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Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone- and it's never coming back.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, lay the foundations for a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.
What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?
We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just (so far) lack the visions and collective will to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
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Sam: The bottom line for me is belonging and asking a question of where do you belong and how deep the wells of a question like that are the sense of belonging you, you could say, sits on a parallel journey to the question of lostness. There's an admission of lostness first. I think becoming lost is one of the best things we could possibly do in modernity. There's a part of me which believes that no person raised without elders could ever fully become elder themselves. But what's the job then of pretending well enough and being able to say, ‘Look, we are modelling this, we're doing the best we can.’
And it's a multi-generational response to this multi-generational wounding, but the position of anyone being full and complete, and I know where I am and I'm not lost, and I'm this thing, and I'm becoming more and more sceptical of that position. So yeah, I think it's really lovely how we're doing double speak around the word lost and it feels like a really interesting place to be in of what is lost?
What is unlost?
Manda: Sam Crosby, welcome to the Accidental Gods Podcast. How are you and where are you on this magical spring morning?
Sam: I am good. This is a conversation I'm excited to have and I am between Newquay and Perth in Cornwall, close enough to the sea if I've got the energy to get there by foot, or I can roll down on a bike.
Manda: Yay. I'm not remotely envious! We were looking at a map of where you were just before we came on air and there's something so special about being able to smell the sea. Every human I've ever met finds the sea magical and alluring. And the theory that we emerged from the oceans rather than climbing down from the trees does seem quite compelling with that, I feel.
Sam: Yes. It’s a good way:, heart, heart, noses, ears. They're all engaged, with the business of the sea, aren’t they? Yeah.
Manda: And awe and wonder and, and everything that goes with it.
Sam: Hmm,
Manda: Anyway, we are recording this just before the Equinox and the New Moon and all of the astonishing things that are happening in the world at the moment, which we'll undoubtedly be different before this goes out in about 10 days’ time.
But you are a mytho cartographer amongst many, many other things. And in a very beautiful Substack post that you sent me, you say that myths are multidimensional and myths are beyond maps. And given that I feel the way through for humanity through the pinch point that we are creating, is to be able to map out routes forward to a future that we would be proud to leave behind – and so, coming across someone else who sees mythology and maps as intertwined and necessary and useful to where we're going is such a joy.
So maps and myths. Talk to me in any way about what maps and myths mean to you and how they came to mean that That was a very wide boundary question. Take it wherever you want it to go.
Sam: I appreciate the potential here, the moment of uncertainty, also being the moment of potential. I'm just noticing what's coming up for me. And it's not in the essay or in the conversation we've already had, but the, the potential of a map. The possibility of a map. One of the images I've got for what joy means for me is walking out into a big sky space with just a few things - my wits and my heart and my eyes, and, and I think a map and a myth, but both precursors to that.
So there's a feeling there. And I think what I'd like to do in the time that we have is play with naming the, the kenning: play with the idea of there not being a single name for anything. Let’s call this a bunch of imperfect attempts at naming this thing.
The opening of the essay is that the Mountain Leader Trainers said to me, when you get really lost, don't look at your map.Because what you'll do is you'll find features on a map and you'll convince yourself that they match the territory that you're in. So what ends up happening is you are now lost, but you are convinced that you're not lost. And taking that on a broader scale, the question is what are the maps that we're in that we are protecting so that we can feel that desire for certainty, that we anchor for? What maps are we protecting even if they're detrimental to us?
What's the process of seeing them and behaving with them differently? And mythology being a map and beyond a map in the shorthand for me is when a myth comes into a space. It's a reason that there's never been a good film about King Arthur: when a myth comes into a space, every single person in that space has a different anchor point, a different image, a different way in, so that it's as many people and beings are in the space, that's how many versions of the story there are simultaneously unfolding.
And so they simultaneously give us some information that one part of us knows that we desperately want and give us a signifier that, maybe there isn't a one map at the same time.
Manda: You're clearly on a roll and I want you to come back to it, but I am suddenly intrigued about there never being a good film about King Arthur. Partly 'cause I don't watch films. So I don't know. But unless you were born in Edinburgh and clearly you have Arthur’s Seat and Arthur Pendragon came from Edinburgh – leaving that aside, Arthur and Cornwall are very closely linked and I am a writer and books are my thing. And for me, there are two books that really gave me access to the mythological Arthur. I can tell you what they're later, but I'm really curious to know if there are, for you, any books that give people access to Arthur?
That's one. And the other is that for me, the film of Lord of the Rings, which I did watch, was actually a remarkable route in. Two books that were frankly needed a bit of editing, I'm sorry, for people for whom they are basically canon law, but there could have been a degree of tightening of tightening those and it would not necessarily hurt the structure.
And so it's not the case necessarily that films can't give access, it's just that they haven't, partly, I guess because Arthur feels so much more weighted for the producers that they're perhaps afraid to go there. But anyway - have there been any books for you that really brought the whole concept of the Arthurian mythology to life?
Sam: So there are so many things happening simultaneously for me at the moment, and two of these are big headlines in the work. I'll mention one and then park it, which is that, as somebody who spends their time and joy resourcing allies, there are many different aspects of my life pointing towards this work with mythology, and yet, I found it so, so difficult to come back to the myths of my place. It was a round trip. I've been to Siberia and Australia and North America - don't mean, I don't mean personally, but in the mythology of these and coming home to some of the mythic landscape that I'm physically inhabiting – I found this… I can feel my, my, my eyes prickling as I think about it – it’s properly difficult. So that part that the other is, um, there is, there is one book, but I'm not going to name it because I don't think it's that important. I think what is important is the way I've approached this book.
One of the biggest challenges that I found around King Arthur is that the modern desire for certainty - the sensemaking business we're all up to - Arthur's story very quickly turns into a where, who, when. There are Italians who have told me that's where Excalibur has come from. There are Americans who have told me certain bridges were involved in Arthur, and that's just in the culture. And there are so many boos - the shelf I have above my desk is largely given to Arthur and there are so many books that I led into my space and let go again, which were myth, man or legend.
