There is a new story being told. We hear it only in whispers, in bits and bytes, in hints and wonderings, in cracks and crevices, the broken places where, as Leonard Cohen reminded us, the light gets in. It is a cosmic story about the world and how it works and what our place is within it. It's a story that digs deep beneath the cultural myths we tell ourselves, that serve only our basest survival instincts, to unearth the very purpose of our existence ... and to give us hope.
It was the story Jesus was trying to tell us, until we tamed his words, taking them out of his mouth and bending them to fit our own purposes. A story about a realm in which the hopes of the Creator are fulfilled in the lives of the creatures. A story about the unity and the sanctity of all things, everything belonging. A story about a unique place for every living thing, including the creatures called humans, each with their own destiny, their own soul and their own contribution to the whole.
I felt this story leaking out between the words of my last two guests on The Mystic Cave podcast. Michael Trotta talked about the call of ancestral myths that sets us on our soul's journey to answer the questions: Where am I from? Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Philip Shepherd reminded us of an ancient way of knowing, where we engage the intelligence not just of the mind but, even more, of the body. Both said that the stories told to us by our culture, to co-opt us into conforming to its short-sighted vision, are bankrupt, having severed our connections with one another and fractured the natural link between us and the earth, leading us to the very brink of ecological disaster.
As I spoke with each of them, I sensed the larger story behind their warnings and their invitations. The new story, which is in fact very old, is about the interconnectedness of all created things. It is about the recovery of the feminine within us all. It is about the reunification of our minds and our bodies. And perhaps most of all, it is about the healing of our broken relationship with the earth, of which we are not the masters, rather an integral part, like the trees and the rocks, the sea and the sky.
So I invited my friend Don McLeod to help me identify the threads of this new emerging story. As co-founder of The Wisdom Centre, Don carries a passionate interest in the Wisdom Tradition, that ancient way of knowing that is imaginal (dealing more in images than in facts), embodied (honouring what we know in our bodies), and holistic (integrating our experience with that of the universe itself). This week's episode of the Mystic Cave is that conversation.
This week in The Mystic Cave (just press Play):