Living on Mythic Ground: The Paradox of the Modern Day Oracle
If you’ve written a book you’ll know that people usually ask, “What’s your book about?” as soon as they hear you’re an author.
While gratified by their interest, I struggle with this question, especially in the case of my latest book Piko: A Return to the Dreaming, which has multiple narrative threads and subjects, all focused around two small bodies of water, anchialine ponds fed by underground tides in the Place of Refuge near my home in Honaunau on Hawai’i Island.
If you have a copy, you can read storyteller and author Martin Shaw’s description of Piko: “A modern woman’s search for mythic ground,” on the back cover. I thought this sounded marvelous when I read it, a perfect sound byte, and wished I’d come up with it. This is was how I’d introduce the book next week at my reading at the local bookstore.
Being me, this quickly got complicated because I started thinking about the meaning of the statement. What is mythic ground? It sounded great, but would most people in this day and age get it? Would people in the audience at the Kona Stories Words and Wine Event on a Tuesday evening understand what mythic ground was? I started riffing in my notebook and pretty soon had an hour’s lecture, instead of the 15 minutes the bookstore had asked for. Some editing was going to be required. Time to turn myself back into a sound byte.
I’m the kind of writer who discovers what I know by writing. Generally, I don’t have ideas before I begin writing. I discover them through the process of writing itself. In the contemporary New Age spiritual community this is called channeling. In other times, people like me were called oracles. I usually don’t think of myself this way because everything I hear sounds like me speaking inside of my head, not some dramatic Delphic priestess or extraterrestrial from Arcturus. Maybe my ideas do come from another star system or an underground steam vent, but I’ve never had any guides show up and say they were from anywhere else besides my own head. I needed to figure out what I knew about mythic ground by writing it down, letting thoughts flow and giving them form in words. Here’s what I discovered:
Mythic ground is not a place. It’s a relationship. Multiple relationships, in fact. To stand on mythic ground is to be embedded in webs of time and space orbiting the unknown. Mythic ground does not make sense to the rational mind conditioned by Newtonian physics and the Gregorian calendar. It is decidedly not linear, and the space it moves through is full of wormholes that shoot us into other dimensions while still inhabiting the one body given to us by our ancestors. Mythic time is a paradox that can be touched, skin to stone, bones that know things beyond the body’s limits, but always embodied. Mythic time always exists. It’s the true here and now.
Linear time is a way of measurement, useful as an organizing principle that helps us accomplish tasks and create in the physical. It can also give meaning to our days, hopefully deepening our appreciation of our limited time on earth, attuning us to the poignancy of existence where all we love will one day turn to dust. Mythic time is not linear. Seven years can pass in one night in the forest. Mythic time may seem destabilizing, but it’s a tool, a way to give us glimpses of the hidden truths on the other side of death. And they are glimpses, not the full view, for mythic time doesn’t guarantee outcomes. Instead, it puts us in touch with possibilities. Choose this path and end up a princess who gets her prince. Choose that one, and be a hag who lives for a thousand years while everyone you love forgets you were once young and beautiful. Even those paths aren’t guaranteed because mythic ground is always shifting. The prince may have a mid-life crisis and abandon the princess, never becoming king, though the princess can still become queen, maybe not of a political kingdom, but of herself. Same goes for the prince. All genders have equal opportunities in the myth world. To live on mythic ground requires rooting within one’s self and growing in all directions: up, down, outward, and inward, like a mighty redwood imprinting itself with its journey through time with a new ring each turn around the sun. Mythic ground is both something we live on, actual terra firma, and something that enfolds us. We live within it, suspended like amber, buoyant as bobbing ducks whose oiled feathers insulate them from the cold. Mythic ground is paradoxical. It’s the path of the elder who becomes more innocent as they grow old, the truest measurement of wisdom I know. Like elders, mythic time is wrinkled, marked by erosion, the body bending with the wind, shaped by water, while also channeling it where it needs to go.