Where was it? The, the kind of the walks you can do, the sites, the, the slaughter bridge around the corner and tin and all the sites that are down here. And what I found by being given access to myth in a different way, that will inevitably make our way towards in this conversation, was - I don't want to spend my time with the sense aspects of this.
I'm more interested in the meaning aspects of it. So moving myself and my centre of gravity around allowed me to approach Arthur and all the classics, being able to go towards them and say, ‘You know what? I'm going to just do what I do with story, which is see how it touches something that has some verve, has some movement in my body, has some aspect of the way I'm raising my children, or the way I move around my village, that, that are responding and let that in, not diligently memorizing the names and the places and the information in it.’
And I did that and it took me a year and a half. And the first time I told King Arthur, it took me six hours. That's just his story without going anywhere near Paval and Tristan and I was really ill afterwards. The most ill, I've maybe been in my life for about a week and a half afterwards.
Manda: But what happened in the wake of that when you recovered? Where were you that you hadn't been before? Because there will have been a place, I think.
Sam: I was beyond the academic line, beyond the academic veil, beyond the, the…I'm a rationalist, I was raised a rationalist. And my life's work is that I'm enamoured by the idea of animism. And I play with that as much as I can and I'm cracking the carapace. And this was just such a stride forward in the way of seeing the multitudes of everything within a story that's so bound up in chivalry and rescuing maidens and all the dances that doesn't represent anything like the deep femininity that comes up with some of the other more rash myths around the world. So I'm following Clarissa Pinkola Estes down into what she calls get down dirty ways of myth. It has allowed me into that sort of stuff.
Manda: For people listening who don't recognize names, she wrote, Women Who Run With the Wolves and I will find a link and put it in the Show Notes.
And, already we've moved off the narrative that I thought we were going the arc, but into very fertile land. There are so many different ways we can take this. What is top of my head actually is that I had a conversation with somebody quite a long time ago. There was a point after I wrote the Bud of books where I wrote the ROME books – which arose because my publisher said, ‘No more woowoo stuff’.
And I let them say that because I was too young and naive in the publishing world, not to tell them that it's what I do. And so I wrote a series of Roman era spy thrillers because I am particularly entertained by cryptography. And I think it's fascinating and the whole way people can present as something that they're not. And I had discovered that the Great Fire of Rome was lit probably by people who believed that their Messiah would only come back after Rome had burned under the eye of the Dog Star, Sirius. And the fire was lit the night that Sirius rose over Rome in that particular year. And it happened just after the end of the Boudican revolt.
And I was still at the point where if I didn't write another good book, I was going to have to go back to the day job. And there was nothing I wanted less than to be a vet again. And so those books arose, but as a result of that, I believed and still believed that I uncovered the historical basis for Christ, which my publishers then proceeded to bury under a large pile of bricks so that nobody really noticed it because they were afraid they'd be fire bombed.
And that was 20 years ago. So the risk of being fire bombed is probably greater now, but we were still in a place where somebody in some talk I was giving suggested there was no evidence that this woman called Boudica existed. And without really thinking, I replied that we have more evidence of her existence than we do the existence of Christ.
And nobody actually queries that one. And that rolled forward too. There's actually more evidence about the existence of someone called King Arthur than there is for someone called Christ, for which there's no evidence at all other than hearsay. And I'm really interested about the mythologies that we choose to build and that our entire world has had imposed on it by 2000 years of Christianity, and now we've got the Christian Nationalists who think that they're going to create the end times by causing war in the Middle East.
And then we have Arthurian mythology that feeds into chivalry and heroism and the knights and armour and total anachronism, but that nevertheless becomes part of our current oral history of who we are and where we arose and what it is to be human. And there is a layer underneath it that is quite different and that would be more generative in our times.
And that that's where your Substack was taking us, was towards the how do we uncover different maps? How do we evolve different maps? What would those different maps feel like and how do we raise them up to a point where they are strong enough, like little pioneer saplings to grow on the hillside of who we are in the place of the pretty toxic maps that are there, which I think is where you were going before I interrupted about Arthur anyway, but it feels like that's so rich and you were raised a rationalist, as I was and we're told the world is scientific, that the world consists of atoms and electrons and molecules and chemistry. And people like Rupert Sheldrake look at the mythology underpinning all of this, that perhaps some of the assumptions underpinning the modern cult of science are not as whole as they could be - and then his TED talk is the one that's been censored.
And yet myths are still so integral to our culture. How do we evolve new myths? How did you evolve a new myth?
Sam: So we're going to need six hours.
Manda: That's fine. Guys, it's going to be a long podcast. We'll break it into bits. No worries.
Then I’ll do a few stepping stones
Manda: I think Stepping Stones is a good analogy.
Sam: So I think we, let me be careful with that word. My experience of the world changed significantly when my son was born with a profound brain disorder, and the systems and structures in people around me didn't know how to meet that experience. I was offered cups of tea and I was offered scientific explanations for things. We were told phrases like failure to thrive, um, and given a list of things that might end his life.
Sam: He's still with us. He's six. He's got piles of blonde hair and sharp blue eyes, and one of my favourite phrases I've ever alighted on for describing his personality is that his smile is as easy to coax out as a puppy's wagging tail. And he is the light of our lives and was a for a source of fracture for me.
I went for a run one day and disturbed a flock of jackdaws that lifted off into the air and left behind a pigeon with a broken wing and I found my knees going down into the ground and I expressed myself in a way I've never done as an adult before. And I bellowed and keened and cried and, and I was muddy and I ran down to the sea and got in the sea and ran back up the hill. And if I'd have had Strada going on that day, I'd have set a record. I would never have been able to be in the rest of my life. There was something moving in me spirit or adrenaline or something in between that just kept me moving.
And in the wake of that moment, allowing myself to see a brokenness in the world, the broken wing of the pigeon and, and the black cloud of wings above and something broke that could have bent and then snapped back into place again. I could have looked at that time and said, ‘Well, wow, that nearly got bad, didn't it? Well, back to day to day, then off we go.’
And instead, I didn't, I went to pieces, all to pieces. I went down to the underworld. Then I found a video of a guy called Danny Dior, you might know, um, north American storyteller. He's since died, but he was telling a story about a man coming to a crossroads and a horse and a wolf.
