Transcript: Episode 9

Hey friends, and thanks for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

This month I’m going to be playing a bit with the idea of “creative center” – how we find it, and how we stay in it while we’re working. I don’t see the term “creative center” like all over the place, all the time, but it is a term that crops up, and I think it comes out of the general somatic and psycho-spiritual concept of “being centered” or “grounding and centering.” I’ve used the term myself sometimes (although I don’t know if it’s been in any episodes of this podcast before this one).

For me, and for many writers I’ve worked with, it’s pretty easy to feel creatively centered when a new story idea is first emerging. Thinking in terms of the somatic or the full mind-body experience of working with a new creative idea, there’s usually that phase where stuff seems to be spontaneously welling up from somewhere inside us, somewhere private and inner and… well, centered.

The act of drafting, on the other hand, tends to feel like searching for something that’s missing. The more we get into trying to give real form to that thing-from-the-center, the more the experience starts to have tension and anxiety and a somatic sense of lack.

I think the trick we have to learn is how to expand our concept and our inner experience of what it means to be and feel creatively centered. Having a center can imply staying in the same place, and being in control of that space – but I think that desire for control is where a lot of the trouble stems from.

So for this episode, I decided to approach the concept of an adaptive creative center through a mythological lens, and partly one that doesn’t immediately or overtly connect to artistic creativity. There’s often something powerful in giving ourselves new symbolic or sacred imagery for our brains to work with (or imagery to do its own work on us) below the level of implementing our writing habits or starting a draft or whatever we’re doing on the surface.

I also think there can be something really powerful in exploring storytelling as a craft through actual sacred storytelling – old stories that bypass modern trappings and help us change the way we relate to our writing on an intuitive level. So that’s the goal for today. (That’s kind of the goal in every episode, but this one is going to have much more of an overt comparative mythology vibe.)

Later in the episode, I’m going to talk about the figure of Saint Brigid from the Irish Catholic tradition; she’s the patron saint of poets, which in that cultural context encompasses storytelling and creative-culture-keeping as a whole, not just literal poetry. But before I get to Brigid, I’m going to start with the Greek deity Hestia, who is maybe the least-known Olympian in modern times.

(Just as a general note on historical accuracy for this episode: I’m drawing on scholarly sources for both the Greek and Irish mythology that I’m referencing. But I’m also taking some liberty with how we might be able to apply that history and symbolism to our creative practices – so I’m not claiming that my interpretations are in exact sync with the way people historically would have related to these sacred figures, or the way Greek and Irish culture represent them today.

As always, research resources will be listed in the show notes and in the monthly newsletter circle email.)

The Greek goddess Hestia is usually described as the goddess of the hearth fire. But it’s also accurate to say she’s an embodiment of the sacred center in ancient Greek cosmology, and all the cyclical, generative, and creative energy that implies.

In terms of her role in the mythological stories, she’s both the oldest and the youngest of the original five Olympians, the children of Cronos and Rhea. Hestia is the firstborn, but due to some typical creation-myth shenanigans, Cronos swallows his children as they’re born and then regurgitates or rebirths them in reverse order. So Hestia is born both first and last of her siblings. She has a circular and cyclical relationship to time – her two births form a sort of loop or bracket around this first installment in the story of the Olympian gods.

Hestia is one of the maiden goddesses, along with her nieces Artemis and Athena. She turns down offers of marriage from both Poseidon and Apollo and swears an oath that she will remain eternally one-in-herself. To honor her steadfast self-possession, Zeus appoints her the keeper of the Olympian hearth fire, independent from all influence (and from the shifting and often ill-advised relationships and alliances of her siblings and their offspring).

As the spirit of that divine hearth flame, she receives the first portion of all offerings burnt for the gods. In many parts of the Greek world, any ritual sacrifice also opened and closed with a libation to Hestia – first, last, and eternal.

Hestia isn’t well-known today because she doesn’t appear much at all in the mythological stories, which makes sense for a deity whose role is to literally keep the home fire burning while the other gods run around and do what they do. And she doesn’t often appear in art, either. But it would be a mistake to think that this means she isn’t an important divine figure.

