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Birds have a unique place in our cultural imagination. Observing their habits, our ancestors learned about home building, foraging, and partnership. Their presence inspired our earliest art forms and culture. 

Today birds still teach us about sorrow and death, love and joy, and the beautiful power found in song, in singing. We're also learning new lessons from birds, about intelligence, cognition, and language.

"The Nightingale" is one of Hans Christian Andersen lesser-known stories. It's quirky and funny and an interesting reflection on the difference between art and artifice, nature and culture. I hope you enjoy the story.

“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.”-- Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

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"The spirit wanders, comes here now, now here, and occupies whatever frame it pleases. From beasts it passes into human bodies, and from our bodies into beasts, but never perishes." ----Joseph Campbell

Animals have a significant presence in our mythologies. The meanings we ascribe to them illuminates our uneasy relationship to our other-than-human companions, and offer us a way to think creatively about our place in the world and human nature. 

The exploration in this episode revolves around two stories, "The Tigress" jataka and a fairytale called "The Three Languages."

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Fables are probably the best known and most widely used stories in our mythological traditions. These are simple stories that frequently include animal characters. What is their appeal? Do they offer us more than a laugh?

In this episode we make some leaps, from a fable about frogs to practical philosophy, to an angry goddess, an ancient Greek comedy, and the mythological history of frogs.

I hope you find something entertaining and useful.

“We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight — the light of our particular day.”
-- Loren Eisley, The Unexpected Universe

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This is our second and final podcast in celebration of National Poetry month. I devote the April episodes to National Poetry month, to honor and recognize the shared origins of poetry, myth, and song. 

I also want to share some of the power of poetry. A poem, like a song or a story, can evoke a deep and necessary sense of the rightness of things. In his work titled The Relevance of the Beautiful,philosopher Hans Gadamer writes "[...] the experience of the beautiful, and particularly the beautiful in art, is the invocation of a potentially whole and holy order of things, wherever it may be found." 

Attention to beauty is one way to find the quiet eye in the middle of our collective storms. I need the perspective and peace of mind that communion with a poem offers. Maybe you do too.

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"Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."  --Rumi

In the last podcast, "A Terrible Love of War, A Culture of Peace," I talked about the need to build a culture and societies that are so satisfying and compelling that we are unwilling to sacrifice them or our precious lives to the destruction and death brought by war. 

I imagine the time that we spend together here today with these poems, as an offering to such a culture.

I hope these poems bring you some respite, inspiration, a deeper appreciation for the beauty in your life. Perhaps you'll find a new poet to investigate on your own.

April is National Poetry month here in the United States.  Let's celebrate.

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In 2004, James Hillman published a difficult and though-provoking investigation of war titled A Terrible Love of War.  He writes:

"I believe that we can never speak sensibly of peace or disarmament unless we enter into this love of war. Unless we enter into the martial state of soul, we cannot comprehend its pull [...] To know war we must enter its love. No psychic phenomenon can be truly dislodged from its fixity unless we first move the imagination into its heart..." 

In this episode, I approach Hillman and "A Terrible Love of War" with these questions:

What is "the terrible love of war?" 

How does Hillman ask us to imagine it?

What can an archetypal perspective on the phenomenon of war tell us about its nature, and our own? 

Can this perspective help us, as citizens and mortal humans, to create a culture of peace?

I welcome your comments and questions. Thanks for listening.

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Nations. Sovereignty. War. Democracy. Citizenship. I. We. 
Unconscious monotheism. Polytheistic consciousness. 
Diversity. Complexity.
Fluid myths. Culture building. Trickster.
Multiple meanings. Art. 

Some thoughts and two poems.

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“The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow, and there is no humor in heaven.”  ~ Mark Twain

When we get stuck, when life hands us a challenging situation and there's no clear way out, our best tool is the ability to shift perspective. To see things from a different angle.

Laughter can help us make such a shift.  So can a story. 

The answer might not come immediately and yet, the shift is essential. In this episode, we'll explore this process with the aid of a fairy tale called "The Bee, the Harp, the Mouse, and the Bum-Clock." 

Whatever you're dealing with right now, I hope you find something useful in this episode. Thanks for listening.

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My jumping off point today is a story that's generating a lot of heated debate right now, the movie "Don't Look Up." 

I'm going to make some references to this movie, but this podcast is not about it, per se. So, if you haven't seen the movie, no worries. And if you have, and are perhaps tired of or already feel deeply embroiled in the conversation that it has catalyzed, I hope to take you in a somewhat different direction. 

We're going to wander with the Trickster and see what he/she can tell us about the process of cultural change....

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“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.” ― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

The creation and maintenance of a shadow aspect of the personal and collective psyche is an inevitable part of psychic life.  When consciousness and a sense of personal identity emerges, so does a shadow.

Recognizing your shadow and maintaining a healthy relationship with it is a central psychospiritual task. Owning your shadow is essential to self-awareness, ethical behavior, and psychological wholeness.

The dangerous machinations of the psychological shadow are revealed in this creepy adult fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. 

"If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against… Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day." --- C. G. Jung, “Psychology and Religion” CW 11

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