Mythic ground sometimes vacations in plays, films, novels, and poems, but its homeland are stories. The myths and folktales of the world are how the mythic speaks in every human language. I didn’t know that when I tended the ceremony that became the book, Piko, but some part of me knew, let’s say my bones, the ones that sat themselves down for 21 days on that spiky black lava rock at the edge of those two small ponds and told the water stories.
I didn’t plan what stories I was going to tell or intend to start on day one, April Fool’s Day. While I did know Easter would occur during the first week, I hadn’t really cared about it as a holiday in years. I never expected Good Friday or Jesus, or the resurrection to pop up as presences in my unfolding narrative. I’m not trying to sound blithe about it, maybe I was a little sloppy and could have been more intentional, but all I did in the beginning was cast my conscious mind into my memory banks and hook whatever wanted to be caught. “Nanaue the Shark Man. That’s a good story. First one I ever heard in the place it was born. Let’s start there. Maybe The Name on day two. I really liked it when I heard Jay Leeming’s version.” And so on. That is the way my mind worked, haphazard calling itself intuitive, not coincidental.
After a few days of watching how life unfolded at the ponds, I realized events were corresponding to the stories I’d told so far. In awe, I became more conscious of the stories I chose, not trying to shape an outcome, or to be a prophet, but to enter into conversation with my surroundings. I was telling the ponds storie,s and to my astonishment, they were telling them back to me. A relationship was formed. Mythic ground.
I did choose the number 21 intentionally, but really just to set myself a limit, not because of any known significance. I realized on day thirteen that the stories I was telling and the events unfolding at the ponds were aligning with the Major Arcana of the Tarot, a journey that begins with 0, The Fool, and moves through 21 archetypes to culminate in The World card, that represents the totality of existence. To say I was delighted is an understatement. Grateful is a better world, and I extended that gratitude to myself. I had survived a lot to get to the point where I could sit on those lava rocks, open my mouth and offer my words, and I knew the fact that the elements spoke back to me was an acknowledgment that I was stepping into elderhood. Like that redwood, I had grown enough in all directions my rings were ready to be heard.
Over the next few months, I’m going to share written and audio versions of the stories I told in Piko with the intention of creating an alchemical crucible for those readers who choose to consent to being transformed by them. Your consent is necessary. You can read them, perhaps even be transformed, but if you give your consent to this journey you’ll be opening up the possibility for a conscious relationship with these stories, and with mythic time and space. Hopefully, at the end, you’ll find you are standing for the first time, or more firmly, or with more tenderness and gratitude, on mythic ground. Each story will be followed by questions you can ask yourself, the stories, the bird outside your window, the traffic lights on your morning commute, or even your cat. I will also be creating original pieces inspired by each story, transferring the old tales into modern settings to see how they speak to us through different eras and places.
In a recent essay, “Enchantment is Resistance,” on her Substack, The Art of Enchantment, author and scholar
writes of how stories can move us beyond the known and accepted limits of cultures that enscript us into an endless war against life itself that manifests in every aspect of Western Civilization as we hurtle toward implosion. She makes a case that enchantment is the way forward, not a step backward into naive ignorance. Here are some words from her proclamation:This kind of writing is about capturing the imagination and inspiring new ways to live. It’s a resistance based on mythopoetics: on acts of mythmaking, so that we come to understand and then to challenge the cultural mythology we are living by – that mythology which is destroying us and the planet. It’s a form of resistance that works – because change always begins with individuals, and it always begins with imagination. It begins with the dawning of a different story which succeeds in capturing our imagination more effectively than the now-crumbling old, life-destroying story. One which speaks to our longing for deeper connection, for deeper meaning.