The sacred hearth was so deeply incorporated into the Greek worldview that Hestia received honor in all temples – her altar was the hearth itself, where offerings to the god of the temple were burnt. She was also present in the physical hearths of civic community spaces, and in every hearth in every home within that community. The symbolic and literal meaning of the hearth was foundational enough that refugees and fugitives would sometimes go to a civic hearth or to the hearth of an influential home to officially ask for sanctuary.

In the Greek world, hearths didn’t take the form of a peripheral fireplace built into a wall, the way we typically think of a hearth today. Greek hearths were round and open and were typically placed at the actual center of the home or palace or city hall – so Hestia is the literal sacred center of any relational, communal space in the Greek cosmology. She is the physical and metaphysical location where relationships are enacted, where people cook and weave cloth and welcome guests and perform the rituals that mark all the cycles of living.

This brings me to the aspect of Hestia that I think can lead us to a powerful teaching about nurturing creative vision, or tending a creative hearth.

Although Hestia is the official maiden auntie of Mount Olympus, she’s also often officially paired with Hermes, her sly and subtle messenger nephew, god of travel and commerce and theft and clever words and luck (both good and bad). Hermes is essentially a trickster, one who crosses boundaries and sometimes confounds them – this is a god whose very first act is to go out and steal a bunch of sacred cows from his brother Apollo, before he’s even a day old. Not an immediately obvious choice to be a companion for a hearth-keeper.

And yet, these two deities are seen as natural companions, both in devotional poetry like the Homeric Hymns and in philosophical works by thinkers like Plato. The Homeric Hymns are a series of poems describing and praising each of the major Greek gods, and the Hymn to Hestia actually invokes Hermes as well – asking both gods to “dwell together in friendship in this house, and aid on the wisdom and strength of mankind.”

Hermes is a god of movement into and through liminal spaces, places inherently in-between – the unknown and beckoning road to the horizon, sweeping you off on a Bilbo-Baggins-style adventure. He’s one of the only Greek figures who passes without penalty or permission between the Underworld, the human world, and Olympus. He’s the god of chance encounters with strangers, and the god of making yourself a stranger in order to discover something new.

He’s the god of the story that turns the shape of things inside out to expose how the seams are sewn – and sometimes he’s the god of the story that puts things back together in a new way.

Not all storytellers are tricksters, but all tricksters are some kind of storyteller. This is a polite way of saying that Hermes will lie to you without a second thought – but his lies somehow still tell you something true. If that sounds sort of familiar, you might be thinking of this frequently quoted line from Picasso: “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”

The poet and cultural critic Lewis Hyde explores this contradiction at the heart of art and creative work in his book Trickster Makes This World. Hyde’s nonfiction work focuses a lot on the intersections between imagination, artistic culture, and commerce, so if you haven’t come across him before, his books are very much worth checking out.

He describes the trickster aspects of creativity as “dirt-work” and “working the joints.” It’s creative work that exuberantly excavates the layers tucked and hidden inside the cracks in our world, the openings and possibilities we stop seeing when we get psychologically or spiritually stuck – the stuff we pass over when we lose touch with the sacred curiosity of the traveler.

Trickster storytelling is storytelling that, in Hyde’s words, “knows how traps are made, and knows how to subvert them.” The “trap” here is the trap of restrictive narrative – any cultural or personal story that has become so calcified that you’ve forgotten it’s literally made up.

Hermes and his fellow tricksters are powerful allies against the narrative trap, especially what Hyde calls traps of shame – narratives that create boundaries around who is allowed to exist and how, and that guard those boundaries with “rules of silence,” restrictions on what kinds of stories we’re allowed to tell.

In the context of individual creativity, a trap of shame might be connected to larger societal traps that enforce hierarchies of race and class and gender. Or a trap of creative shame might be tied to narratives about ambition or talent or worthiness – the sort of dogmatic traps I talk about a lot on this podcast. I’ve also talked in previous episodes about the societal conflation of creativity with economic productivity; that narrative definitely creates a trap of shame where art and stories only have worth if they have a market value.

Whatever the specifics of the trap might be, the trickster’s power is born from what lingers at those borders of silence, the edges where living beings are asked to cut themselves off, to pretend that vital parts of themselves don’t actually exist. To borrow Hyde’s words again, “Treat someone that way and you will foster skepticism about the shape of things.”

Writers tend to be people who harbor some level of skepticism about the shape of things. That’s partly why we find ourselves drawn to the practice of describing all the shapes we see. But it’s often much easier to be sly-eyed skeptics about the shape of the outside world than it is to turn that trickster gaze on our inner worlds. And that includes our narratives about our own creativity.

