Beloved Sisters

Sisters are such special people. They can out think, out do and love us better than anyone in the world. They stand with us in difficult times, and talk to us with loving words to lift us up. The Cherokee call these special people - beloved sisters. Sisters never complain when we get lost in time and space; never forget to welcome us home. Sisters don't have to be blood kin; for what does that matter when the relationship is stronger than ancestry. Love transcends so many dry places and makes us family by choice. What could be better than to be a beloved sister?

- Sent to me by my beloved sister Hayley and now passed on to you -

Have you ever had that thought that whatever you do it won't turn out right or it won't be as you expected? Never fear failure or be defeated by its possibility. It is from our mistakes and the things that go wrong in life that some of our greatest lessons and opportunities emerge. Samuel Beckett writing in Westward Ho (1983) summed it up perfectly: "All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

The Purpose of Myths

... is to tell us to follow our bliss, to adventure forth, take the challenge and to find one's Essence. To remind us that life is to be experienced. It's a journey; a transformative journey. As the Sufi philospoher A H Almaas says, "This level of experience is so deep and profound, so full and packed with a live significance, so moving and so powerful that it is not possible to communicate it in words. Words can describe some aspects of the experience, but they fail actually to deliver the whole impact. Words can communicate the experience to somebody who already has had it or is right on the verge of it. But not to somebody who does not know" (Quoted in Houston, J. A Mystic Life, p.123).

We are in need of new myths to help us understand the coming planetary civilisation, women in full partnership with men, the world connected through media, the new understanding of human capacities like our ability to play God with biological and ecological systems. Without a planetary mythology we fall further into chaos and violence until finally we will self-destruct out of a sense of meaninglessness. Who brings this new myth? Those who are awakened to the imagination, to the invisible - the artists and poets and the dancers. The way of the artist is to join their craft to their imagination in order to speak to the world they live in and the conditions of that world. Campbell argues, we no longer live in societies within a bounded field of geography or culture. Today there are no boundaries. The only mythology that is valid today is the mythology of the planet - and we don't have such a mythology (Campbell, J. The Power of Myth).