As a colonizer in Hawai’i, I am constantly questioning my presence on stolen lands. Telling stories to the aina was an attempt to introduce myself through my ancestors who told some of these stories, and to tell the stories of this land through my voice. I still don’t know how my personal story on Moku o Keawe will unfold. I question if I should be here and feel unaccepted by most locals, but since the completion of the ceremony that resulted in Piko, I have never again questioned my right to be on Earth. Would going back to Rhode Island help heal the ongoing legacy of colonialism in Hawai’i? Perhaps. And I may do that. But I’m waiting for the land to tell me. Land that knows me and my stories. Day by day, I listen. Day by day, the land speaks. Right now the land isn’t asking me anything. Thank you, I hear before I go to sleep and first thing on waking. I’m not sure who’s speaking. The voice sounds like mine, but it also sounds like the first bird to sing outside the window each dawn, whose song I recognize.
These are the stories I’ll be sharing and the cultures where they were born:
Nanaue the Shark Man, Hawaiian
The Name, Haitian
Birth of the Titans, Greek
The Rape of Medusa, Greek
Sedna, Inuit
The Salmon of Knowledge, Irish
The Moon Man, Chukchi
The Descent of Inanna, Sumerian
Psyche and Eros, Greek
Dumuzi’s Dream, Sumerian
Hi’ilawe, Hawaiian
The Oldest Boy, Inuit
Pele and Kamapua’a, Hawaiian
The Wind from Haven, Hawaiian
The Pursuit of Dermot and Grainne, Irish
Ukemochi, Japanese
The Birth of Halo, Hawaiian
I’m excited to begin this new project! I love being swept up in a maelstrom, energized by wind and lightning. I want to give this my all like I did the writing of Piko. Your support by becoming a paid subscriber would be a valuable contribution to that, as well as offering encouragement as a tangible affirmation that you appreciate my work. Subscription costs less than one fancy coffee drink a month, and if you take me up on my special offer in March, you might even get two lattes for a month’s worth of posts. If you don’t want to become a paid subscriber, I’d love if you share or like my posts, drop a comment, or send me a message on how my writing weaves its way into your life. In gratitude for you, I am offering a 20% discount on paid subscriptions through March, 2024, that can be redeemed by clicking on this link:
Up until now, all of my new posts have been available to all subscribers, but as my commitment to this work grows, some posts will be paid subscriber only, so if you want to read them all please click on that green button!
“Jennifer Lighty is the real thing and has done us a great service with Piko. A modern woman working intuitively to contact mythic ground. The language is fresh and imaginative, her intention five fathoms deep. I’m so glad she exists, and that she has turned her life’s work into a gift that we can cradle in our hands and feel the benefit.”
—Martin Shaw, author of Bardskull
“In the Hawaiian language, Piko can be translated as ‘the very center.’ As a society, we understand that before we can make sense of the results of our culture, we must remember the very design of it, or its piko.
Jennifer Lighty, with her provocative Piko: A Return to the Dreaming, coaxes its readers back into this center, and with masterful literation, weaves the patterns that bleed from this center to result what we know as the human condition. Although the core concept is poetic, Lighty expresses this work in such a relatable way that anyone can position themselves as the lead character(s) whom, through the beauty of words, symbols, art, and consequence, truly affirm the core design which all results from.”
—Ke’oni Hanalei, founder of Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals
Piko: A Return to the Dreaming is available worldwide through all online platforms or can be ordered through local bookstores.
Upcoming Event
Join me at The New Thought Center of Hawai’i this Saturday, March 9, from 2-4PM. I’ll be telling The Handless Maiden. Telling stories live has long been a dream of mine and I’m thrilled I’ve finally jumped in to the river of words! Suggested donation $20.
Announcement
Are you interested in working with me? I’m opening up spaces for mythic or writing mentorships. If you’re a writer of any genre looking to add a mythic dimension to your work or seeking guidance in your life through myths and fairytales, reach out and introduce yourself. Mentorships can be craft-based, to inspire creativity, or a combination of both.
To schedule a free consult, contact me, Jennifer Lighty, at waveofchange@gmail.com or leave a message by responding to this email.
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light