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When I think about the importance of myth in our every day life I come to this elegant, irrefutable passage from dear Stanley Kunitz , poet, nurturer of gardens, and cultivator of wisdom: "The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race." Mythic Journeys is a place to respond to that call. "Poetry," he wrote, "is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul."

Whether through painting, performance, poetry, psychology, history, fantasy, dialogue, dance or song, at Mythic Journeys we heard and interacted with the telling of the soul at a personal and social level. It is bound to ever reverberate in our ears.

In one of my earliest daydreams I asked the Spirit of Life, "Can you give me a place where every art, virtue and thought can meld, to become a riot, a romance, a family?" I did not suspect that Mythic Journeys would become and perhaps is the closest enactment of that vision.

Joseph Campbell said, "Follow your own bliss." Okay, you might ask: where do I get a taste of that? More than a taste, at Mythic Journeys I received an abundant, rare plateful of bliss. I was among inspired scholars, artists, historians, psychologists, and teachers who not only generously offered their knowledge and their lucidity, but also their wisdom, their intimacy, their stepping stones, their conversation and even their questions. And always the myths, the stories — little stories, big stories, your stories, my stories communicating with each other, inaugurating bridges into the mystery myth of living itself.

Being a good skeptic, when I received the invitation to participate in Mythic Journeys my first reaction was: what the fu is this? It seemed too flighty and farfetched. Now what remains of those adjectives in the re-living of the experience is the physical sensation of flying and seeing far. My complaints about Mythic Journeys: shut off the air conditioning in the hotel, and find a machine where I can clone myself to take all the workshops.

Most of us still retain childhood fantasies. We want to gaze at the mist and, as we go through it walking or in a cab, we want to step into a world (this world) filled with magic. Have you walked into a closet hoping to find the lit torch of Narnia? To me the experience of Mythic Journeys was like stumbling into C.S. Lewis' wardrobe or meeting Bob Dylan's tambourine man:

"I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way,
I promise to go under it."

Since I am more at ease in metaphor than in prose, I offer you a fragment of one of my poems that condenses my perception of what Mythic Journeys offered me:

My journey is always beginning
and that in it self keeps me content.
but if indeed one day I reach the shore
or fly like a phoenix to meet the source of light
and weave my words into a cloak of patterns
and go back to the irreversible word
from which all words came forth,
then I'd be silent.
not daring to utter a word
for fear of staining
the delicate silk of its totality.
In the meantime here I come
pulling on my oars, wondering
and there's plenty of songs
to keep me going.

What I was left with from Mythic Journeys was a glimpse of the vastness of the shore and the infinite songs to reach whatever one truly desires, but more than that: the sweetness, acknowledgment and awe at the completion and passionate goodness that already exists in the world.

Visit Ekiwah Belendez at his website

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