And it's a story that I tell often now. In fact, let me give it to you. A guy comes to a crossroads and it's the first time he's ever left home and he's the scruffy third sibling and his oldest brother, the big fella, and the middle brother, the poetic fellow with flowers falling out of his sleeves: they're both in the pub around the corner. They set out on the same task, got to the crossroads and went to the pub instead.
Our guy gets to the crossroads and there's a standing stone which says, keep going the way you're already going and you will die and so will your horse. If you go to the right, your horse will live on, but you will die.
If you go to the left, you will live, but your horse will die. So it's either keep going without making a choice: everything goes. Go to the right; you die for your horse. Left: you live and your horse dies. And by the way, there are bones everywhere around this crossroads from people who just didn't ever make the choice, just stayed there.
And who knows how many other people went by without even noticing the crossroads. Anyway, he notices. He goes down onto his knees, he keens, he screams, he cries, he stands, he leads his horse to the left, the direction in which he will live, but his horse will die. And he's going some way down that path, patting the horse, rubbing its neck, feeding it things, and a huge wolf comes flying out of the trees and eats the horse.
Disappears back into the trees again, and it's bloody and shocking. And he's down on his knees again and he's crying. And then the wolf comes back and this guy is looking up at the wolf, even though the guy is standing, it's the size of this thing. And then the wolf looks down at the man and opens his mouth and there's blood and eyes, eyes are blaze. the wolf says, why are you crying? And the young man tries to explain the significance of everything he's lost: the saddlebags were full of instructions and maps and gold and tools and weapons and information from his family and so on. And all that comes out is a guttural sound. And the wolf says, ‘Climb on my back and I'll take you where you need to go.’ And he does. And he spends the rest of the story flying over the forest and over the mountains and the rivers. And it goes on and on and on. And it's, and, and he comes back to that crossroads. And I won't tell you what happens there, but.
Manda: Oh, but you have to, Sam, you can't leave everybody hanging!
Sam: It's a much longer story than I that I could give you time for. Just to say, that's what happened for me. That's how I allowed myself to move beyond somebody who I was a rationalist, facing something deeply irrational. I'd already rejected wholesale, mainstream religion. Everything else was woo woo.
I used to live in Totnes. I went to Dartington College of Arts when there was a theatre degree there. And I remember walking up the high street of Totnes where people would be offering gong showers. And it was the epitome of absurdity to me at the time. And it just that Danny who I mentioned earlier, was starting to delivering stories whilst I was there and didn't know about it, and probably would've seen a poster and laughed at it at the time.
So, we are facing reckonings, I think rationalists facing irrationality, retirees facing purposelessness, activists facing imposter syndrome, professionals facing hollowness around materialism. And again, let me be careful. I think there is a reckoning happening and I think there are different manifestations of it and meeting us our opportunities to go towards something older, something more deeply rooted, and Arthur and chivalry and some of the things that are codified into the chivalric language, don't allow for that sort of thing.
And when I tell the story, actually Arthur is multitudes. He's not one guy. He's, wearing chain mail and he's muddy and you couldn't see his face for how muddy he is in some images and in others he's plumed like the peacocks. And in others he's a loving man. And every cathedral in that story is a stand of trees at the bottom of a mountain simultaneously. It has to be, which is why there have been no good films about King Arthur.
And I'll give you one more image, which the point that I haven't made—that I'd like to land this, which is that there's a gentleness I think that could be available for people to move one step along.
It's not an organized religion. It's not a massive ideology to just hear a story. When you recognize parts of yourself being reflected back to you in thousand year old mythology, something of the centre of gravity of me and mine moves slightly towards ours and us and an inter beingness without putting that at the first step. It's a more gentle way.
Walk towards a broader worldview. And the image I wanted to put here was of when King Arthur pulls a sword from the stone and becomes the right wise king of Britain. And later down the line, he's scams away now and again and he disappears off and his bodyguard, Kay – his long suffering foster brother chases after him, saying ‘You can't do this anymore. You're the king. You've got to come back.’ And he's disappeared this one day. And he's in a fight beyond his ken. And he's got to the point where the sword he's pulled from the stone has been snapped off at the hilt.
He's swinging a hilt with no sword, with no blade, and he's about to have his life ended by this errant night that he's having a fight with. And Merlin shows up and freezes the scene and, and says, Arthur, you can't come out. You bloody pain in the ass. We need to go back to the court now. You can't do this sort of stuff.
And, and the air is unfrozen and it is revealed to the Errant Knight that he was fighting the king. And he makes his apologies and dedicates himself to Camelot and Merlin says to Arthur. ‘We need to take you back to the court or back to the trees or back to the U tree, wherever it is that the story's landing for the participants of the work.’ And Arthur says something like, ‘I don't know much about kings, but I do know that there's no such thing as a king without a sword, so I'm not going back. Merlin not with this.’ And he holds up the hilt. So Merlin says, ‘Fine, I know a place and they go a little way, as long as they need to go for the story to unfold.
Maybe it takes 30,000 years or 25 minutes. And they come to a mirror reflecting the sky. It's an extraordinary lake. And Merlin says to have a look. There's an arm sticking out of the water over there, with sword on the end of it. Just go, there you go. And Arthur sort of double takes and then finds himself walking out on top of the water.
He gets to the sword, looks down, he can see a form underneath the water. In fact, he can see lights down there. There's a city down there, which by the way is where Lancelot comes from later. And he comes back to the edge of the water and he holds this sword in his hand and he draws it from the scabbard and he holds it.
And Merlin says, ‘Now what you have in your hand there is, is Caliburn. Cut steel: Excalibur. When you swing that sword, it cuts into the other world. It's the most powerful known thing in the universe. It's extraordinary. But Arthur, the scabbard is more powerful than the sword. If you wear that around your waist on that belt, you'll never die from blood loss.
