Praktikos

Are our cliffs just Zeus’ leftover columns? What does myth become once they stop telling your story? Or when they rewrite your story?

• What if Orpheus never looked back?

• What if Narcissus didn’t seek to gaze?

• What if Odysseus stopped searching?

Then what?

• Who would Hera be?

• What if Helios slept in one day?

• What if Hermes didn’t know the Zip Code?

• What if Sisyphus just let it roll?

• What if Prometheus, brother to Atlas, chose not to settle accounts with fire in a fennel stalk?

• And what if the brother shrugged? Put down all the expectations of the Heavens.

• What if Calypso didn’t hold the hero hostage?

• And Circe and Hecate sought no thresholds, nor crossroads?

What realms would we know then? What in-between would keep our tensions? Where might the liminals lay and lead and last?

What has myth become now that we’ve stopped recounting for all the counting of who we are?

Mythos, is it within you? Is it beyond you? Must we allow the edges to unveil the arrival of something beyond and within?

What happens when the Gods forget their lines? Are we left as the understudy with ourselves, so full of infallibility to keep practicing.

Myth only survives when we practice remembering how we work, how we love, how we dissent, how we rest, how we connect.

So perhaps the task ahead is simple, and therefore all too difficult:

Return to practice.

Tell the story again tomorrow, slightly truer this time.

Live it once today, learn from it repeatedly tomorrow.

Rewrite it slightly kinder.

That is how myth stays alive.

Not in the heavens

But in our hands.