Glimpses of the mythical amidst the mundane.

A mythopoetic peregrination into the tangles of urban wilderness, animated with a few words from a few contemporary mythmakers.

There are moments when we all, in one way or another, have to go to a place that we have never seen, and do what we have never done before. Myth is about the unknown; it is about that for which initially we have no words. Myth therefore looks into the heart of a great silence.

Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

Ancient stories, myths, old tales—these kinds of stories hold something powerful. Call it bone memory, call it the deep, primordial part of ourselves, call it the voice that gossips with the wild, across species and across time. If we listen, we hear it calling. If we listen, we find ourselves deep in the forest, where a large white bear holds something we all desire.

Martin Shaw, Myth in the Age of the Anthropocene

This is a yarn about yarns—a meta-yarn, if you like. Us-two will find marginal stories and grand narratives twisted together in macabre ways here, as we stand in a noisy hall outside a high-school science lab.

Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk

'Words matter,' he says. 'The name you give things, it forms them when you speak. You must always be careful with your words.'

Rebecca Roanhorse, Trail of Lightning

Written words cause ripples in the fabric of reality.

Paul Kingsnorth, The Great Work

What if we reframed “living with uncertainty” to “navigating mystery”? There’s more energy in that phrase. The hum of imaginative voltage. […] It feeds the underneath in us, the ceremonialist in us; it nourishes places in us that are secretive and fond of beauty. […] If life is uncertain, then let’s make that work for us. Let’s get expansive.

Martin Shaw, Navigating the Mysteries

I speak my life into existence with each expressed breath I take. I tell you a story within which are more stories. Universes within universes. We are all spinning like small suns.

Nnedi Okorafor, The Book of Phoenix

There is a story there that is still unfolding, people involved, forces at work. It is a rich space of change, filled with tensions, conflicts, obstacles, challenges, synergies and complementarities.

Jose Ramos, Answering the Call of Epic Times

People tell stories all the time: the stories they want told, where any story could be changed or warped this way or that.

Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

Release the Kraken! Unleash the primal on the familiar, disturb the edges, dispute the layers, find a place of stillness, press your ears to the ground to feel the rumblings of things outside your philosophy, linger by the shrubbery, improvise new rituals, pay homage to the nonhuman, and acknowledge the wilds whence you came. To release the Kraken – that monster of Norse-Grecian lore – is not merely to call upon a monster, it is to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of a particular plot. It is acknowledge our own flailing limbs. It is to dismember ourselves.

Release the Kraken. Let the monsters roam again.

Bayo Akomolafe, Release the Kraken.

Convivia & Refugia

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Further reading & references