The Map
finding ourselves in mythos
In times of transition, it’s helpful to have a map.
Not every map is made of lines and roads; some are woven with spirals, circles, and stories.
Can fairytales or myth change your life?
Yes — but not in the way you might think.
Many of us fall through the patchwork of life’s key transitions, never quite learning the stitches in the mythic quilt. Many of us were never initiated into the deeper meanings that mark our thresholds — birth, adolescence, love, loss, midlife, death.
Once upon a time, these transitions were held by story, song, ritual, and community.
Now, we mostly stumble alone.
Fairytales are not just children’s bedtime stories or recycled, over-processed Disney entertainment. They are maps of initiation — soul cartographies that reveal the passage from innocence to wisdom, belonging to exile, exile to return, descent to rise.
Joseph Campbell said that myth helps us reconcile the beast of life-death-life within and without. These stories are not meant to be “understood” so much as lived with — simmered in, slept with, spoken aloud, courted until they breathe through us and through the land again.
They are holographic in their wisdom — multisensory, multidimensional.
They aren’t intended to be decoded; they offer a thousand ways of seeing that reveal themselves over time.
They teach us to take off the glasses through which we’ve been conditioned to see
and to put on a different pair, one that expands and deepens our vision, allowing us to glimpse the world as living, shimmering, and whole.
The modern mind wants to get something from everything — ever hungry, ever sorting, spinning, devouring knowledge and information, yet often spinning far from soul. It wants to get something from mythos: a lesson, a teaching, an outcome.
But myth is not a transaction. It is an invitation.
It asks us to surrender the sharp edge of analysis
the clever tailor, snip snip snipping the story to fit the garment of our understanding.
Myth wants us to enter the spiral geometry of wonder.
Myth doesn’t care whether we “get it” or not.
She waits — patient and alive — for the one who will sit beside her fire,
who will dream with her through the long nights,
and allow themselves to be changed by slow time. mythic time.
Mythos offers a wellspring of wisdom and renewal
to those who say yes
who dare to drink from the elixir of story medicine.
We are, each of us, storytelling creatures.
Beneath the noise of forgetting, we long to come home to ourselves
to return from the towers and exiles we didn’t realize we were in.
We are orphans of lost cultures, lost meanings, lost rites and rituals.
Yet the stories remain
ancient, patient
waiting for us to pick up the thread.
Each of the images in this Substack are unknown in terms of the artist. I have been seeking!
Upcoming Story Ritual
Write the Dead: An Encounter with Spoon Mother
A Samhain Story + (W)rites of Passage Ritual
Thursday, October 30, 2025
11 am – 1 pm MT · Online via Zoom
Sliding Scale: $33–66
At Samhain, the veil thins.
The season invites us to turn toward what has passed
the ancestors, unfinished stories, voices and threads that shape us from the unseen.
Write the Dead is a communal story ritual that weaves writing, remembrance, and conversation around the hearth of this turning season.
It’s a space to feed what has been forgotten
through story, language, and presence.
We’ll meet the Spoon Mother, an ancient archetype
of the one who stirs the pot between worlds
keeper of bone and broth, nourishment and transformation, story and ancestral remembering.
Through her, we’ll explore what it means to tend relationship with our ancestors and our own creative lineage.
During our time together, we’ll:
Listen for the stories rising from our lineage and the season
Write as offering — letters, spells, stories, poems, remembrances
Share stories in community as a way of feeding and being fed
(Optional: bring a bowl, spoon, or ancestral food beside you as part of the ritual.)
Bring: paper, pen, candle, and/or bowl; optional small offering (bread, salt, seeds, soup, etc.)
This is an invitation to pause inside the darker season —
to write, remember, and reconnect with the continuum of life and death,
and the stories that keep both alive.
Hello- what a beautiful offering.
I've followed the link to register but it took me to a squarespace login page. If you could share the right pathway that would be helpful.