Wild Genius
The NAVIGATORS Storynights
OVERTURE
January to June 2024 AUSTRALIA LIVE
WA
• Geraldton • Cervantes • Yanchep • Perth • Rockingham • Bunbury • Margaret River
PLUS
• Adelaide • Melbourne • Canberra • Sydney • Brisbane
Journeys | Navigators | Overture
In this section:
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Quick Facts and Figures
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Invitation
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Why join a Navigators journey?
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Wisdom and Resiliency for Modern Times
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All Praises to the Teachers and the Lineages
Journeys | Navigators
On this page:
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Overture—a quick description and invitation
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Syllabus—a deeper dive into the idea of group story work
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Testimonial—selected
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Details—attending an evening
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Registration—at end of page or
Quick Facts and Figures
Quick Facts & Figures:
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7:00pm to 9:30pm
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Participatory with discussion and art
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Each evening is unique
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Recommended preparation for Saturday full day events
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A telling of one of the old myths
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Story is told with drumming
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Explore and reveal your unique relationship with the story
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All backgrounds welcome
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Laughter, tears and dancing may be present!
TUITION
Full: $75 Aud
Concession: $50 Aud
Invitation
An old tradition says that tellers of tales are also meant to be trained as diagnosticians able to prescribe a next step for healing. The first step is listening and reflecting deeply.
Across cultures, myth holds encoded information, encompassing concerns ranging from ecology to initiation of the soul. These teachings begin making a bridge between the instructions hidden in myth and the practical healing that is possible to emerge from a group process.
Join this fellowship of brave travelers searching together for these old roots of culture and community.
“A myth tells the truth—
without the use of facts.”
Daniel Deardorff
The Other Within:
The Genius of Deformity in
Myth, Culture & Psyche
Why Join a Navigators Journey?
Storynights answer the modern sense of exile, dislocation from purpose, grief, and lack of healthy connection to ancestors with an integrated approach. Group work with old myth has the following features and benefits:
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Confirmation of chaos as possibly initiatory
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Felt sense of ancestral guidance
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Eldership from the old wisdom traditions in myth
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Weaving strong bonds of recognition in the group
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Companionship for your travels and troubles
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Surprising revelations of inner knowing
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Experienced guidance of the process
“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”
J.R.R, Tolkien
The Hobbit
The depths of what is within the imagery of myth is a perfect welcoming home for seekers of beauty in the unusual and forgotten.
It is relevant for anyone deepening their relationship with the Other World—dreams, nature, psyche.
This is a way to work practically with the old African proverb, "It takes a village . . . " cutting through the false sense of isolation in modern times—since we bring both personal and practical concerns to the table.
SYLLABUS
Journeys | Navigators | Syllabus
In brief:
This section is meant to give you a good sense and "feel" for the nature of the work on a storynight.
In this section:
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Like Stepping into the Old Stories
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Wounds and Genius
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How to approach the work
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Themes January to June 2025
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Elements—The StoryCarrier's Map
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Myth—The Compass of Attention
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Ritual Tasks—A Practice for Steering
“The medium is the message” implies that the invention of a dichotomy between content and method is both naïve and dangerous. It implies that the critical content of any learning experience is the method or process through which the learning occur
Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner
Teaching as a Subversive Activity
Like Stepping into the Old Stories
There is a world wide resurgence of interest in old tales and their telling. Something badgers our bones and scratches an ear calling us to pay attention. Truth be told, an old myth or story seeks to pass on and uncover the renewable sources of wisdom, resiliency and inclusion to each generation. It wants to be generous.
You will learn how to uncover the particular guidance a myth is meant to give to each listener personally. Not a moral of the story, for myth never really does that. Not a general advice, for the wisdom is peculiar to the moment. And yet the value in working in a group shows everyone the riches of the "storehouse" hidden in each tale.
Wounds and Genius
Both wounds and genius get spoken of in the context of a ritual telling and working session. This path of training will be practical—we will study one story a month. We work as if under the guidance of a kind of Elder (the story itself), who has heard all of the details of life many times before. We find here initiation, trouble, style, and sass, and the making of powerful alliances in the mythic world.
Many types of people could benefit from this mentorship: storytellers, facilitators, performers, counsellors, or those wanting to delve in for personal reasons.
How to approach the work
By necessity, the work relies on own personal relating to the myths. Each month, we will work with one story. That will be the common journey we undertake to uncover an embodied application.
