I want to suggest that play is our participation in the process of our own development through imagination. Adults mature through play just as children mature through play precisely insofar as play represents the intermediate step from potential development to actual “work”.
D. Stephenson Bond, Living Myth
This book is about the life and death and rebirth of myth. For those who have fallen out of myth, the experiences described here may be familiar, but for those who are able to live inside the cultural myths, these experiences may seem alien. I write for those who have experienced the loss of vitality and hold the secret in lonely isolation; for those, as Jung said, who, “…find themselves in the wilderness”; those who for whom personal meaning becomes a way of life.
D. Stephenson Bond, Living Myth
A living myth is in many ways a fantasy that has become a way of life. To me, the most vital aspect of mythology is not found in the stories of gods and goddesses of long ago, nor in the the psychological truths those stories reflect, but rather in the contemporary framework of images and meaning that are found in our way of life—the rhythm and structure of our weekly, monthly, and yearly cycles—and the myth that informs our life.
The problem is, however, that we don’t trust our own mythic imagination. In fact, the eruption of mythological fantasies in a person’s life is a psychological problem of a first degree. Other cultures in other times had ways of integrating mythological experiences into the whole fabric of personal and social life. We, by contrast, often don’t know what to make of such experiences.
D. Stephenson Bond, Living Myth