And Merlin says to Arthur, ‘I need you to understand something. You die to blood loss. I've seen it. Your son kills you. Knowing that, which of these would you keep if you had to choose one of them?’ And Arthur doesn't even hear him, holds a sword above his head and screams ‘What is he, what was the name again?’ and puts it back in the scabbard, and the story continues. And I'm now in this in-between space with you Manda of, do I let that just sit? Let's just let that sit. And whoever's listening, let that sit. What is it? What is it to, to let the image of a of the, the king of kings in the mythic British landscape to have been offered the choice between a sword related to cutting and a scabbard related to blood. How does he choose and what does that mean of being a leader?
Manda: Yes. And as sword related to death and a scabbard related to life. There are a lot of other ways to die, mind you – blood loss is by far not the worst.
Sam: And if we were sat together and we had time and there were others in the room, the process after this, after some embodiment and some breathing and some time, and letting the twist of the styling be involved. The next step would be a game of Yes - and everything that we say from now on about that image can hold for us.
Manda: Yeah. Yeah. And I'm really struck by the fact that both the stories that you told had life and death choices at the crux, and that each of them is a man and the other things involved. The horse got no agency. I'm doing a workshop with some people later in the week and how much agency we give the living things around us is, is crucial to what I'm talking about. So I'm thinking about that a lot just now. Because one of the things we know of, or we believe we know, one of the mythologies that we are taught by the science of neurology, neuroscience, neuro-psychopathology, whatever, is that essential to our wellbeing is a sense of agency and - and for those of us listening, you won't have seen the fact that Sam just drunk out of a mug. That is almost identical to my mug and we have never met before. And I find that really quite striking. So people on YouTube can see that we have very similar earth shaped mugs. They're round and they're big, and they hold a whole pint of whatever you are drinking, which in my case is Feverfew – and anyway, it feels to me one of the very, very many fertile threads that you are laying out for us is the agency of what it is to be alive. Who has the agency and how do we choose the nature of life and the nature of death?
I was talking to somebody recently who's training to be a death doula, and at the point where we were having an email interchange, something came past on my Facebook feed where someone that I only know on Facebook had a close relative who just entered a hospice. And the hospice nurse had finished describing all the bits of technology: here's how you get pain relief, and here's what you do. You need to press a button and, and is there anything else? And the person who is now on a definite road towards whatever comes next says, that what they I really wanted is help with how to die.
And the nurse said, ‘I'm sorry, that's not in my remit,’ and walked out of the room. And there is a reality in which that's true – they’re not trained and yet, we are all going to die. And learning how to die with grace feels to me one of the most important things and a sense of agency that comes around that, that we could offer. But I also think that learning how to die is depends upon - is co-terminus with - learning how to live. If we've lived every moment as if it were alive with the magic of being alive, then death becomes another part of that magic. It's harder to live a life where every moment is alive with the magic of being alive, unless we have absolutely come to terms with the fact that the crossroads is one we will get to and we will be able to choose how we cross it.
And our culture veers away from both of those. And we sedate our lives and ignore the fact that we're going to die until we're in the hospice. And someone says, I'm sorry, that's not in my remit. And when you take this out to people, is this a thread that is lifted up - the nature of life and the choices around death, and where does it take people?
Sam: Thank you for sharing that image. I think I'm still in the position and I hope I always can say something like this - the position between who I am and am becoming, and who I was, and the shape of both of those worlds. And I think for anyone listening, if the image of a nurse saying, it's beyond my remit to play with how to die, if that's, if that fizzed, if there was some physical response to that, that to me might be something of either you know it well, and you are playing here and you, you are already familiar with it, but if it feels new, that to me is the calling of this stuff.
That feeling of how, that's the question we asked ourselves when our, when our boy was in the first year or so of his life. And that was the reckoning. That was it. He could have died and also a version of him was not what we were expecting. Our lives had changed forever. Something had gotten, or something had been let go. It died. And wrapping this back up in the point of the horse without agency, one of the things that I think is most powerful about this opportunity is allowing the multitudes to be in the body. So there are these kind of four levels of belonging around mythology broadly.
I mean, there's a thousand, but that we play with: place - a sense of belonging within the place that you are in, physically, a sense of belonging within a broader culture or a broader story, a sense of belonging in your own story. You know, getting down with your own weird story is one of the things that Martin Shaw used to talk about.
Um, we all think our origin stories aren't worth telling. A bit boring. But you know, there's that. And then, and then the fourth layer, which I think is the gateway. And one of the most powerful ideas is feeling belonging in your own body.
And that's something to do with if there's a horse without agency and a story for you, where does that live in your body and how does it respond to the other actors within the story?
On a more basic level, what if there is a rash part of you and a rationalist part of you, and they just refuse to make an accord? What does it mean? Where do they live in your body? What is it to accept in a story, even if you are a mother of three? And the story's about a mother of three. You can let that part of course play there, but what happens if the mother is in you and the three are in you and the trees are in you and the ogre is in you and the wolf is in you.
And the stepping in allows the multitude of self and, and then starts coming. The multitude of all, and the gentleness of well Thich Naht Hanh talks about a flower being made of non-flower elements. Everything that is a flower, is not a flower simultaneously, and that's what starts happening.
You asked the question about, I don't think agency and death is such a fine point. I don't know. I'd have to investigate that more deeply. But death generally, when we hold this work- and I say ‘we’ meaning Recalling Fire - when we hold this work, grief is a necessary aspect and if grief is loving what isn't here and gratitude is loving what is here, they're just the deeper capacities for love more broadly. And it's back to that uncertainty again, holding the uncertainty of it rather than looking to solve the uncertainty. Resilience is an ability to be within the thing, not to get to the end of the thing. And I think if agency and death is a question that can be held by imagery and symbolism and horses and wolves and it's an Excalibur and the daftness and gentle pouty face of Merlin.
Manda: that feels somewhat different to my Merlin.
Sam: I'm curious as well though - the question about the agency of death…are we talking about initiation?
Manda: I see death as an initiation, yes. In the teaching that I have, if we take it down to its bare bones, it suggests that if we can have a sense of who we are from when we fall asleep to when we wake, and within that not control the dream time, I'm not interested in lucid dreaming and my ego taking control, but I can hold the thread of a question through the dream time - then there is a potential that I will be able to have a sense of who I am and hold the thread of a question. And the question is always, ‘What do you want of me?’