We meet, with a theme of investigation that each person has their own personal reflections upon. After a break out room for greeting and catching up, we explain the theme, and tell that month's story. After the break, we return and work with the different images in the story, uncovering some of their perceptive wisdoms.
Themes January to June 2025
The great powers continue to drag their heavy bureaucratic feet on making meaningful changes to policy for environmental, economic, and social issues. Add to that the looming horror of fascism boldly advertising itself as with lies and duplicity. In answer, the myths tell us to look both within and without for resources. Some of our themes will be:
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More lost than ever before
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Grief and Praise
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A style is the doorway to a genius
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True identity
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Welcoming and community
Bringing some grit and truth to the conversation will be worthwhile—you will get out what you put in. You will likely meet new friends to collaborate and celebrate with.
Elements—The StoryCarrier's Map
We will be referring to the energies of the five Elements of the West African Dagara cosmology, which are Earth, Mineral, Water, Fire, and Nature. There is no need to "study" these before beginning, you can pick it up along the way.
Always we are dealing with the Grit and the Grace . . . and the Guile needed in life to navigate the troubles we face simply by being alive. In a very real way, we are living in the territory of the wild elements on this Earth. They are gigantic forces seen from our human sense of scale, yet we feel their powers stirring in us constantly.
We will work in the stories holding the map of the Elements as our ancestors once did daily. No doubt the elements will visit us in the course of the stories.
“Only to a magician is the world forever fluid, infinitely mutable and eternally new. Only she knows the secret of change, only she knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness to become something else, and it is from this universal tension that she draws her power.”
Peter S. Beagle
The Last Unicorn
Myth—The Compass of Attention
To carry a story, more than the simple telling, is to have undergone some examination in the way the story affects the teller. Only in this way can the teller be able to step into the secret aspect of their craft—as a listener to the responses that come from an audience with a deep compassion and wit. The conversation leads toward finding bearings and practical ways to work with what has been uncovered.
The circumstances described in the myths are timeless situations that all people in all times experience. We will learn, by practice, the way of bringing the personal into conversation with the perennial. The myth doesn't tell you what to do—it helps you understand what the situation already really is anyway.
This way of working with story in community is not only personal, but the time-tested way of training those who would tell stories as well. If that is your interest, these evenings provide valuable experience.
Ritual Tasks—A Practice for Steering
Our goal is to receive some particular, personal detail from each story, and turn it into a worthy task—this is what we call a "ritual task." It is a relatively small thing to do that embodies the relationship with the story. We are working with a deep re-education of the modern fascination about transcendence (just thinking about) to balance it with the wisdom of the emergent (active relationship).
Such a task has a practical effect of training, practicing, attention directing, and discovery. A ritual task is a mysterious small adventure that holds the possibility of stepping into a new identity. As always, working with an indigenous sensibility that "it takes a village," we will witness each other and support the work.
Ritual tasks, in this context, are steps that do something different enough to make a difference. They are something you do to interact with the knowledge hidden in the storehouse of the story instead of just intellectualizing. Always they are designed to bring a particular step of wisdom from the mythic world into this world.
“Gaia visited her daughter, Mnemosyne,
who was busy being . . . unpronounceable.”
Stephen Fry
Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold
The Longing for Eldership
To humans, young or old, the stories have been around so long that they begin to look as if they might be Elders of a type in relation to the human world. And it is certainly a time when the world is longing for Eldership to replace the poverty of simple "Oldership." Our adventure is nothing less than part of the old training from many cultures that suggests that Elders, at least in part, get trained in the work of story.
“Myth and nature are the two great garments of the world, with nature being the living green garment that covers the planet and myth being the multidimensional, many-colored fabric that continually weaves human culture.”
Michael Meade
The Genius Myth
TESTIMONIALS
Journeys | Navigators |Testimonials
DETAILS
Journeys | Navigators | Details
Aspects of the evening that may affect people
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Sometimes emotions get expressed in the container
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A small shrine to the elements is in the room
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Drumming during the story affects some people
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Please respect this is a drug and alcohol free event
Best Practices:
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Do your best to arrive 15 minutes early
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Bring a specific intention or question for guidance
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Come as you are, even on the edge of tears
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Bring a notebook if you wish
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Stay present and attentive
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Consider that everyone, including you, is helpful
Accommodations
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If you need any specific accommodation, please communicate with advance notice if possible
Questions?
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Happy to assist! Get in touch!
“Friends ask you questions, enemies question you.”