Sometimes when we think we’re in touch with our creative center, what we’re really touching are old, calcified goals and beliefs about ourselves as writers and storytellers (or even just as humans). To return to the figure of Hestia and the hearth – sometimes we’ve become too loyal to a fossilized hearth that doesn’t actually make room for us in the sacred circle, that can’t expand and evolve enough to really connect us to the creative cycles of life. Sometimes we’re tending a hearth that’s become a trap.

According to Hyde, Hermes is one of only three Greek mythological figures who get described with the Greek word polutropos, which in English is polytropic, “turning many ways.” So if Hermes is the cosmic companion of Hestia, then a true creative center – a hearth where Hestia and Hermes dwell together in friendship – is a center that is both constant and can turn many ways. It’s a sacred circle that’s fixed but not static.

It’s constant in the sense of being always available, not in the sense of being always the same – it’s the place you can always go to orient yourself toward and within cycles of change. It’s the hub of a turning and breathing wheel, the hearth where you can stand and see the shifting horizon.

A true center is always also fundamentally a threshold. Hestia may be eternally sitting at the hearth, but the smoke of that sacred fire forms an axis mundi, a central crossroads where travelers can both seek sanctuary and access the entire cosmos. In Greek philosophical texts, Hestia is often described as an omphalos figure; the sunken circle of the hearth links the human, surface world with the mysterious generative powers of the earth and the underworld.

When Plato writes about Hestia, he also equates her with cosmic symbols like the mast of a ship – a center that travels. He even poetically ties the etymology of her name to quote “the essence of things… that all things flow and nothing stands.”

This is the sacred paradox of the center across many different cosmologies: that the center of the world is eternally wherever you are.

So: what does the cosmic friendship of hearth and horizon tell us about the actual practice of writing stuff?

Lewis Hyde locates a large part of the creative power of tricksters like Hermes in what he calls the “creative accident.” A storyteller who’s in touch with their trickster side is in touch with quote “an intelligence that makes itself at home in the happening world, one not so attached to design or purpose as to blinker out the daily wealth of accidents.”

I see this as a guidepost for escaping traps of creative paralysis, especially traps that show up as perfectionism. When a story is still unrealized in our heads, instead of embodied on the page, it gets to keep its sheen of pure, perfect potential. But as soon as we begin to actually tell the story – even before we share it with anyone – we’ve embarked into the happening world. We’re walking out from the hearth toward the horizon, getting further and further away from the realm of the ideal and deeper into the relational world of reality.

Or to put it in less poetic words, as soon as we start actually drafting, we quickly remember why the “shitty first draft” is such a popular writing meme. And if we’re too deeply caught in a trap of shame or perfectionism, we quickly get mired in the gap between that shining but vague initial imagining and the specific story that’s now coming out on the page.

The trickster spirit is the ultimate antidote to this kind of creative paralysis. When we put ourselves creatively on the road with the trickster, we learn to hold our designs lightly enough to stay centered, even as our idealized vision starts to brush up against its own imperfect manifestation.

Trickster knows that perfection kills a living story – and that perfection isn’t even as interesting as what will arise out of the inevitable gaps in our process. Trickster’s endless attentive curiosity in the midst of chaos is the bridge that gets us across, that breaks the lock of the creative trap. (Or in the words of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Trickster can help us “slip edgeways through the keyhole.”)

Quoting Hyde again: “Going on a journey (or entering the painting studio) without consulting the god of the roads invites bad luck; taking the god into account summons the presence of mind that can work with whatever happens.”

I think the magic of the trickster approach can run in both directions: both out into the draft and back into us, finding and loosening whatever’s become calcified and static at our inner hearths. The more we write with trickster as one of our core guides, the more we’re able to find the kind of creative center that’s the strong-yet-flexible mast of a ship, and not a rigid cage.

There’s a historical Greek ritual I think makes a pretty great embodied metaphor of a creative practice that honors both the self-possessed constancy of Hestia and the transformative adaptiveness of Hermes. The ritual is described by Pausanias, a historian from the 2^nd century CE who spent thirty years travelling Greece and writing descriptions of life in the places he visited (his work is aptly titled Descriptions of Greece).

