Myths Move: Spore Gods, Storm Gods, and Cycles, With Josh Schrei & Tom Hirons

Video with Tom Hirons, Josh Schrei, Sophie Strand on Monday 14th November 2022

Ecosystems are constituted by constant cycles of decay and regrowth. We can replant myth in ecology by understanding that storytelling, too, remains healthy when it goes through cycles, decaying, regrowing, and adapting to suit shifting climatological and social pressures. We can examine oral storytelling, forest ecosystems, fungal spores, and a rich mythology of storm gods to begin to understand how we cannot prize ascension over descent, text over spoken word. Healthy mythologies grow connective tissue between dualisms, cultivating fertile mythic gradients between opposing ideologies. Conversely, we can look at what happens when these mythic cycles get interrupted in the examples of patriarchy and material reductionism.

This is a snippet of the recording from Week 2. To watch other snippets that we’ve made publicly available, check out this playlist on YouTube here.

Tom Hirons #

Tom is a writer and storyteller whose particular interests are finding ways to speak and write with eloquence and power, and how those qualities might be cultivated through truth-telling, word-craft, paying keen attention to the world and knowing who we are in this life. His most well-known works are ‘Nettle-Eater’ and ‘Sometimes a Wild God.’ As well as having co-founded Hedgespoken Press and Hedgespoken travelling storytelling theatre, Tom is also a wilderness fast guide, a community acupuncturist and a writing and storytelling mentor. He’s a father of two young, wild sons and lives just south of Dartmoor in England. Find out more at www.tomhirons.com

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Josh Schrei #

Joshua Michael Schrei is a writer, teacher, and a lifelong student of the cosmologies and mythologies of the world — in particular the Indian subcontinent. Throughout a lifetime of teaching, study, meditation and yogic practice, wilderness immersion, art, music, and public speaking, Josh has sought to navigate the living, animate space of the imagination and advocate for a world that prioritises imaginative vision.

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Sophie Strand #

Sophie is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, & ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine is forthcoming in 2022. She is currently researching a mythopoetic exploration of ecology and queerness in the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde.

Read Sophie Strand’s profile