Speaking of myth - old wisdom/everyday observations (post 3)

Yesterday I was profoundly glad to be able to tell stories live - face to face - for the first time in a year and a half, to a wonderful local audience. Many of the stories touched on the season we are now in - harvest, apples, Samhain, Day of the Dead. As I was preparing them, I thought about how many of our folktales touch on our relationship with the natural world. They contain mythic elements but have come down to us as simplified, everyday versions of much larger narratives.

Tony Allan dwells on this in the introduction to his book 'Myths of the World' but what really caught my attention was the foreword by Martin Shaw in which he says of mythology:

... it is an ecological age we now live in, and I want to suggest we take another step. A deeper one yet. That actually what we have in our hands are the most beautiful transcriptions of an extended conversation between humans and the wider earth. That myth is the way we and the world and its inhabitants talk to each other. That the earth itself thinks in myth.