Pausanias documents an oracular ritual performed at a certain public image of Hermes known as Hermes of the Market. He describes this statue as being pretty unassuming, built “right on the earth” and “of no great size.” Before the trickster is a stone hearth ringed with bronze lamps – it’s not explicitly named as Hestia’s, but then, no hearth really needs to be named as hers. She is the hearth.

To seek guidance from Hermes of the Market, the supplicant approaches the hearth in the evening, the threshold seam between day and night. They first fill the lamps with oil, light them, and burn an offering on Hestia’s sacred fire. Then they leave a coin and whisper their question into the ear of Hermes. Covering their own ears, they head out of the market square. Once they’ve crossed out onto the road, they uncover their ears, and the first words they hear, no matter how wild or weird, are Trickster’s response.

In the ritual of storytelling, I think this is a deeply powerful form to follow. We come first to our center, to honor what we find there. But the story begins with the question we’re moved to ask, the question that can only be answered on the road, in imperfect interaction with the world.

The real story is the paradoxical, oracular interplay between what we hold sacred at our cores and the equally sacred accidents we meet once we loosen our hands and reach for the horizon. That’s where our imaginations are most alive, where living stories emerge.

And when we understand that the story isn’t a monument to our individual, idealized egos – that it’s always fundamentally a collaboration with chance and luck and imperfection, before it even gets to our readers – suddenly it becomes so much easier to just not take the damn thing so seriously. Or at least, to take it a different kind of seriously. The kind that knows our stories deserve to be more than just perfect potential trapped in our heads.

There’s one last symbol I want to borrow (or steal) from the trickster, and it comes from a brief line in one of the Homeric Hymns to Hermes. This hymn tells the myth I referred to earlier, when the infant Hermes sneaks away from his bed and steals Apollo’s herd of cows. As he slips back home after this adventure, his mother catches him and scolds him by saying, “And where exactly have you been at this hour, wearing the cloak of shamelessness?” In artistic depictions of the full-grown Hermes, he’s also often shown wearing a traveling cloak.

Lewis Hyde briefly points to the cloak of shamelessness as a symbol of how Hermes is able to do what he does and be who he is – his enveloping lack of shame protects him from the traps of cultural ethics, for better and for worse. He’s shielded from the collective gaze of judgment.

This could sort of imply that the cloak’s power is a form of invisibility. But I don’t think his cloak works by making himself or his nature invisible. Everybody knows pretty much right away what kind of game Hermes is up to. That’s not the trick. The trick is in the way his blatant shamelessness gives undeniable form to things that would otherwise go unacknowledged. He openly wears them. He wraps himself up in them so they can walk around in the world.  

Here’s my segue into Saint Brigid of Ireland. As odd as it might seem to be naming a Catholic saint alongside Hermes, Brigid carries a pretty strong whiff of trickster energy, passed down to her from pre-Christian Irish mythology. She also embodies many of the same sacred tropes as Hestia – Brigid is another avowed sovereign maiden, and her monastery famously included a perpetually burning sacred hearth.

Brigid the saint was preceded by a pagan Brigid (or Bríg), who was possibly a singular goddess or possibly a group of different local divine figures with the title Bríg. The pagan Brigid was associated with some of the core cultural pillars of the Irish world: hospitality, the healing arts, metalworking, and poetry. “Poetry” in this world had a distinctly political and social role as well as an artistic one – poets were carriers of oral history and natural philosophy and could also literally curse you by composing a satirical verse about you and reciting it in public.

Brigid the saint inherited Brigid the goddess’s patronage of poetry, and her lore speaks very directly to storytelling as a sacred partnership of the maiden’s hearth and the trickster’s horizon. One of the most widely told Brigid stories nicely encapsulates this dual vibe, and it even includes a cloak.

Here’s the story, or at least my version of it:

When the time came for Saint Brigid to build her monastery, she went with four of her women to ask for leave and land from the king (whose name is mostly forgotten). The king denied her, as male rulers in stories generally do. But in the way of a protagonist who’s only really asking permission to be polite, Brigid had a quick retort.

Give me only the land that can be covered by my cloak—surely that isn’t too much? Clearly this was a joke, so the king condescendingly laughed and agreed.

(He might have been more wary if he’d heard the other famous story about Brigid, the one where she stoically plucks out her own eye to get her brothers to stop talking about marrying her off. Saints don’t generally go in for half measures.)

