I Spent the Week in the Wasteland, and I Feel FIIIIIIINNNNE

This message is grounded in hope. And, Arthurian Legend. And, also, in the wasteland.

This week, I began listening to The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Maté. 

And, after hearing a snippet of a Fresh Air interview with Virginia Sole-Smith about her new book, Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, I felt I needed to start that one, too.

(If it seems too triggering to listen to a conversation about how to discuss weight with kids while you’re driving your thirteen year-old to dance class, it’s clear you need to read the damn book, right?)

And, this week in the Heroine’s Knot community, the group where we make this “myth is medicine” project real, I guided us on a journey into the heart of a whale.

(It was a departure from our usual format, which generally takes us deep into a mythological heroine’s story each week. Our story from the previous session left us at the edge of the sea with a great whale carcass - I shared the tale of Cana Cludhmor and the invention of the Irish harp  from season 1 of the podcast. This time, it felt right to leave the usual narratives behind and engage more directly with the more-than-human world.)

We explored the mystery of these magnificent creatures, their age and enormity, the way they are so perfectly designed for the element of water. And, we also wrestled with the sorrow and what we’re now coming to call “climate grief,” as we acknowledged how colonialism, commercialism, and the industrialization of production has decimated the whale population and turned vast swaths of the ocean into plastic dumps.

Sing along with me in your best Michael Stipe voice “I spent the week in the wasteland, and I feel FIIIIIIINNNNE.”

The Myth of Normal.
The Normality of the Wasteland.

Oh, my friends, there are so many routes to the wasteland. Or maybe, there are just so many vehicles pulling up to the curb to take us on an endless tour of the wasteland that has become our home.

Note: I write this from the lush spring beauty of the Hudson Valley. The streams are full, the trees are in bud, and the dandelions are ready for the pollinators. There is peace in land, and any disharmony in the neighborhood is concealed behind closed doors. These words about the wasteland are composed from the comfort of a three bedroom home with a full refrigerator. This evening, we’re looking forward to a cozy family movie night to close out a long week of work, school, sports, and school music performances.

There’s so much that is so very good in this life, and so much that fills me with hope, for my family and for our world at large, and yet… 

Bringing up the wasteland in the midst of such fortune and relative ease may just seem like hyperbole or performativity. One might say that I am stirring up trouble, seeking attention, or trying to conjure some outrage. Certainly, such rhetorical tricks and story manipulation are common enough tactics in the wasteland that passes for our media ecosystem.

But no… I’m just reporting from behind the closed door of what I truly believe to be a “happy as it gets” home in 2023 America. And I know that as green and lovely as it looks out there, it’s not right that springtime came three weeks early or that development threatens so much of the forested land we’ve loved and taken for granted for so long.

We are living in one of the nicest possible sections of the wasteland.

We are products of a world that pushes us to work too hard and stuff down emotions until they become physical maladies. We run on programming that makes us feel bad about our bodies and then splash that judgment on every body we encounter. And the comfort we experience, manufactured by everything from single use plastics to lithium batteries, is creating actual environmental wastelands for people and animals across the globe.

And that’s just giving you a snapshot of what’s going on with the white, able-bodied people who will be watching that new Peter Pan movie on the couch tonight.

The wasteland is real, and it’s here. But this isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last. I’s not inevitable nor permanent. But it’s not easy either.

When Did You First Recognize the Wasteland?

As this week’s KnotWork Storytelling guest Tara Wild describes it, the Wasteland emerges in times of imbalance - as it did in the land of the Fisher King in the times of Arthurian legend. 

It’s not just the stuff of British mythology, of course. We were born into a world out of balance—culturally, economically, environmentally. We have been raised to believe these tipped scales, these inequities are normal. We’re rewarded for contributing to the imbalance in the way we work, eat, travel, and live. (The nature of the wasteland is to render us blind to the long term consequences as we consume ourselves toward short term gains.)

In addition to the books above, this week I’ve pulled out my tattered, much-loved copy of

Sharon Blackie

’s If Women Rose Rooted, which was published in 2016. It was her work that (re)introduced many of us to this trope (and reality) of the Wasteland.

