Hello all, I’m new to this space, and grateful to be here. I suppose I can do a more formal introduction at some point, but this is the thing that is feeling most alive in me this morning—
At Rufus and Sylvie’s session on Saturday, the Lindisfarne Association was briefly mentioned, which was exciting because I’m usually the one to bring it up, usually to folks who’ve never heard about this remarkable group who shaped so much thought, together, in a range of constellations, over many years.
This morning, as I prepare a piece for the upcoming Second Renaissance magazine edition on mythos, I find myself in a gratifying full-circle moment. Over the last few months, I’ve slowly been rereading William Irwin Thompson’s The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture, and feeling the threads connect across time and thought.
Thompson, who founded the Lindisfarne Association in the 1970s, brought together a constellation of minds—poets, ecologists, monks, physicists, mystics—into a living mandala of inquiry and imagination. Their gatherings had a lot of different aims and outcomes over the years, but a thread that I have always been interested in is the cultivation of a mythopoetic coherence in the face of fragmentation. Lindisfarne’s work was both about shaping culture as sensing the patterns beneath it.
In The Time-Falling Bodies Take to Light, Thompson explores how myth can be understood not as fantasy but as a deep code, an evolutionary force shaping the symbolic and psychic architectures of humanity. For him, mythos was the breath of civilization, and the compost of its renewal.
My own life is steeped in the living waters of regeneration, and the many emergent movements serving our collective regeneration, which has a thousand names. Within Second Renaissance, Life Itself, the BFI, and other soul-aligned circles, I feel the pulse of that same mythic intelligence.
We are once again inviting new stories to the fire—stories rooted in relationship, resonance, and regeneration. Stories not of domination or escape, but of remembrance and return. It may be useful and gratifying to know that a creative executive at Pixar who taught at the Design Science Studio when I was a fellow there in 2020, shared that there is a strong push that he is a part of in Hollywood to shift from the solitary hero’s journey mythic structure to what he called the “Kindred Quest” which I think is beautifully demonstrated in the 2021 film Raya and the Last Dragon.
The past is not behind us. It’s reaching through us, asking to be carried forward, and regenerated into new life, with care. To be part of this unfolding is an immense privilege and can genuinely be a joy. In fact, I believe that joy is vitally important to this work, as is beauty, ritual, eros, and the deep love that must resource all of the work ahead of us. I so deeply appreciate how Sylvie leads with these elements that are central to a whole and healing culture.
Thank you to all who are tending these threads, in your own ways.
