Fall Fallowturn Moon
The further I go on the ancientrail of aging the more I seem to travel further back in time. Ancient Greece and ancient China right now, ancient Celtic and Roman life, too. Something about the mythic, even the stories of Genesis, Kings, Matthew, Acts. Those misty days when human life and the sacred life reached out and shook hands, strolled together, loved together, fought together.
(source)
I suppose this could be a desire to escape the Obama/Romney symptom of our deep political sickness. Or to dodge the careening environmental disaster that we seem determined to advance. Maybe it’s about setting aside the present for an imagined richer past.
But I don’t think so. To follow the struggle of the Warring States period in China, a time when a hundred flowers bloomed, to know that out of awful violence can come human and humane wisdom. To watch the consolidation of those same states into one and then follow those states as they transform, yet always hold onto the thread of culture. To listen to the epic poets Homer and Hesiod sing the tales of adventure, gods, heroes, treachery, betrayal and vengeance. Rebellion and revolution among the earliest offspring of earth and sky, chasm and eros. To embrace the never vanished sacred bond linking you and me to the land, the stars. To see Gawain as he puts his head down to receive his blow from the Green Knight.
The Roman epic poets Virgil and Ovid, spilling stories onto their pages with extravagance, a flood, a tsunami of narrative, history and myth all laced together. Adam and Eve fled east of Eden. Solomon and David. Jesus at Gethsemane.
These are the foundations of our cultures. The base narratives against which we understand love, war, justice, deceit, fate, doom. The base narratives with which we dance our identities in the ballroom of the cosmos.
(lucas cranach the elder)
To study them is to learn the human language.
