The living myth explains the world at a non-rational, non-verbal, or preverbal level, making existence sacred and informing the believer that he/she is not alone in the universe. Myth and mystery inform the heart that a person belongs and has a part in an eternal drama. Mystery simply is.
I felt myself a steady, fixed point on the earth round which a whirling gathered and spun a center. Then it was that I seemed to be no one, to belong to no one, and suddenly beholding the russet light of the turning sumach tree in the pasture, I thought,
I am leaf and I am wind and I am light. Something in the world likes faces and leaves and rivers and woods and wind together and makes of them a string of medallions with all our faces on them, worn forever round our necks, kin.
