Wanderers in a Lonely Age


We feel so alone and trapped in our age; we cannot see that we are part of a greater stream of time that binds us fully to every age that has passed before. We wander through our green land and see the old mounds and the ruins of temples, but we feel so distant from it all. Mythical figures and images, the cast of fairy tales and legends, all dance together in our imaginations, but that's all they are to us: dream-images, caricatures thin and insubstantial, like dim echoes from distant stars.

I walk through a dispossessed world everyday. The world seems to be a ruin, to me- I feel the greatness that was once here, now forced before the tide of change. I don’t see grassy hills and trees; I see burial mounds surrounded by singing and wailing crowds of people as they bury a beloved hero or ruler. I don’t see skeletal stands of trees and dried leaves; I see sacred groves and haunted forests, concealing the mysteries that our ancestors enshrined as sacred.

What king was buried in the ancient hill that overlooks my town? In my imagination's eye, he is a ghost; his bright cloak and golden adornments are hard to see, but his dark eyes stare at me from within. Even if you can’t visualize the clothes and jewelry of ancient times, you can still see that face- their faces were like ours. What brave armies once marched through the plain that travel now, rolling blindly along on the bus, and what sacred fires once dotted the tops of the mountains and hills in my valley, on certain magical nights of the year?

The landscape has dwindled and become property and motorways, rails and townships, but on another level it has become a mythical landscape, and all of us- or at least, those of us who still have some contact with our inner lives- are the myth-makers. I needed to recover the myth that I felt was lost, but I knew that such a task might be impossible. Or, I knew, it may carry me into irrational and concealed places that have always been the wellspring of myth- if the sacred could bubble and flow forth like a fountain in times of old, could it not do so now?

My land was once full of storytellers who knew how to do something extraordinary- they could put themselves in touch with a source of inspiration far beyond any modern person’s imagining, something divine. But the last ancient storyteller's voice has become silent. Once, he may have strung a harp and walked through the shady trails of the massive forest which is now only a tiny copse that I see from the window of my bus. He sang songs about Gods and Heroes in his time, but who knows about those Gods? Who knows where his bones are now?

As for his spirit, well, that's become a mythical icon in our minds, the “wise bard” of legend, and sometimes, when you're asleep and dreaming, or reading a story in a book penned by some fantasist, you'll meet him- still alive and on his adventures.


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