the depth and breadth and spectrum -from higher to lower, right to left, front to back, upside down and right side up, shadow to light of our human condition.
Some of these forces are asleep in us. Some are hiding and relegated to their shadow corners —hiding until provoked. Some we feed, some we starve and some we avoid/bypass or ignore, but they manage to move through us sideways.
And -some folks like to feed the dragon, the fear, the hate even more than other parts, because it gives a false sene of power. Also -evil lurks in the shadows. It feeds where there are gaps -trauma -hiding -shame -guilt - hate -it feeds where it can. Some folks have been fed on the steroids of hate. Evil rises, surges, explodes. But that is not the end of the story.
Artist: Unknown
Níðhöggr (or Nidhogg) (whose name means Malice Striker) is the fearsome dragon or serpent that gnaws at the foundational roots of Yggdrasil in the underworld realm. The dragon is always ready to destroy. He is constantly threatening the collapse and destruction of the tree. He also chews on murderers and oath breakers after their death.
The eagle at the top of the crown sometimes has a hawk perched between his eyes. This represents the upper world -celestial vision and far-seeing consciousness. Objective sight. Imagination. Inspiration. Intuition.
Also in the Great Tree is the squirrel Ratatoskr —always running back and forth between the roots and the branches, tossing provocations and insults between the Eagle who lives in the crown of the tree and the Dragon in the underworld. Ratatoskr loves seeding chaos. He is a trickster. Cosmic shit-stirrer, maintaining the tension between the above and below. Between the far-seeing wisdom and the gnawing destruction. He loves spreading misinformation. He wants to get EVERYBODY riled up.
The tree holds it all. Always has. Always will. It teaches us about this precarious dance. There are times in its history —collectively and mythically -when the gnawing tips us out of balance. Quakes the foundation too much.
Images -unknown
This trickster-messenger keeps the polarities in dynamic relationship rather than static peace. Because this trickster has an agenda. Cultural disruption. If you haven’t yet listened to the podcast on Trickster Jumps Sides by Joshua Shrei of Emerald Podcast you most definitely should. It opened my mythic imagination greatly.
“Tricksters and culture disruptors populate global mythology. From Loki to Coyote to Èṣù and Hermes, they bend rules, cross boundaries, commit deliberate and unintentional offenses and generally mess with established orders. Yet they are often seen as indispensable to these orders — they are renewers and cultural innovators and often pave the way for great change. So in many cultures, Tricksters, despite their shenanigans, are seen as sacred. In modern society, we have no such ritualization of cultural disruption.”
There are also four stags who nibble constantly on Yggdrasil’s leaves and buds, eating away at the world tree from the middle. We have a poignant image: dragon gnawing from the roots below (underworld/roots), stags eating from the middle (branches/our world) and the eagle watching from above (crown/upper world). The tree is perpetually under assault, perpetually dying and yet perpetually alive, perpetually renewing itself.
These stags represent a necessary consumption -like a deer in the forest managing growth, preventing stagnation -keeping things vital through their constant appetite. They aren’t the villains. They are simply part of the metabolic process of the cosmos and life/death/life.
We cannot forget the Sacred Well of Urd at the base of the tree. A shimmering pool. Holy, pure, everything touching it turns white as the membrane inside and eggshell. The Norns sit here -Urd, Verdandi and Skuld, past, present and future. They are drawing water from the well each day and mixing it with clay mud around the edge of the well. Sprinkling this sacred mixture onto Yggdrasil’s roots to prevent from rotting and withering away. These cosmic gardeners hold the threads of fate. Tree tenders. Life/death/life renewers. Like the Calleach of Scotland, perhaps they are always weaving the stories into form, witnessing, reweaving. Tangles. Knots. Tapestries.
It is their job to weave fate, destiny and the primal layers of all beings —gods, goddesses, humans. Everyone. They are not controlling fate but rather tending the conditions from which fate emerges.
Kindra Nikole —three muses
The feminine IS life. Is life/death/life. Is the renewing force. Is the living map. Sophia. Wisdom. Creation. Empress. Fates. Weavers. Stories. Bodies. Creation. Creativity. Thank you to the sacred trinity. It is water + earth + feminine tending that provides the medicine that sustains the cosmos. It is this sacred trinity that helps me make contact with my map. Life and renewal nourishes and counters the dragon’s destruction, which is necessary for the tree’s vitality.
People. Friends. Sisters. Brothers. Let me be most clear: make art. sing. dance. garden. tend. nourish. cook soup. make herbal elixirs. Nourish yourselves in these times. So that the dragon does not deplete you at the roots and cause you to collapse.
THE EMBODIED PRACTICE: Dance
I danced this morning with 195, live in Boulder Colorado. Thank you Melissa Michaels and Movement Mass! Dance moves the all of it, the waves of it, the uncertainty of it, the collective FORCE of it through my body, clears out the channel. Helps me to stay clear, rooted, grounded. Melissa was a student of Gabrielle Roth and the five rhythms for decades. She has deepened Gabrielle’s work to incorporate different lineage pathways of movement and embodiment —weaving soul-centric cycles of human development, life cycles, social justice and creative rites of passage. I recently became certified in this work. I believe dance is an integral map for change because we are easily stuck in all kinds of stories. Dance teaches us to keep moving -even if we just change our pattern and walk across the floor and then change our pattern and direction and rhythm and motion -we don’t have to stay stuck in the most stuck stories. Or slip on the coldest, iciest stories. We can collectively and individually dance our way through. No matter our age or physical capacity. Dance is for every body. Even if you are in a wheelchair. You can let your nose wiggle, your fingertips can tap. You can move even the smallest part of you. it’s political to have agency in this body, threaded with stories -interpersonal, personal, collective, ancestral, cosmic.
The world is spinning out of control. We can spin like tops in the fear and calamity of the all of the stories clashing and colliding. Dance practice that has a specific map can orient. Ground, and cycle the energy through.
I highly recommend tuning into this intro and invitation to the waves from the late Gabrielle Roth. Move the inert, move the. heavy, move the stuck, move the grief, move the anger. Each rhythm tracks with an element, a spectrum of dark/light —Roth says the rhythms are catalysts, teachers, gateways. I see them as thresholds. To discover your inner flow, stacatto, chaos, lyrical and stillness.
Waves can pummel. Waves can ebb and flow. This is a wave. I am the ocean. This is a wave. I am the ocean. This is a wave. I am the ocean. I am strong enough, to hold, wave after wave.
I’ve been listening to this song by Sarina Partridge -Song leader from Minneapolis:
I’ll be singing this song and many other songs for peace and resistance with a group of elders in Boulder, CO tonight. Reach out if you want additional song inspirations. Also - I’d love to know more about your maps for navigating times of collapse.
Remember - we don’t have to collapse while the systems break down. Don’t be fooled during collapse times. While they try to break us down. We will rise. And stand. We will rise. And stand for beauty. Stand for truth. Stand for the living world. Trees with deep roots cannot be easily toppled. Root down. Ground into body. Tend your roots. Draw from your well. Nourish yourself. And then nourish your community. Return to the roots, the well, the wellspring.
And trust the tree and its wisdom cycles. Life/death/life.