Stop making sense
on overthinking, spelunking, and trusting the body
Responses to my recent survey of reader interests reveal to my delight that the top contender is “wild love for the eternal dance of matter and spirit.” I’ve come to see this dance as a lifelong project. As a kid, I lived in my imagination, my head in the clouds, skittish about everything, especially people (they’re so erratic). It wasn’t until my 30s that I discovered my body was more than just a base for my head. A breathwork session told me, Your body is the key to your becoming, which inspired me to a) figure out what the heck that even means, and b) experience the world more through my body and senses.1
Though I still try to make intellectual sense of the world, I’m aware that other senses are needed for a more complete understanding. The Greeks saw it as a balance of logos and mythos. (Shorthand: reason and imagination.) I’ve noticed lately that my struggle to make sense of recent events is a trap; it’s me buying into the dominant culture’s insistence that logos is all there is, that mythos is dead.
“Logos sends us looking for capital T Truth in news items instead of in mythic stories. The very crisis of the fact-free world of lies and gaslighting we now inhabit points to the inadequacy of logos alone to make sense of the world. Sadly, mythos has been buried for so long, we can’t even visualize its relevance.”2
It doesn’t take a genius to see that much of what’s been happening in this country defies logic and reason. But I continue to fall into the same trap of reading, reading, reading, searching for that one pithy analysis that puts it all into a neat, understandable box. The temptation is real. Brilliant thinkers and writers make valid points that give the fleeting relief of Ah, yes, that’s it. I get it now.
Two recent examples of this are
’s brilliant piece, “The Great Realignment,” which, fair warning, is not for the faint of heart. It’s about the U.S. cutting off military aid to Ukraine to instead align with Russia and away from Europe. And other cruelties like hobbling Radio Free Europe and destroying USAID.“I am no longer interested in speculating about why Trump is helping Putin. But I will continue to demonstrate, over and over again, that he does.”3
With apologies to Anne, I will indulge in “speculating about why,” right after sharing the second brilliant piece, “No one wanted Trump’s devastating budget bill. Of course it passed,” from The Guardian’s Moira Monegan. She covers the passage on July 3rd of the abhorrent budget bill in Congress with satisfying snark.
“Why are Republicans voting for a bill that will hurt their own constituents? A bill that undermines their stated values and threatens their careers and will immiserate people they care about – if only themselves? One of the more confounding aspects of the Trump era is his ability to vacate what the constitution’s authors – and indeed most reasonable adults – would have assumed would be a defining feature of the contest among the branches: self-interest.”4
Making sense is beguiling, the way kaleidoscopes are beguiling. But then the next atrocity comes and the kaleidoscope of fragments shifts and I’m back floundering in the chaos, incapable of grasping any understanding for long.5
Mythos meets the moment
In a brilliant essay after the 2016 election that still holds up, writer Corey Pein argued that Trump is not quite the next Hitler, whom Carl Jung compared to the Norse god Oden (Wotan). No, said Pein, Trump is more accurately Oden’s blood brother, the trickster/shape-shifter god Loki.6
Since that day, and likely for some years before it, we’ve been living in the cultural fallout from having discarded the vital mythic sensibility long ago—in favor of the logos of hyper rationalism and materiality. In his essay, Pein argues that this choice signals a cataclysm of the psyche:
“The more adamantly people deny the influence of unseen forces—that is to say, unconscious impulses—over their own behavior, the more power those forces exhibit.”
Indeed, Trump’s whole brand is to weaponize psyches and deploy them against people’s own best interests. He’s awakened our national shadow, calling it forth as a macabre army of pathologies—and pathological people to do his bidding. They are dismantling the house of civil governance and throwing us into the streets of chaos with glee.7
My attempt to make intellectual sense keeps my focus too narrow, too small for what’s happening. For all human history, myth is how we’ve placed our lives in a larger context, how we derive and pass on meaning, and also how we balance spiritual and psychological postures for right action in this world and the next. But today, when someone says, “Oh, that’s just a myth,” they mean, “That’s factually untrue,” or, “That’s a lie.”
