Laura Dawn: It’s so nice to meet you, Michael. Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me. Your work has had a huge influence on my life, and I’m just really honored to be able to have this time with you.

Michael Meade: Oh, thanks. Good to be with you.

Laura Dawn: Recently, I was listening to one of your episodes on the Living Myth podcast, which is one of my favorite shows that I listen to regularly. And you were talking about something along the lines of how, and this is what, what I took away from it, how when we’re on a journey and if we have a backpack, if we’re hungry, we might reach for food or if it were in the dark, we might reach for a tool like a light and that you also.

are encouraging people to think about reaching for stories and myth as a really appropriate tool for navigating this journey of life. And I thought that that was a beautiful image. I often think about questions in that way, that they’re actually a really powerful tool and that we can learn how to cultivate questions to help inform how we view reality.

And so I’m curious if this is a good place to start for you to just share a little bit about myth and storytelling as a navigational tool for navigating the modern world.

Michael Meade: Okay, so yes, of course. There was an ancient poet, and people give the credit to different poets, but the statement was, this world isn’t made out of atoms, it’s made out of stories. And so stories are how we make sense of the world, make sense of ourselves. The word relate that gives us relationship comes from the Latin verb relatare, which means to carry it back.

And so a relationship really is based on the people in it carrying it back to the other person or the other people, the story of what’s happening to them. And so we’re always in stories and what becomes real important, I think, are two levels of story when the world becomes radically uncertain. And, uh, and polarized as well, and that is to say the mythic realm, which is not affected by or limited by or determined by the common world.

It’s part of the eternal world that just keeps going on. And then the personal story the idea that each person is here to unfold a story that’s partly written in their soul. And the unfolding of our story is how we make sense of our life and also how we contribute to the world that needs in a sense, our help. So then an interesting happened. And can happen when a person can put their personal story into a mythic story because the mythic story is universal, it’s timeless, and it can add insights and levels of understanding to the personal story. So, this is a particularly important time to be packing and unpacking one story, but particularly in reference to mythological stories. In myth, the world can come to an end. a particular story about the world can come to an end, but another one starts. And so in a time when people think the world might end, myth is helpful as a kind of, , uh, sustenance, a vitamin program for the soul. And then to put one’s personal story into the myth, then can help open that up and reveal resources that that otherwise might not become conscious.

Laura Dawn: Do you feel like there’s one overarching framework for a mythological story? Is it always, you know, a certain kind of pattern? Like, when you think about a myth or a story to define this time that we’re living through, do you draw upon many, many stories, or is there really one? bigger story, or are all of these other little stories really pointing to different facets of this time that we’re living in?

Michael Meade: Kind of the answer is yes to all of those things, because they’re all part of it. But the, , two big stories now are the stories of the renewal of the world. So, I spend a lot of time now with creation stories, because creation stories turn out to actually be recreation stories. Like, uh, traditional people all around the world, when there was trouble that was affecting the collective group would often tell a creation story.

They would go back to creation, because in going back to the beginning, you tap all the original potentials. And you can start anew. And so one of the response, in terms of traditional cultures, to the world going awry, would be to go back to the beginning and draw from the, uh, original things from which life keeps being made, keeps being remade.

And so, we’re at the end of an era. We’re at the end of a worldview. The Western worldview is just fading before our eyes, but the end is connected to a beginning that’s trying to start. So I often now tell creation stories, but I draw on the stories from different cultures because Just as each place on earth has its own plant and its own forest and its own ecological systems, each place on earth has developed a mythological system.

And so you can get insights from all these various, uh, creation stories in particular.  So yeah, uh, you, you can draw intelligence. All people are interconnected just the way all the roots of trees are interconnected and all that kind of thing. So right as the world is falling apart before our eyes, rapidly changing at a rate that human institutions can’t keep up with, At the same time, there is being revealed this old knowledge that we’re all interconnected.

So, that’s the kind of story we’re in. Collapse on one side, and a deepening of understanding and an awakening of ancient wisdom on the other side. That’s one way to use creation stories and use myth in general.

Laura Dawn: Do you feel like creation story is ultimately also a story of destruction, and that in our Western world, we’re just so focused on, oh, this is gonna keep going forever, and it’s just perpetual, never ending growth, and the fact that we actually don’t embrace that. part of the mythological story is part of the place that we run into trouble.

It’s like only being in the light and not acknowledging the darkness.

Michael Meade: Absolutely. And, and so now, when science thinks the world might come to an end because of, uh, ecological disaster, or an asteroid, or the misuse of, uh, nuclear weapons, and of course religions have been predicting for years that the world will come to an end, because they think that have to leave the earth and have it destroyed in order to go to heaven, that’s the kind of mythology that we’ve been living in.

And so what happens is, the very people who try to insist that growth is continuous and uninterrupted, that, uh, the enlightenment, everything will shine a light and will cure all the diseases, the very people following that belief, when things become dark and uncertain, suddenly give up on the world altogether, and say it’s all gonna end, and people become cynical, and they become, you know, trapped in a collapsing mythos, you could say.

And so I’m with you. Interestingly enough, almost all creation myths around the world begin in eternal darkness. And then the creation starts when the light is separated from the dark. And so people then chase the light without realizing all light comes in the dark. All life comes from death in a sense, or stillness of some kind.

And so now it’s time to understand that these two things happen together. And there’s many mythologies where there are gods and goddesses of destruction. If you go to India, you have Shiva, who dances the world into existence and then dances it into destruction. And you have Kali, uh, the goddess of, Kali means dark, but it also means the goddess of darkness.

And so then they interpret that we’re living in the Kali Yuga. Yuga means, like, a real long time, and we’re living in the dark times, but it’s happened before. And poets like Hafez, the great mystical poet, says, , let the darkness season you. In other words, there’s a, a seasoning that we don’t have if we’re only counting on the light.

There’s a intelligence in darkness. There’s a hidden light. The human soul used to be called the light hidden in darkness. We, when we understand the dark, we draw more soul, more of our own soul into consci