Through the process of dreaming where our culture, particularly part of the job of any shamanic practitioner can be psycho-pomping, which is helping the loss to be less lost. And our culture, a lot of our culture, we get very lost at the point of death and after death because we have no training of what happens and how we might navigate the lands beyond life and the pathways West of the Sunset and helping people just to move with grace through that space is part of what we do.
And so it feels to me that there's choices to move on or to stay lost, and that's a really clear choice. And that choosing to stay lost can often be being tied up with the stories that we told ourselves that were not necessarily true and were not necessarily even our stories.
Manda: A lot of what we're learning in is the extent to which our stories of loss and lack are inherited. They can come down many, many, many generations. And then the parts of us that get hooked into those can be very loud and very strident in their maintaining of those stories. And what I'm feeling from you in, in my body, in my heart, in the sense of energy that we are creating - I don't want to head up into the neurophysiology and the trauma healing and all of that - is that there's a magic in mythology, in the building of different maps that could help those parts to let go of the old stuff that has nothing to do with the life that I live now and could be 10,000 years old, however long since we were last really genuinely an initiation culture, who knew ourselves to be an integral part of the web of life. And in the letting go of those stories opens the door to the potential for deaths to be yet another rite of passage, and that if I have undertaken other rites of passage, clear-eyed, and with an open heart and a full heart, and a strong heart, and a clear heart, then a rite of passage isn't a frightening thing.
Each one takes me to places I have never been because that's the nature of rite of passage, but at least the process is one that I can meet with grace and joy and wonder and awe, and that sense of, ah, wow, the world is unfolding again.
Manda: How does that fit with your way of mapping the myths?
Sam: I think it's really interesting. I agree with you that ultimately and fundamentally there is a, there is a, the bottom line for me is belonging and. Asking a question to a group of participants of where do you belong and how deep the wells of a question like that are the sense of belonging you, you could say, sits on a parallel journey to the question of lostness.
But I think going back to the original metaphor of the mountain leaders, there's an admission of lostness first. I think becoming lost is one of the best things we could possibly do in modernity. I mean that geographically. I mean that in terms of myth, David White says that you know, you're on the right path when it disappears in front of you – that the sense of being lost is the way to belonging. And back to the mountain leaders - we are already lost in adverted commas could be lost in adverted commas and convincing ourselves we are not is the the biggest challenge.
And you describing this traumatic practice of becoming unlost, but I think the admission of lostness is really well connected even to the story of, of elderhood and animism. And there's a part of me which believes that no person raised without elders could ever fully become elder themselves. The same as, as someone who's raised rationalist, probably couldn't ever become fully animist. But the job then is pretending well enough and being able to say, look, we are modelling this, we're doing the best we can.
And it's a multi-generational response to this multi-generational wounding, but the position of anyone, being full and complete, and I know where I am and I'm not lost, and I'm this thing…I'm becoming more and more sceptical of that position. So I think it's really lovely how we're doing sort of double speak around the word lost and it feels like a really interesting place to be in of what, what is lost? What is unlost?
Manda: Yeah. does it relate to something ancient, and how does it relate to the ideas of modernity and whatever being clever and successful and right mean these days? And to what extent is that changing? This feels like it's opening up a lot. Again, everything you say, Sam opens doors. And so I'm exploring the feeling of lost and certainty and modernity and this idea that unless we have been raised by elders, how do we, how do we become elders in the same way? I, I think nobody can be a shaman unless they have grown in an actual shamanic culture. You can be a shamanic practitioner and that's an amazing and wonderful thing, but you're anyone who tells you they're a shaman - it's not the real thing.
However, being lost. So it's our culture, the dominant culture. I was talking to somebody a couple of weeks ago who works at the level where he is talking to heads of companies quite a lot and said that in the last six months the ideas began to take root, that the current system cannot continue.
Not that it's bad and shouldn't and isn't sustainable, and we ought to be wearing hair shirts and not flying anymore. Just that it actually physically can't, even if they wanted it to, it, it can't, it is dying. And this gives it extraordinary sense of freedom. That feels to me like watching the walls of the prison walls actually explode open.
Sam: Hmm.
Manda: And then in the lostness of that, when we have been raised as children, our domestication out of the wonderful, wild, vibrant, forager-hunter little beings that we are, when we're born into the domesticated adults, we become lucky. I'm sure you're familiar with Bill Plotkin’s work at the Animus Valley Institute and his concept that our culture is locked in early adolescence and that the severance from elders was very deliberate as many as 10,000 years ago so that they could not be a growing into elderhood so that we were going to forever be locked in early adolescence, when picking up the sword and waving it around is what you do, and, and that's appropriate to that level of our evolution. It's just not that staying there is not a clever, when one could instead evolve to being an elder, but even in a culture where Elderhood has been severed
For 2000 generations - how do we grow back to that? How do we grow back close enough to elderhood that the next generation is closer and the next generation closer still, and maybe in five, 10 generations there are actual genuine elders? And so if being lost as a gift, I think that feels real for me. And it feels as if it's emergent from what you're saying. And we don't want to replace it with new certainties because the only thing one could say about the certainties with any certainty is that they're not real.
So, if we were talking to these masters of the universe who have until now believed that they knew exactly where they were going and what success looked like and how reality was shaped, and we can come and it's already evident that this is not the case. How do we create the fluidity for life to live through us?
Sam: I'd like to invoke one of the first things I said, which is about naming and kenning and making a perfect attempt. Before I say anything in response to so big a question, I have some senses. One of my favourite phrases was offered to me by a friend. He said, ‘Wisdom isn't learning something new. It's being reminded of what you've always known.’
Sam: And I work with leaders. I facilitate groups. I work with young people - it's the writing in the middle of the stick of rock. This doesn't seem to be something which is individualized. There’s something about the centre of the work that I've been writing about and holding space for over the last couple of years around elderhood. The very fine point of that is how do you accept a compliment? Really seems small, but it's taken quite a long time to get there as a, simple mechanism to play with the idea of, of what we're playing in here.