Brigid was a woman and therefore small; the cloak was well cut and fit her perfectly. And yet, when her attendants began to unfold it, the cloak folded out and out to the east, and out and out to the south, and out and out to the west and to the north, and the folds began to vanish toward all the horizons.

So the panicked king relented and gave her what she’d asked for, because it was clearly hers already. Or, to put it another way, before she stole it out from under him.

Brigid the poet stands on the threshold at the center of the compass, wearing a cloak so shameless it can steal back sovereignty from kings, all by telling a lie that contains the truth.

Regardless of whether one takes Saint Brigid as a historical individual or a synthesis of folklore, she has undeniably become a sort of living reliquary of sacred symbols that stretch back before Christianity. Irish mythology doesn’t really have a clear trickster figure like Hermes or like the Norse Loki – the Irish deities refuse to be easily compartmentalized, despite what we’re used to from the Roman-style pantheon.

Instead of ruling over distinct areas and wielding completely distinct powers, the Irish gods tend to sort of draw from a general pot of sacred memes. Many of them have what could be called a trickster mode that they draw on as the situation requires – usually at some sort of threshold moment, when things are in flux or power needs to be shifted.

(A basic google search may tell you that the god Lugh is the Irish trickster, but like… he’s not really the trickster so much as a trickster, some of the time.)

Saint Brigid follows in this lineage, and maybe not least because she stands in the crack between pagan and Christian Ireland – her folklore and folk practices blatantly smuggle in the older forms of divinity around the borders of the new, slipping edgeways through the keyhole.

Thresholds and various acts of being in-between are a common Irish sacred meme, and Saint Brigid is literally born in a doorway, with one of her mother’s feet inside the house and the other one outside. Many of the folk practices connected to her Catholic feast day have ancient cosmologies encoded within, including a practice called the Threshold Rite.

She’s sometimes described as probably the only female bishop in Catholic history, due to a trickster-y slip of the tongue. When she took her vows, the presiding bishop accidentally spoke the wording used to elevate a priest. So Brigid took the oath of a nun but became a bishop, a woman of equal rank to men, thanks to a divine lucky accident. And in the stories, Brigid is constantly thwarting authority figures – giving their bejeweled swords away, stopping them from executing people for dumb reasons, and of course, taking their land to build an egalitarian monastic center of learning and a school of the arts.

There are approximately a million bits of cool Brigid trivia that I would love to keep sharing at length – like, she’s basically the patron saint of abortion access! – but I’m going to stop here. (Although I’m sharing a bunch of Brigid research resources in the show notes because I can’t resist.)

My point with all of this (besides just that I like nerding out about religion and mythology) is that in Brigid, we have both an archetypal and a historical model of storytelling as a way of bringing the sacred in through the cracks. Like Hermes in his cloak of shamelessness, Brigid the saint wraps herself in what might otherwise be excluded, lost, or unacknowledged, giving it form so it can keep walking the roads.

As storytellers, this is one of the powers available to us. And it’s serious work, but it doesn’t have to necessarily feel serious – it can feel like curiosity, and play, and collaboration. In fact, it’s almost impossible to draw on the full power of visionary storytelling if we’re idealizing our visions and treating them as static.

Trickster reminds us that if we think we’re creating something ideal, we’re wrong. The power of the story isn’t in clinging to the ideal. It’s in asking the next irresistible, shameless question, and the next, and the next. Until you reach the horizon and find yourself, as always, at your center.

 

This month’s writing praxis for newsletter subscribers is a new format, an Inspirited Word first! It’s a bonus audio offering to help bring the mythology from this episode into a more personal form. I’ve put together a guided experience based on the Brigid story and on the ritual of Hermes of the Market. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can get in on that bonus audio by joining the newsletter circle at the link in the show notes wherever you’re currently listening. Or you can join at inspiritedword.com. If you’re on the main page of the website, go to Contact in the top navigation menu, and then hit the big green newsletter button.

I’m still putting final touches on the recording, so the guided practice will be going out to subscribers next week. Keep your eyes on your inbox on probably Thursday or Friday for that. And in the meantime, if you’re a new subscriber, you’ll get instant access to all the practices for past episodes, to give your writing plenty of intuitive creative fuel.

I really appreciate you being here with me today – and until next time, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.