Tag: myths

Creation Myth in A Minor: Scene Process Notes

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“Azna addresses her new pupils…”

It is necessary that I feel powerless in my love for you.

How else can I transform my self, our relationship and the world?

We have given our greatest gifts to a love that we needed to fill the hole inside us and we birthed beautiful art and children of pain and fear.

Now, a clarion call from the future shakes me to the core.

These holes can no longer hold.

Mother comes in from the bottoms of my feet, fills my womb with ocean water.

I traveled many roads, running from the screaming voices in my own phlegm, and happened on to you, a stranger who I will never completely understand.

A voice repeats the phrase, “I have met my match.”

What does it mean?

Why must my love enter the space of sheer confusion?

It is necessary.

I know that I cannot fill myself with your strangeness.

Strategies jump from this sinking ship, as my love for you continues to expand, confound.

Weary, I fill my body with perennial spirits and I surrender.

(I do this many times, as surrender is not a skill I have mastered.)

As I peel myself out of this deep sleep, I see little shining pools, where the holes were.

These are my eyes.

Perhaps they were sleeping.

Something about you and the shifting of the planet and a trumpet from around the bend woke them, perhaps.

As I explore these new ways of seeing and move through the world, aware of my wholeness, my love for you deepens. I find myself listening and standing in spaces that I never even knew existed. Qualities surround me, or drink me in…gentleness, grace, curiosity, as well as passion, fervor and deep emotions (also I did not know them). I walk with you into further strangeness.

There are moments…that I see the little shining pools in you staring back at me. I cannot explain what it is to stand in this creative fire, the moment where we can birth beauty and children out of love and wholeness.

This is why we gather, why I have committed to these teachings. From mother to daughter, the bond of love in separation is natural, crucial. Each generation must hone, practice, give and welcome our strangers.

The time will come, when most of the people sleep in a nightmare of fear and pain. We must enter each other’s dreams and wake ourselves up.

So, you see, it is necessary that I feel powerless in my love for you.

MYTHS are the genes we live by.

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For a long time (I can now say decades) I have been exploring rituals, many kinds. It is one reason that I became a clown, which led me to study healing arts, which drew me to become a minister, which called me to form a deeper commitment to the arts.

I was writing an ensemble piece a while back, “At Thebes.” I traveled deep into our mythic history. This piece took me to the world of Oedipus and Jocasta. If you don’t know who they were, read the play, “Oedipus Rex.”

As I poured over literature and scholarly papers, I was struck by what a slippery slope is history. Like many plays, this story was based on a myth, a story that may or may not have happened, at least not with the details that got passed down and embellished by the storytellers. In some accounts Jocasta did not die, Oedipus did, he was exiled, he was not…etc. As I filled my notebook with these contradictory facts, the themes of my play came out of the smoke and mirrors.

The storyteller is the story.

Those who control the stories, control our ‘reality.’

The third major theme is intimately related to my larger purpose and it has to do with transforming the nature of the feminine in our lifetime. In Greek mythology, there is a hero. Let it suffice to say, this individual is a man.

Basically, I believe myself to be as valuable and heroic as all beings. Myths are the memes of our social agreements: our cultural ‘DNA.’ (Meme: a cultural item transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes) Jocasta is the heroine in my retelling of the myth. The third theme, of this piece

We all must face the call of our destiny.

Of course, there are twists and turns along the way-

It is a good time to create new myths and reclaim old ones. I think, on some level, most of us are feeling this, or some form of psychic indigestion. In the past weeks I have released myself from old ideas about artists being freaks or needing to suffer. This is why I am making a commitment to share some of my creative process to you, my friends and family.