“Mythos is not an inferior mode of thought, nor an early, misguided attempt at history. Mythic tales never claim to be objective fact. A myth is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information, but because it’s a guide, inviting us to change our minds and hearts.”8
I keep forgetting I can’t make sense of recent events except at the level of mythic story, of psyche and soul. Rational analysis will never yield a full, holistic understanding. Indeed, looking only to logos for sense tend to feed my outrage and impotence. Pein writes:
“To truly understand why people do what they do requires a spelunking trip into a dark realm where the virtue of reason and the clear ties between cause and effect do not apply.”
The trickster figure in mythology, Pein reminds us, “arrives at moments of uncertainty to bring change, often of the bad kind.” Loki is the god of mischief and lies. He has the power to mesmerize both supporters and opponents. Sound familiar?
“When considered in the context of the dark psychic undercurrents of the national experience, Trump’s appeal becomes self-evident. Is it really so shocking that a racist, misogynist, mafia-connected, serially fraudulent boor could find a successful place in American life—especially in this age of misinformation and artifice? Loki has awoken. He walks among us, gaining strength, and he doesn’t need your stupid vote, loser.”
Why does this keep happening and what can we do about it?
Carl Jung taught that our experiences are invitations to greater consciousness. Such growth requires delving into the murky dark of the unconscious, into the realm of psyche and soul. The promptings will stubbornly continue until we do that often-painful digging. The co-worker or partner who never fails to trigger you over some bullshit or other? That weird recurring nightmare? The continual blindsiding by current events? These are all opportunities to do some personal spelunking.
If that sounds like a burden on your over-frazzled nerves, there’s another way—through the body and senses. In wild places—woods and water and wilderness, even the local park—you can feel into your connection with the wider, breathing, conscious community of life. Instead of trying to make sense, simply relax into your senses—into hearing, touch, taste, smell—even imagination. It helps to close your eyes, because sight is most closely linked to the rational mind and logos.
Anything we can do to invite the numinous, to court mythos, will help to counter our immersion in a culture so heavily weighted to logos. We all need such encounters to remind us of the larger context of our lives. Encounters with mystery, soul, and mythos occur in a vast timeless place beyond our worldly concerns. Beyond climate chaos and racism, misogyny and xenophobia, corruption and greed and cruelty. The universe is vast and we are vast. I am continually nurtured by the many writers I encounter here who help me to remember and touch into mythos.9 10
The wise elder and activist, Joanna Macy, was interviewed in 2019 by Krista Tippett for On Being.11 I still remember her saying that the poet Rainer Maria Rilke lived at a time of great upheaval, too, and that he experienced what many of us are feeling today. She read some of her translations of his poems during the interview, including this one:
Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower by Rainer Maria Rilke Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29; translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
We won’t get through this time unscathed. But we have a choice of the lenses through which we view what is happening. We can remind ourselves that logos and mythos have always been in a wild dance, a partnership. We can join the dance.
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I still have no idea what it “means” rationally, even as I know in my cells that it’s true.
Read the full post here.
Read the full article here. After freeloading for months, I finally committed to a monthly subscription. I couldn’t resist her tone, as in this definition: “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or Snap, which helps low-income Americans buy enough food to keep themselves alive.”
Shout out to the brilliant think pieces that I rely on, and trade regularly with my cousin, sister, and besties from
, , , , , , , , , , and others.That essay is on Baffler, here. I wonder if Pein is tempted to update his assessment. Aren’t we in Oden territory now?
Actual glee. Elizabeth Warren reports in this video that her colleagues in the Senate cheered over taking health care away from 17 million Americans.
For more on the mythic imagination, Sharon Blackie’s marvelous TED Talk is here.
Right after the 2016 election, I read an essay saying that the universe threw down its "trump card" (as in bridge) to wake us up, to expose the shadows for healing. It was a long essay and this is a very short paraphrase--your reference to Loki reminded me of it.
Thank you for this recentering essay—you have put into words so well what I have been groping towards… and Rilke… ❤️