And it came off the back of listening to rabbi and spiritual elders, Salman Shaar Shami. He's got an audio piece you can listen to where he talks about the work of Eldering and why we're struggling. And he says to the seminar room that if we put all the 90 year olds in the front row and then the 80 year olds and then a few rows of 70 year olds, he says, how are you going to be in your bodies receiving that grace?
How are you going to accept that level of grace? What is the challenge of our skilled, beautiful, experienced life, lived by older people to accept grace and feel my whole body still responding to how bereft we are of the exchange between human beings in our culture to be able to offer and receive grace, to be able to say something beautiful to somebody and for them to not either throw it over their shoulder or deflect it back to you or say anything other than, ‘You’re welcome.’
Sam: How, what does that say about the person who can use a phrase like that? How much of their own self are they able to love? How enough can they feel to be able to use a phrase like that?
And it's hooked up to the word pride for me. It's hooked up to, to what the nodes of success are in our society. What it is to be successful. We don’t want to self-aggrandize, but also we don’t want to be demure. That's one side of it. And the other side is claiming everything I did this, it was all me. There's a showboat aspect and a shrinking violet aspect. And somewhere in the middle is something about standing in the power. And then I think there's something about fostering people. Older people I'm interested in, not entirely, but at large, being able to disconnect their popularity from their opinion as a main function of elderhood, to be able to say, ‘This is bonkers. We've gone mad. Let's sit in front of parliament with a sign that I know will get me arrested’. The symbols of it happening, calling out elephants in the room so that we can start moving towards a place of holding uncertainty in a place where people who have had some life experience, are able to hold the frame, to hold the line, to be able to, to bring to bear how many times uncertainty has borne out benefit in their lives. And I love invoking Bronnie Ware here. Um, I'm sure you've come across ‘The top five regrets of the dying’, an article she wrote that exploded across the internet. And the number one regret, these people that she'd been listening to on the deathbeds was, ‘I wish I'd been lived a life true to myself, not a life others expected of me.’
So it's this simultaneous disconnect between knowing, being certain and being uncertain, being found, and being lost. And this endless need to be performative and please people and hit sweet spots so that people feel safe enough to be this wisdom isn't learning something new, it's being reminded of what you've always known.
And there's something of the grownups doing, some remembering of what they've always really known and rejecting some of the, the, the really new ideas and some of the less new ideas about what success means.
Manda: And being heard.
Sam: This is the other side of it, and the part of the reason I'm really fascinated by your work is whether it’s a requirement of modernity for individuals to experience crisis and trauma in order that they have a becoming, have a sense of initiation because we don't have the culture and the broader agreements around that being normal, yet we haven't for many years, is it a requirement for us to have in our trauma culture, to have these moments of crisis and trauma in order to want to move towards someone to bless, to offer grace to?
And if that's a yes, then is the work less about going out and finding youngers to be an elder to, and is it more about acknowledging that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Is it more about making the most nourishing source of water we possibly can for when there is a readiness to drink and we just rely on the unfolding crisis and trauma to, to, to enable that.
Manda: That is a really interesting question. What's your feeling? I have ideas, but where does it take you?
Sam: I work with a group called Abandoned Brothers, so I'm a mentor within this charity, which works with young men who are at risk of or already involved in the criminal justice system. And the broad line across that they have had no good male role models in their lives has led them to that largely in the care system.
We work with the whole process of rite of passage, so there's an initiation moment. There's elders, and we work with mythology and they have several days away without phones, so you don't know that you're going to be okay all the way through, you sign the disclaimer, all that sort of business, as many things as we can do to make it real. And in that instance, the young men we work with, they are hitting moments of crisis. They're being dropped by our systems. They're tantamount to someone on their deathbed asking the nurse to help them how to die. And being told, sorry, no, we don't have that.
So the only working manifest model I have does have that as a prerequisite. Yes. That there's a breaking point. And my own work, what I'm interested in an the dichotomy I have is that myth is you've either got a taste for it or it's a bit silly. It's either kind of Tolkien or the Avengers or Disney or it's either that you are in and you'll, be in with a storyteller and there's a sense of enjoying mythology or it's kind of held arms length.
When somebody says, once upon a time, that's the time for the adults to leave the room and let the children be dazzled by the person in the silly hat with a shaky stick. And there's something of this work and this conversation whereby I think someone who wouldn't normally move towards mythology being given some of the images within it, might find their way without it needing to be a manifest crisis trauma moment.
And increasingly, I told you I studied at Dartington College of Arts, that was about uncertainty. My son was born masses of uncertainty. Mythology is uncertainty. The facilitation work that I do is uncertainty and the fullness of this work will be that if I'm doing it right, I'll get phone calls. I'm not saying this happens yet, I'm saying in the future from people who have tried things, maybe coaching, maybe therapy, maybe offsites with their leadership teams, maybe they've been to a conference and something has moved for them and then they've got home and they've forgotten what the thing was that was moving, but, then they'll call somebody like me or you and, and say, ‘You know what? I'm willing to have an emergency contact number, a good pair of boots and a compass and not know what else is going to happen for four days.’
So I do think that if there's a curiosity about placing oneself into a position of uncertainty, maybe that's another way as well. So I'm interested in your take, but my semi-shaped answer is that uncertainty is important. I go around the world trying to foster uncertainty everywhere I can. And I think that gentle invitation for some might be enough, but I don’t know.
Manda: And as this year unfolds, everyone's capacity to hold onto certainty is going to be shaken loose. Last year, it was possible. After this year, I don't think it will be. And one of the things that arose when you were talking about moments of crisis is I don't know how I would go about finding someone in our culture who is not experiencing a string of moments of crisis - you couldn't do the control of that.
What everyone defines as crisis would necessarily be different. But I'm remembering Gabor Maté's book, The Myth of Normal. I haven't met anybody who, who has not considered themselves to be perpetually hopping from one crisis to the next. Clearly, some of them are very global north crises, but that doesn't stop them being deeply felt by the person involved.
I was listening to a coaching podcast the other day and somebody was saying they were talking about coaching business, but that what we need to remember is that in every chief executive who's making very bad decisions, there is a five-year-old melting down. And we forget. And we think because this guy has the power suit and the big car and the Rolex and the capacity to sack everybody, that they've somehow done all the work and of course they haven't.