Sharon tells us the story of the rape of the Well Maidens that precipitated the devastation of the Fisher King’s realm. She tells us her own story of replicating this sort of arid, empty, desecration in her own life. She weaves in other women’s stories, and they all illustrate our collective commitment to the Myth of Normal and how it leads to the painful outcomes that Maté attributes to our culture’s widespread toxicity.

Wasteland is the hollowness inside us, for we are reflections of the hollow world we live in. To embrace it might mean that we spend our lives doing work we hate in order to feel secure, defining ourselves by that work which we're paid to do for others, wondering then why our hearts are breaking. To embrace the Wasteland might mean that we hunger for ever-grander houses and ever-smarter cars and all the latest versions of all the latest gadgets, as we try to fill the hollowness inside us with 'stuff.’ It might mean that we wrap ourselves tightly in busy-ness and noise and never-enough-time and anxiety and panic and wonder why eventually our bodies break.

• If Women Rose Rooted, Chapter 2

“What does it mean to live upon land that has lost its heart and in a society that has lost its soul?”

Tara asks this question in our conversation that follows her story, The Women of the Grail.

It’s a rhetorical question, at one level. And, it’s also a question that we are actively living each day. 

Sometimes, the answer is to ignore the toll of heartlessness and soullessness, and keep on making it through the day. 
Sometimes, the answer is to feel the anguish at all that’s been forced and all that’s been lost, and fall on our knees in grief.
Sometimes, the answer is to see it  all–the pain and toxicity, the love and the beauty–and to commit to living from the heart and reclaiming the soul in order to renew the world.

Those of us who work in the realm of mythology tend to be hopeful folks.

Even as we hold stories of destruction and death, we hold space for the transformation and rebirth. To name and claim the wasteland is not to succumb to it, but to begin to restore and re-story it.

This Week on KnotWork Storytelling

The twelfth century poet Chrétien de Troyes gives us a story of Perceval, a holy fool from the wild woods who visits the court of the Fisher King and eventually becomes the epitome of the chivalric knight.

In this retelling by Tara Wild, we meet three women, each with her own archetypal energy: the Grail Bearer, the Mourning Maiden, and the Loathly Lady. This story comes from Arthurian legend, and remains some of the only native mythology of Britain.

Our Guest

Tara Wild is a women’s educator, storyteller and songstress, focusing on uplifting nature-based feminine wisdom & ancestral teachings from Ireland & Britain. She's been on a journey of remembering and reclamation for over ten years, honoring the earth based feminine wisdom left in her blood and bones.

She's the creator of The Roundhouse, an online membership community that lovingly guides women into nature based feminine wisdom from the Irish traditions. She also runs courses, events, and workshops that serve thousands of women every year. She's trained as a Women’s Moon Circle facilitator with Moon Mná based in Dublin, Ireland, as a Keening & Breathwork facilitator.

She journeys to Ireland & Britain regularly for pilgrimage, and currently lives on the ancestral lands of the Ute and Arapaho people in the mountains of so-called Colorado (USA).

Find her on Instagram and Facebook.

Continue your journey with Tara in her upcoming Women of the Wells workshop.

Our Conversation

• The power of curiosity and the courage to ask the right question.

• This is a story of transformation and the quest for spiritual maturity, not about the materialist prize of the grail

• The archetypal energies in the story: Grail Bearer is life, the Mourning Maiden is Death, the Loathly Lady is Transformation and Rebirth.

• The wasteland - in mythology, in the landscape, and in the psyche. What does it mean to live upon land that has lost its heart and in a society that has lost its soul?

• This story invites us to encounter the wildness of The Loathly Lady and the grief of the Mourning Maiden. We tend to both embrace and reject these intense, difficult women and all they represent.

• Is the Grail Bearer voiceless, or is she the power of silence?

• Book recommendation: Circle of Stones: Woman's Journey to Herself by Judith Duerk

• Mythology offers us a map back to ourselves that helps us restore balance in ourselves and in the wider world.