The Leap

by Honora Foah
Co-president & Creative Director
Mythic Imagination Institute

I'm pretty sure this is the most beautiful place on earth. The lake stretches out at dawn, slate blue, and four volcanoes rise out of it directly opposite my mountain perch amidst banana, long-leaf pine, hemlock and many other plants, vines and trees I cannot name-yet. Because I am determined to get to know my newly beloved place, the names will come, as I hope will Spanish, please God, since the next Mythic Journeys will be here in Guatemala next May.

You can see why the Conquistadores wanted it: the paradisial climate, the wealth of plants, animals and land. And you can see the result of their taking it, too, 500 years later, as the sadness and suffering of the Mayas, and in a different way, the Ladinos, goes on and on and on.

The Mayans are somewhere between 48 and 80% of the population. The counting is complicated and politically charged. DNA-wise, the people are quite mixed, how they identify is a different matter.

People here are very short-something I appreciate since I can look most of them in the eye-quite an unusual treat for me. While there is certainly a genetic pre-disposition to this size, the fact is 50% of the population is chronically malnourished.

Is there any way to heal generations and generations of violence and systemic destruction?

There has to be. The world is one crime scene after another.

***

'Healing is the leap out of suffering into myth.' --Joseph Campbell

***

The mist is burning off of the volcanoes, dogs are barking, roosters giving us the go-ahead. A cat has climbed in my window over night and lies curled on my clothes, which are scattered on every surface trying to dry from the avalanche of rain that fell on us in the little open boat we took to this casa. Sunlight slants into Lake Aitilan, the solar plexus of the world. Tomorrow, Arifah and Burhan Gebherdt and I will go to a Mayan ceremony on the southern coast of Guatemala to ask for blessings on Mythic Journeys.

***

Healing is the leap out of suffering into myth. What an extraordinary thing to say. What can it mean?

One thing it means is that healing is possible. An essential point. Another thing it means is that repair does not and will not look the same as before the wounding. Return is not birth. Return is something new, and something hard-won.

Another thing it means is that help comes from the strangest places. Healing comes from beyond logic. Beyond logic is the mytho-logic.*

Maybe it means that the only way out of suffering is into creation.

Andres Botran, who you may have met or seen if you were at Mythic Journeys last June, came to War, Peace and the American Imagination, the event Mythic Imagination, Emory University and the Alliance for the New Humanity held last September with James Hillman, Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston.

The next morning, Andres met with Michael Karlin and me, and suddenly amidst flying biscuits and eggs, Mythic Journeys — Guatemala was born.

Here's what blows my mind: Andres is the Minister of Food, Security and Nutrition in the Guatemalan Cabinet. It is a position created when Andres' insistent carping on the need for universal good nutrition drove the government to distraction and then action. Andres is working on solving chronic malnutrition in his country. So, of course, he thought of mythology. (!)(?)

Andres is a remarkable man who doesn't know much about mythology, per se, and maybe doesn't particularly care. But he has a gut instinct for knowing that, in the face of embedded prejudice, suffering, chronic pain and entrenched systemic dysfunction, help has got to come from a different dimension.

Maybe healing can come when suffering becomes myth.

Maybe, people who have an atrocious history together can bring their stories and dreams as an offering for the creation of common ground. Maybe those of us who come here from other parts of the world can put in our stories, too, and enrich the pot.

Maybe the only way out of suffering is into creation.

It's not only internal dysfunction that makes Guatemalans hungry. A worldwide systemic dysfunction contributes as well. The 'no man is an island,' no country is an island thing, is only the simplest form of acknowledging the depth of interdependence that most of us do not want to acknowledge. Our culpability and responsibility are everywhere. It doesn't mean we have to take care of every single problem in the world literally, but it does mean we need to be aware of the 'butterfly effect' (more on the 'butterfly effect.')

The Chaos Theory posits that the movement of a butterfly's wings in North America affects the weather is China, and means that God only knows the total series of consequences to anything we do. On one level, we have to surrender the idea of control. But staying aware that there are always unintended consequences helps to remind us that the full measure of what we do, the intention, the moral consciousness, the generosity or self-centeredness is in motion.

The realm of mythos and dream is a realm of generation—it is the place from which things are created. You have to imagine something in order to build it. If something truly different is needed, there is no choice but to repair to mythic ground, to the land of imagination, to the world of the original instruments of creation and ask for help.

The initiation rites of many indigenous peoples involve a return to the origin of the world, a creation story. Here, as an individual, you experience the dawn of the world as a witness and participant—you are there; time has collapsed into a single point. You are shown how your participation makes you complicit in the Creation and that therefore, you are responsible for it. The whole Creation is our responsibility.

As I wrote that, the sun has risen. I'd like a shower.

There is only one sun, 'the heart of the sky', as the Mayans say. From his vantage point, there is only one world. Though our geographies and thus our mythologies are different, the mytho-poetic realm is a universal homeland, as full of bio-diversity as the solid earth.

It is time to go home. Maybe healing can come from the leap out of suffering into myth.

* Thank you Daniel Deardorff...

Photo compliments of Anne Parke

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