And probably less than the janitors, or at least potentially less than the janitors. And so opening the doors to that feels to me that what you're doing with mythology, I'm really interested that you say people walk away from mythology. And I think one of the things that perhaps we can normalize is the fact that mythology is the sea that we swim in. The death cult of predatory capitalism is its own mythology. GDP must keep rising is a mythology. Strong men can make good decisions, is a manifestly broken mythology. Mythology is, myths are the maps that we live by and they are of necessity, not the territory. And as I am just in awe of your mountain leaders pointing out that when you're lost, the last thing you do is look at the map.
What you do is find where you are and don't draw your own maps. And even drawing maps is such an act of magic. I imagine being the first human being who thought that I take a stick and draw perhaps on the sand, on the cave floor that the river's here and there's a little set of stones there and you can walk across it.
And it's much easier than trying to swim across here. Mapping is a magical thing, and yet knowing that the map is not the territory is crucial. And it seems to me a lot of the dysfunction of our current culture is not recognizing the myths as myths and then also thinking that they are the territory and, and maintaining this bizarre mindset.
It is breaking down so fast. I don't watch the news, but I get it filtered through on social media of a particular style, particularly in politics of rhetorical questioning that takes. As given a very, very narrow boundary set of realities. And then along comes Zach Polanski to your average political TV pundit and blows apart their preconceptions. And you can see the, the panic in their eyes. They genuinely don't know where to go because for them, that is the world and they got the job because that is their world. If they had questioned it, they would not be there. But now you've got somebody who has the legitimacy of having had a huge amount of votes cast. And in our culture, part of the mythology is that this gives you a right to speak. And this person – Zach – is pointing out that this particular bit of the map is just not worth having anymore. And it opens doors in ways that need to be opened and that have not here before been opened because nobody's who knew that had the soapbox from which to speak it.
So I'm guessing that in your world you can shape myths in ways that the adults don't feel they need to leave the room.
Sam: Yes, and well caught. I think it being more specific, oral storytelling is the mechanism by which people dare to move.
Manda: like when you were at Dartington and Martin Shaw was already there and you were busy ignoring the posters, telling you about this guy who could tell stories
Sam: Yeah, well the football was on. Come on. Exactly.
Manda: Sam, you so don't look like a football person.
Sam: No, I was – and now I’m not. But I think that’s really well said. Thank you. And loving seeing somebody like Zach Polanski not have to speak in tongues. It’s really fascinating. But I think the key point for me, and what I mean by ken - at least one of the things I mean by mytho cartography is how we are engaging with our maps.
That's the bit, so agree. Making maps is magic and beautiful. And I'm really fascinated by this. You’re about to tell me that you already know somebody doing this. I'm fascinated by the idea of maps, which are scaled based on how long it takes for a certain being to move through them. So for example, what would it be to draw on that, where the bog, and it's from a human perspective, the bog is huge, but the road is tiny.
Even if the one is a foot across and the other one's four miles, how long, how much time or something?
Manda: I don't actually know anyone who's already doing this, but I think it's a very interesting door you're opening and we should be doing it together.
Sam: Yeah. Well, great. Let's explore - What does bird’s eye mean? And then, we're into, what's the purpose of the map? The point I make in the essay is that OS Maps – which are gold standard, beautiful, and I love them – and they've given me all sorts of access to the world – but they were originally commissioned by the Ministry of Defence equivalent in the time, so what was the point of that map? What's the point of the map of no belonging that flops out of the industrial revolution and so on. I've got two examples that sit right side by side.
One is back to the mountain leader guys, just as you said. What they say is, if you're really lost, the first thing to do is put your map down and be in the world. What can you see? What can you smell? What can you hear? What can you touch? What can you taste? What's your proprioception doing? What's your belly doing?
What's your heart doing? What can you choose to mean life as I experience it, which is a non-negotiable that I expect to see represented on this map. And if it's not on this map, I reject the map. Look up, look at the map. It's not on there. It might be as simple as saying, oh, there was a bridge over there.
I don't see a bridge on my map, so I'm not going to believe the map anymore. And how does that scale up to, to, to global? What, what, what is it to say? I believe a good life to be connected to the way I treat the people I physically live nearby.
Sam: My neighbours are important to me. I know that that's a remembering, that's a wisdom thing, huh?
The map doesn't have anything to say about that supports that. Maybe I can reject this idea. So how we might take the metaphor of the map is not the territory and use it to as a continuous tool of re-engagement with the map and the map choices we're making.
That's the one. And the other is this phrase, when I work with associates and friends and myth makers and, and it goes all the way up and down from the nature people to the consultants. It's, it's beautiful. I have a, I have an agreement that we make, which is that we won't use the phrase, ‘mythology’
Sam: And so that, that it's a, it's a small thing, but it sets out my stall for where I am. First of all. I don't think it's possible to use mythology. I think they're, they're bigger than us. They're broader than us. They're more contained than us.
They're also within us. We're entrenched in it. But also it's the decentralization of the human aspect of, you know, the, the, the, to, to know something, to get a handle on, to apprehend, to get these ideas of domination of, there's nothing in the natural world that has a handle on it.
The second that you say you're going to get a handle on something, you've de-analysed it. It's no longer allowed to be. It’s a human thing that has human appendages and wings and gills and petals, but no handles. And so there's something about the language and beautifullyyou might already have gone down this track, but etymologically speaking, understand the roots of the word.
Understand. I had this moment going along one day where I realized the word that had defined how I engaged with the world understand was a nonsense word. Understand is the word we use to mean that we kind of have a sense of things, but the, the middle English is actually more closely related to stand within, which to me is more evocative of a whirlwind or a hedge, or an experiential something which is moving all around me
Manda: Yeah. Or a forest. Or a river, or…
Sam: right, right, right. And so I'm much more happy with the word understand. And then stepping back to where I started that to use mythologies and to use maps, if by definition you are calling them resources, which are to be used and therefore will have been used, what does that do to be a user of something?
What's that? What kind of an engagement with anything in life is that? And what is it to decide there is such a thing as a resource? And how does that underpin the whole conversation around metrics and polycrisis?
