In response to Vic’s comment on ChangingNormal thread “Language and Metaphor”
Phil,
Let’s work with this … for me, myth is ‘not’ what the world is made of. And shifting to story and reality are intermixed: Story is how we describe reality as we know it. It is also how we descibe the possibility beyond reality, which also connects to something Great enough to ‘realize’ Life into us. Of course the paradox is that we ‘are’ That, and yet that ‘That’ is what we don’t know of intimately. It is this chasm where myth is found - almost in an attempt to fill the void. Stories then, are heard as the reflections of a collective understanding (i.e. myth is not individual) bouncing off the walls of the chasm-cliffs that define our lives. So, possibly, myth is the bridge between spirit and matter, and story fuel ‘what’ matters - that which we feel through emotional responses and make our existence meaningful. …. Food for thought .. Vic
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Vic,
But nature also works with story. We get the idea of story from her, not she from us. What we’re missing is how to watch her stories without a heavy overlay of cultural values, social relations and stock phrases, etc. Her basic “story unit” is things that “begin, develop, live and end”. That provides her enormous variety on a single theme, and all of it “value free” and “unencumbered by human thought”. If we learn to read her stories without all the baggage that our way of “making sense” layers them with, then we notice little useful things. One is the completely unhidden pattern ALL living things end their growth with maturation, then followed by “the good life”. The pains we’re going through now look a lot like death pains, and could be, but are equally possible to turn into birth pains, at least in the physical world. Whether it’s possible in the cultural world too, allowing us to create and share the myths and values we’d need to acknowledge nature as an independent player here, and communicate how to get along with our “new dance partner”, I have more doubts about… 
Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
NY NY www.synapse9.com