The Sacred Art of Forgetting a Story

One Mythic Woman, Two Storytellers' Perspectives

I tend to fall passionately in love with a character or a story. And then, I move on. 

I need to. It’s in my own nature as a curious, voracious creative. And, it’s the nature of my work, which demands I hold space for new stories, week after week and month after month. 

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By the way, speaking of the nature of my work, you probably know about how I hold stories on the KnotWork Storytelling Podcast.

Did you also know that I’m a writing coach? Enrollment for my online writing groups is open now!

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I have grown comfortable with the forgetting.

The stories are in the archives, and, more importantly, they’re held in the gorgeous, faulty memories of my community. You are composting my ideas to create your own new narratives!

There’s something magical in meeting and learning a character. There is something sacred in the forgetting, too. 

We get to meet our characters, again, for the first time. And we can draw on the memories that have already seeped through the soil and bedrock of the mind. There’s a sort of alchemical translation that happens when you can merge your own half-remembered version and someone else’s retelling.

Meeting, Forgetting, and Remembering Cessair

More than a year ago, I wrote and shared a version of the story of Cessair on KnotWork Storytelling. According to the Book of Invasions, Lebor Gabála Érenn, she was the first person to ever set foot on Irish soil. 

I only just went back to read it this morning.

Considering I have already received and released another version of this story - Sandy Dunlop of Bard Mythologies was on KnotWork Storytelling this week to tell his Cessair tale - I probably should have gone back to it sooner.

But I wanted to come to Sandy’s story as a listener rather than a teller. I wanted to leave room for surprise and fresh perspectives. All of that would be harder if I had re-rooted myself in the way I’d seen and shaped the story in the winter of 2023.

One Mythic Woman, Two Storytellers’ Perspectives

Cessair came from Meroë, in what is now Sudan. 

Sandy’s story follows her up the Nile and through the lands and mythologies of Egypt and Babylon, all the way to the time and place of the Hebrew tribes. She is the granddaughter of Noah, and their family reunion takes place just before the flood.

Cessair and forty-nine other women, who Sandy describes as “Mothers of the World,” board their own boats. Three men, including Cessair’s father Bith and the shapeshifter named Fintan MacBochra who would make his own mark on Irish history, went along as well. 

They survived the journey, and began a life on the shores of Bantry Bay, but there was no stopping that flood. Cessair, and everyone in her party but that fishy Fintan (he transformed into a salmon), would perish beneath those waves. 

We do this myth work in order to have different takes on the story. We learn so much about culture and nature and what it means to be human in a more-than-human world. 

We learn so much about each other when we take the story from the source and bring it through our individual lens of experience.

And for me, it is straight up fun to compare the way we interpreted the details.

I invite you to spend some time with Sandy’s story this weekend. And, perhaps you’ll want to go back to the archives and find my story, too.

I’m intrigued by the way Sandy spoke of the obsession with “strong men” and my Cessair is rather flip about the ways of patriarchs. 

And I love how we both worked with “being chosen.” Sandy called Cessair, and indeed the Irish people, as “not chosen” while my Cessair says “We were looking to create a new world with what we had - our chosen community of castaways.”

I’d love to hear what comes through for you when you listen to two Cessair stories, side by side!

As ever, thank you for spending some time with KnotWork Storytelling and with Myth Is Medicine. Your attention, and your support of this work, mean the world to me.