Manda: And to what extent then do we begin to pick apart our language? Nate Higgins had Indy Johar on the Great Simplification a while ago, and he always asked the question at the end of, if you could wave a magic wand, what would you change? And Indy said, ‘I would change it so that everybody used verb based languages and instead of noun-based languages, which is fine, but you can't change that overnight. We could all learn Lakota eventually, but we wouldn't have the Lakota mindset. You can't just change the language. The language is in our bones. And I have great respect for people who can speak seven languages and can fluidly dream in all of them differently. But the language of the meta-crisis at this moment is English.
Sam: Yes.
Manda: I am sure it can be translated into French and German and all of the other Western European languages, but there is something about English that has been brought into service of a particular way of being and in the richness of whoever it was who said that English is the language where seven languages walk down a dark alley and English walks out the other end on the rest of your life to tatters at the back.
It's so rich in terms of the sourcing and as you said, middle English evolves. It's an evolutionary language that drew on many, many, many, many roots. And I love English. I love working with the threads of it and the feel of it, and so how can we make it a full-hearted language without necessarily saying we have to be verbing everything? This feels like this is probably podcast number two because I'm aware that we're already way over time, so perhaps we leave that one of how do we take the wonder that is the language that we grew up with and in the same way, I'm on a quest of how do we stop being ashamed of being human because that's not useful. And that's what we've been offered so much particularly by very well-meaning people who understand the metacrisis. But shaming people for being who we are is not, not going to help. How do we become, how do we evolve to be in a world where being human is a source of great genuine pride?
In that pride that arises from, I feel respect from the energies that I respect the human and the more than human, I am being something worthy of respect. And that gives me a sense of pride. How do we, how do we generate the groundswell? It feels to me that that stories are the warp and the left of the tapestry of who we are. And knowing them as stories opens them up and lets there be new stories and and however you are reaching people, Sam, it feels to me as if you are opening the stories to being and belonging and heart opening in ways that will allow new stories to emerge that we have no idea what they are. If we could tell what they were, we'd already be there and we're not. How is, that landing? We are going to have to close soon, I would like to talk to you forever actually, but we'll definitely come back for another go a little bit about the story of the moment. How does that land with
Sam: Bless you for reigning us in before the six hour mark. I think I heard you just say the language of the meta crisis is English, and I just think that's in and of itself an extraordinary poem: to speak to the encounter of this experience. I think just to touch on it, and maybe these are just way markers for another time, but Tolkien said at some point that tree isn't a good enough word for tree, and I am interested in telling my son that the tree is tree despite whatever shame id hooked up in there, whatever mistakes we we're making or codifying or that accepting that that's part of the deal, and part of the process rather than something to be thrown out and discarded. And it is about fostering the multi-generational, I think it is about, it is about little steps now to see how they might unfold later on. I want to invoke Tristan and Isolda quickly.
So Tristan and Isolde is the Cornish story which obsessed medieval Europe and inspired Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet. And there is something extraordinary about the, the watersheds of Europe.
Tristan and Isolde stays within one flow scape, one space one territory beyond culture, beyond geography, beyond county
Manda: kind of like a bio region. Are we, are we mythological bio regions?
Sam: Yes, exactly. You know, the Welsh word, hiraeth.
Manda: Yes.
Sam: Well, there's a Cornish version, which is Hi-earth, the same word. But, I have a Cornish friend who has some beautiful re reconfiguring of how we've missed maybe part of the essence of what we think we mean when we say here is an untranslatable Welsh word, which means something to do with nostalgia for a home that you never had or something like that.
And he goes, oh, wait a minute, you've said it's untranslatable, and then translated it and moved on. So he comes back to some of that and he's the one who's sharing some of these images of potential bio region, which the story of Tristan and Isolde is contained within. Now the point I'm making is Tristan and Isolde is something that we know Wagner has worked with. It's a vague romance that we have a God being so liberal with the word we there. There is something in the culture around what Tristan and Isolde is or could be in the same way that there is for King Arthur. And in my investigation of it, it's taken me full circle down, down into this place, down into where I am, down into the sense that Rivers used to be so beautiful that they were hard to talk about, and that the experience of goddess was something about putting your forehead down on the ground and submitting rather than full face up to the sky and proclaiming something like that.
And it's all living in one of the most beautiful and brutal, tragic romances I've ever come across. And so there is a, ‘Hey, if you like storytelling, this is interesting.’ There's a, ‘If you come from anywhere near this place or the sense of, I don’t know what place is, it's a layer down’. If there's something of, ‘there are definitely parts in me, which I don’t know how or why they speak to each other in the way that they do and I feel something first thing in the morning and I feel aggravated some part of some days. And there's a pattern in me which is, I don’t know who I am at 11:00 AM because I've had so many meetings happening…’ There's something about orienting deeply to the self within a story like this and it's just on the edge of something. We generally, culturally engagement with movies and books and it's on the edge of something we know about. It's on the edge of something we have access to and that's what I'm interested in representing. That's what I'm standing for and that's why speaking with somebody like you and the world that you are in goes beyond this sense of, Hey, how can, how can story help us with some of the problems we already know about and move into how, what has mythology got to do with helping us see the things we don't even know we're facing?
I have a strange feeling in my body about the way things are and the way that culture is. I don’t know what that is. That's the calling towards mythology. That's the calling towards oral storytelling. That's the calling towards something way older than we even need to bother trying to understand. But just letting it in the next step is if you feel overwhelmed, go outside, lift your shirt up and put your stomach down on the soil. That's the next step.
Manda: Thank you.
Manda: I think that's a brilliant place to stop. Actually, Sam, we could talk all day. We could have the six hour podcast and maybe sometime we'll come back and do the other four hours and the remaining 10 hours after that. But for now, I think go outside, lie on the ground, connect your skin to the soil. It feels a good place to stop. Thank you for all that you are and do. This feels really, really as if whole new maps are opening up and whatever we do with the metaphor of the map, it feels really generative. Thank you.
Sam: Hmm. Thank you. Thanks for the, for the generosity of spirit as well and the openness all the way through. Let's see how it unfolds.