Question the Path, Child

A story for a personal & collective rite of passage

May 23, 2025

Don’t! Keep to the path.
Don’t… Keep to the path.
…Don’t keep to the path.
Don’t keep to the path, child.

Katrice Horsley
, Stepping Off the Path

Last week, I shared that my nearest and dearest ones are simply not OK.

In my daughters, I see the painful paradox of modernity: being both bored and busy. They’re “good students” who come home from school with their batteries utterly drained. It feels like it happened overnight, and as if it’s been a long time coming, all at once. No matter how we strive to offer both rest and stimulation outside of school, they never seem to recover enough to make Monday morning seem like anything but a cruel, cruel chore.

A friend of mine who sought alternative education options for her own family helped me find some clarity on just why my kids seem uniquely incapable of getting along in the public school paradigm. It’s about their individual needs and temperament, of course, but it’s also about the way we raised them.

My children were brought up within the system, but we also gave them the tools to spot (and name) the flaws inherent to the system.

I couldn’t give them enough myth and magic to avoid all the pain, but I seem to have given them enough to be aware of when they’re hurting.

Another tricky paradox…

Myth Work Is a Response to Personal & Collective Polycrisis

By definition, the polycrisis is about… just about everything.

To try to talk about a personal polycrisis is probably laughable (and perhaps in poor taste), but I think we all have those days when we can relate. Perimenopausal moms raising teenagers to meet an uncertain future while juggling work, plus the management of extended familial and friend networks, and the community responsibilities that invariably fall to women in heterosexual marriages…. We certainly get it.

And this is all up against the backdrop of the actual, not at all laughable, polycrisis.

Adam Tooze, a Columbia University history professor and public intellectual, is quoted in The Guardian: “In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”1

And so, even when you do the work you love and double down on the spiritual practice , even then you treat your body like the beloved temple it is and you do your part to take action against injustices of all kinds… when the people and the planet you love is in peril, it’s hard not to be shook to the core.

I turn to mythology (and this week in particular, fairy tale) because I need a strong but supple set of stories to hold onto. I do the work that I do because I know in my bones that we all need a forest of old growth tales to support us.

In moments like these, when the collective path seems to be leading us toward climate collapse, fascism, and alienation from so much of what really matters, ancestral stories can help us look at—and question—the path that’s been set before us.

Myth, folklore, and fairytales (before modern prettification) can empower us to break the old conventions that demand we stick to the path at any cost.

Stepping Off the Path

This week on KnotWork Myth & Storytelling, Katrice Horsley brings us a reimagining of a story you probably know well. It’s a chance to hear “What big teeth you have, Grandmother” in an entirely new context.

And, it’s a chance to consider “the path” in a fresh, ruddy light.

Whether you’re raising girls and seek to help them see the holy in the menstrual cycle, or whether you’re encountering the riddle of wildness and so-called respectability in your own life, this story feels like essential listening right now.

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Through a guided journey, writing prompts, and conversation, you’ll encounter the key mythic landscapes that source your creativity and shape your voice.

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