Welcome to the Living Myth podcast with Michael Mead, where this shifting, changing world is looked at from a mythic perspective.

On this episode, Mead suggests that although it may often feel that we are running out of time

when it comes to the great issues of the world and the struggles of daily life, it is not more

time that we need, but a stronger connection to things that are timeless and therefore eternal.

Mead tells an ancient Bushman story from Africa that depicts the dilemma which humanity faces with each crisis that involves issues of meaning,

truth, and the human soul. When great troubles abound, whether it be on the world's stage

or at a critical stage of life, what we need is the touch

of imagination and a hint of the eternal. It's an old and almost universal idea that the individual human heart and soul are connected to a star, that each person has a destiny, and we're each being pulled

through the world by a secret connection to a star. It's our guiding star, which tries to pull us

through life towards the natural destiny of our soul.

William Stafford was one of the great American poets,

although not that widely recognized,

and I had the good fortune of working with him for years.

And he had the sense of this invisible thread as waiting for us at the moment we awaken each morning.

And for him, because he was a poet, the practice of the thread was to take the first word that came to him each day as the end of the thread trying to pull him

further into the world and so each morning he would write a poem based on that first word that

came. So on a certain morning the first word must have been thread,

for he wrote a beautiful poem called The Way It Is that goes like this.

There's a thread you follow.

It goes amongst things that change, but it doesn't change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing, and you have to explain about the threat.

But it is hard for others to see, yet while you hold it, you cannot get lost. Yes, tragedies happen.

...