Maintaining Mythic Consciousness in the Age of Air Travel

The Fool, the Poet, and the Airship over Clonmacnoise

Yesterday morning, a wet, white blanket hung heavy on the neighbor’s forsythia.

All the while, six faraway palm trees shiver in a tropical breeze.

A handful of days ago, I woke beside the Caribbean Sea, more deep slate blue than turquoise, but exquisite all the same.

This morning, the Hudson Valley daffodils seem weary with the memory of spring snow.

Now, I find myself combing airfares, longing for Galway in the summer heat.

Oh, the wonders we take for granted, a couple of decades into this new millennium.

It’s a strange and awesome thing, this ability to soar through the planet’s atmosphere and inhabit a new climate in a matter of hours. We’re accustomed to this, of course. We’re generations into the great revolution of commercial aviation. The planet has been shrinking for years thanks to the glorious, terrible magic of jet fuel. 

In the twenty-first century, to marvel at the miracle of flight is quaint and strange.

But, I find that living a life according to myth, and believing in my bones that the oldest stories are medicine for our modern maladies opens me to these sublime, “gee whiz” moments.

These moments are both destabilizing and revelatory - if you let them be. 

The good stuff, the real stuff, happens when we pause to realize how very new and raw this power of global travel is. This ability to arrive in an entirely new corner of the world after mere hours of aeronautical annoyance would have astonished our ancestors in the sense of the original Greek word - astonished, as in not merely surprised, but feeling something as visceral as thunderstruck.

This idea of living according to myth isn’t just about reading lots of old stories and maintaining an active fantasy life. 

A myth-shaped life asks you to fully embrace the unjaded power of The Fool. 

Can you embody that tabula rasa archetype that shines with the wholeness of zero consciousness and takes the first steps into the new universe at the start of a tarot deck?

Can you let it change you and the way you live, allowing yourself to be both in the flow and in wise opposition to “the way the world is now”?

I find myself on the other side of our family vacation to Jamaica feeling just a little bit utterly transformed. 

(There’s more to say about the ways that US corporations have gobbled up and walled off the prettiest portions of nearby countries in order to blend just enough exoticism with the expected comforts of the American way, and also about the beauty and warmth of the Jamaican people, but that’s a piece for another day.)

I find myself falling out of time thanks to a tiny bit of global travel, and it feels like coming home and being reborn all at once.

As my own white dog and I reacquainted ourselves with the neighborhood over the last few days, I found I was stepping out with The Fool’s stride. Inspired by the contrast of snow burdened blossoms and the fresh memory of a tropical morning, I was doing the work of re-membering the mundane beauty, the out-of-the-ordinary experiences, and elusive slivers of memory. 

Somewhere, sometime, the medieval scribes who recorded their life and times in the Irish annals spoke of men in airships, didn’t they?

It was a bit of trivia I would have stumbled across in a book or a college classroom, in the years when the internet was new and Google hadn’t really begun to index it all. And because this is the way of our synchronistic, interwoven universe, I found exactly what I was looking for in the year 2000: in a commencement speech given by the Nobel laureate, the poet Seamus Heaney.

Poets are our wisest fools.

Mr. Heaney invited 25,000 worldly souls gathered at University of Pennsylvania’s graduation to wonder with him about how  “the veil trembles more mysteriously if you are graduating in the year 2000.”

In the long arc of history, twenty-four years is barely time for an exhale. We’re all children of the millennium, regardless of what personal milestone we stood beside in 2000. We’re all still pulling back that mysterious, trembling veil. 

Here’s how Mr. Heaney describes the story, which inspired his poem below:

One day the monks of Clonmacnoise were holding a meeting in the church, and as they were deliberating they saw a ship sailing over them in the air, going as if it were on the sea. When the crew of the ship saw the meeting and the inhabited place below them, they dropped anchor and the anchor came right down to the floor of the church and the priests seized it. A man came down out of the ship after the anchor and he was swimming as if he were in water, till he reached the anchor; and they were dragging him down then. "For God's sake, let me go," said he, "for you are drowning me." Then he left them, swimming in the air as before, taking his anchor with him.

And his reflection:

I have been entranced with this story ever since I first read it, and I take it to be a kind of dream instruction, a parable about the necessity of keeping the lines open between the two levels of our being, the level where we proceed with the usual life of the meeting and the decision, and the other level where the visionary and the marvelous present themselves suddenly and bewilderingly. 

We must, in other words, be ready for both the routine and the revelation. Never be so canny as to ignore the uncanny.

A moment so uncanny, the earth shook

It just so happens that the uncanny forced herself into the collective awareness as I wrote this: an earthquake shook the house - and much of the northeast - just this morning. Its epicenter in New Jersey is not far from where my 101 year-old grandfather lives.

Grandpa, a man of science and faith, a WWII naval vet who has traveled to six continents (and lived on four) declared the 4.7 quake “a surprise” and “a rare experience!”

The canny and the uncanny. The mythic and the mundane. The everyday miracle of flight. The earth’s insistence that we remember the mysteries concealed beneath her crust, even as we hold space for the miracles in the skies.

Print by James Dodds, inspired by Heaney’s Lightenings viii

Lightenings, viii.

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
‘This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'

The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.' So
The did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.