those giants are the selves we've been // earthbeat souls

Imago Archive #13

Therapy & Initiation

Life is made of stages and transitions. Not knowing which you’re in — or not knowing the appropriate ways of handling what you’re in — causes trouble.

When you’re having trouble with a stage of life, a therapeutic approach is helpful. You need something or someone to help you settle into your role, your actions, your way of being that need to come through right now. Maybe you just need to calm down and get out of your head, maybe you need to untangle some knots from your past that are holding you back — whatever it is, there’s something getting in the way of you acting how your stage of life needs you to act, and a therapeutic approach can help with that.

When you’re having trouble with a transition though — that’s when you need initiation. You need to be cut loose from your past and present so you can move into a future that can include them, without being limited to them. You need to step over a threshold, you need ontological shock, you need to know that the world is ending because it is, it is, your world is ending, the cocoon is unravelling.

In mainstream society, the usual mistake is to treat therapeutics as the solution for every situation. But if someone in transition is treated like they need to adjust themselves to their stage, the transition is either halted or stunted. Transformation doesn’t take place. Development is frozen.

In countercultures, the opposite mistake is standard: always a flurry of transitions, initiations, clean breaks, dramatic experiences to herald a transformation. But if someone needs to develop fully the stage they’re at, and they’re instead encouraged to leave it behind — same outcome. No transformation. No development.

We stand on the shoulders of giants, and those giants are the selves we’ve been. If those selves never had a chance to grow strong, to settle into themselves, to develop shoulders worth standing on — that’s the end of it.

Developmental Genre

I started reading The Anatomy of Genre by John Truby, and enjoying his formulation of the usual truths like “Myth is the essential mind in story form, the first Story Code that consciousness constructs. Myth is the shape of basic human consciousness.”

But in the middle of gems like that, there’s another idea at the core of his book:

For me, the most revelatory part of coming to understand genres was the realization that they exist in a hierarchy of their own, or what might be called a “ladder of enlightenment.”

The idea is that each genre addresses something the characters are missing, some problem they have — and that each genre’s solution to that problem sets the stage for the main problem of the next genre up the ladder.

I haven’t read far enough yet to tell whether his order is convincing or not, but the broad idea feels ripe with possibility to me — each genre implicitly deals with a particular type of human problem, and does so by presenting a particular philosophy of what life and the world are like. It makes sense that there would be some predictable paths from one genre to another, as each philosophy reaches its own limits and starts to realize the problems just beyond its limits.

If you’re curious, the order he gives is: Horror, Action, Myth, Memoir, Sci-Fi, Crime, Comedy, Western, Gangster, Fantasy, Detective, Love.

Hummingbirds & Earthbeat Souls

People run at different speeds, right down to their bones.

I spent a lot of time comparing myself to people who run faster — people who can run 5 projects at once and have them all done in a month, on to the next batch. People who have seven meetings in a day and still manage to get to the gym, cook a hot meal, go hiking on weekends.

But I run slow. My marrow pulses to the heartbeat of the earth beneath my feet. I get projects 80% finished, and then wait weeks or months for the insight that makes the other 20% fall into place.

I spend entire days doing nothing but walking the city, sitting on the stairs by the city square, watching birds murmurate and tourists huddle and couples meet at the statue, dressed for a date night dinner somewhere near. I let the world pass by and feel a gathering pulse somewhere inside me, the earthbeat shaping something it wants me to see.

Catch-Up

• I’m building a new website — it’s under construction right now, but feel free to take a look and comment on anything. I’d love your ideas to help shape it as I go.

• New podcast on about Li Journaling is up on Patreon.

• Next week, my first course on imaginal journeying will come out — catch up first with the Introduction to Imaginal Literacy.