Finding Our Mythic Voices

Coming Waves ~ ©2018 ML Monroe

Myths are bigger-than-life stories filled with beautiful symbols and strong characters. They provide lessons about life, creation, and existence along with a sense of community, belonging and wonder.

Myths are also beautiful, subtle lies. They create magical auras of superiority and difference. As much as we may deny it, we are culturally, and some would say biologically, programmed to accept and believe this too. We want to be important, significant, recognized, acknowledged.

The false side of some of our most precious myths still flash with diamond-sharp light. The Crusades were a result of believing one group was Chosen and another was Heretic. The Holocaust. The Islamic State. The Armenian Genocide. We understand those big ones. Most of us do not subscribe to them.

Some myths are more subtle. Black males as inherently violent. Women created to be subservient. Racial/ethnic/cultural purity as important. Poor people as lazy. Rich people as arrogant. They may even be individual or family myths. Even though these myths may have some flash and sheen to them, they are significantly cutting, damaging and maybe even dangerous. The subtlety of these myths sweeps over us like an ocean wave. We feel its presence and even some of its power. Until it builds to the point of knocking us over, we often don't recognize the full force of impact.

The upside is that we have agency. We have the ability to change the stories, to rewrite the myths. The #MeToo movement is doing that. As is the #NeverAgain movement. And #BlackLivesMatter. We have the opportunity to reach within ourselves and rediscover the truth. Both our personal truth as well as the cultural and communal truth.

In the arena of personal myths, many have been passed to us by the community around us. We believe we are important or unimportant because that's what has been imparted to us. We believe we have control over others ~ often a myth inadvertently passed to the eldest child. We believe we are only popular if we are the captain of the football team or the mathletes. We believe we will not amount to anything or we have the right  us because of where we were born. Individual mythologies are numerous.

We have agency over these too. When we discover them and name them, we own them. They no longer own us. It takes focus and work after that to use our own mythic voices, those inner whispers that pointed out the fallacies in the myths, to rework and rewrite them. Doing so gives us a renewed strength with the bonus that it also bolsters our creative, mythic voice.

How do you know what myths have influence over your life? What personal myth have you believed that no longer serves you? What communal myth have you believed that no longer serves you? What steps will you take to change those myths? How loud ~ or quiet ~ is your mythic voice?