Knowledge Share Description

For most of human history, myth was a durable mode of knowledge transmission, kept alive and resilient by the breath-laced web of communal storytelling. Just as we plant a seed in soil, so were vital pieces of agricultural and ecological lore planted into stories that were built to survive environmental and social collapse.

But the rise of empire depended on the deracination of mythologies. Just as landscapes were stolen and terraformed so were whole pantheons uprooted from their social and ecological contexts.

How can we reroot these myths in their original environments to recover the ecological wisdom they were built to transmit? How can we understand that science and mythtelling stem from a similar impulse to cultivate understanding and intimacy with the natural world?

Rejecting the antiseptic impulse of the dominant culture’s bent on exterminating alternative epistemologies, let us compost our favorite myths, folklore, and narratives with ecology, science, somatics, and poetry. Hijacking the tools of material reductionism for our feral creations, we can glimpse into the inner worlds of lichen, fungi, rainforests, and songbirds, understanding that the most important stories right now are always more-than-human.

Finally, let us retell cultural myths and personal stories knowing that, like an ark, they may carry our most precious relationships and seeds of practical wisdom, through the floodwaters and tectonic shifts of tomorrow.

We will:

• Reroot popular mythologies in their original social and ecological context using a historical, scientific, and anthropological lens;

• Revitalise oral storytelling as a relation mode of knowledge transmission;

• Pour anthropocentric narratives into more-than-human morphologies;

• Decenter human heroes by peering into the sensory worlds of insects, microbes, and fungi;

• Map the webs of relationship that constitute our own backyard mythic ecosystems;

Cost

$35 - low income

$50 - standard

$75 - pay-it-forward (if you have financial abundance, this is our pay-it-forward option to fund our full tuition scholarships)

The zoom link will be sent automatically upon registration. Recording will be available for 30 days.

Please apply here for a scholarship.

Accessibility Information

*ASR (automated) captioning provided

Virtual Gathering

The knowledge share zoom link will be sent out immediately upon purchase, along with any other necessary information.

3:00pm - 5:00pm Eastern Standard Time

Class will be recorded and available for 30 days.

Facilitator

Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and 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. Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she’s ever lived in she has been known as “the walker”. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients. She is the author of The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine and the eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret. You can subscribe to her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com and follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sophie.strand1