Mud, the stone of Sisyphus, and the state of vocational morale in America.
Transcript
Today I have a story about mud. Where I live, if you spend any time in the natural world (even if that’s your backyard), mud is a reality of life during the months of March and April; and with many days bringing rain over the past week, it’s been a reality of life in May as well.
In the modern world, it seems we don’t think too highly of mud, and our language reflects it: when a situation lacks the clarity we desire, we call it muddy; mudslinging is an act of mutual disgrace; and we have mudrooms in our homes in which to keep things that we don’t want in the rest of the house.
When it comes to our modern view of mud, I’m also reminded of a novel by Kurt Vonnegut in which the military commissions a scientist to solve the problem of mud, which is an annoyance and a hindrance to the exercises and operations of its troops. The scientist’s solution is an invention he calls ice-nine, which Wikipedia efficiently describes as, “an alternative structure of water that is solid at room temperature and acts as a seed crystal upon contact with ordinary liquid water, causing the liquid water to freeze and transform into more ice-nine.”
No water… no mud.
Quite contrary to our modern attitude towards mud, in many old creation myths, mud is the substance out of which life is created, what the alchemists might call the prima materia. I think it’s time we gave mud the same amount of respect as our ancient ancestors.
My story about mud today is actually the story of a man I met at the off-leash dog park where I walk with our family dog. I do not remember the man’s name, but for the sake of the story, let’s call him John. I had seen John on one or two occasions before the day he and I spoke. I had noticed that he had no dog, which was rare for the people who frequent the park. On the day we officially met, I introduced myself and shared my observation that he was without a furry companion. He said that he liked to come to the park just to hike, and he was apparently planning that morning to take a path that ran across the top of a hill that looks over the park and runs its length. We met near a stream that runs along the bottom of that hill, and as we talked, John crouched down in the stream and began pulling stones out of it and placing them into a backpack he had brought with him. When I asked him what his plans were for the stones, he told me that every day, he had been taking a load of them to the top of the hill and placing them in a part of the path that getting muddy due to rainwater flowing down the slope.
I asked John what he did professionally, and he said, “Right now, I’m trying my best to be unemployed.” He told me that he was an engineer, and that he used to work for a company that created ergonomic designs for medical equipment. John shared that he was frustrated with his work, because upper management would often sign off on projects before they were truly ready… in other words, the economics of the situation demanded a level of expediency that did not honor a thorough design process.
My intuition told me that John was in a real period of transition when it came to how he thought about his work, and that the process of paving a path through the muddy bit of trail was providing him with a sense of purpose and direction, as if it was a manifestation of the way forward he was trying to forge for himself now that he was no longer in his job. I was deeply moved by his physical effort – carrying a daily load (of what I would guess to be twenty or twenty-five pounds) on his back two hundred yards up a steep incline and then another three or four hundred yards to the muddy spot in the trail – and I became fascinated with the idea that some powerful story was playing out in his psyche, and I began to muse about what that story might be.
It may come as no surprise that meeting a man who had set himself to day-after-day carrying stones up a hill would remind me of the Greek myth of Sisyphus who, having twice cheated Death, was punished by the gods with the eternal task of rolling a giant stone up a hill only to have it roll back down just before he reaches the crest of the incline. The task of Sisyphus is an image of futility and fruitless labor; and to take it a step further, we might say that the tale of Sisyphus demonstrates the futility of a patriarchal economy, where productivity and the bottom line are always the top priority. Pushing the stone to the hilltop is symbolic of the heroic quest for god-like immortally, and Sisyphus’s denial of death parallels the corporate desire for ever-increasing profits and efficiency.
While we are talking about patriarchy, it’s important to note that patriarchy is not the same as masculine energy; and it’s also important to remember that what has been symbolized as masculine in the old stories and old ways of understanding is not specific to only those who identify as being of the male gender, but every human being has potential access to both feminine and masculine energies – also called yin and yang, receptive and active, and so on. Patriarchy is just one of many examples of how an imbalance between the masculine and feminine principles of life can be take form, and the tale of Sisyphus is a good reminder that patriarchy, while it offers privileges to men, is ultimately harmful to both women and men.
Of course, the heroic attitude of bottom-line economics is the very dynamic that John cited when he told me about his frustrations with his former job… feeling as though he couldn’t really do his best work or offer his best product because of the corporation’s demands for expediency. And of course, he is not alone. Vocational demoralization has been receiving more and more attention in America. It is a well-known story to hear about corporate employees who become disillusioned by the lack of humanity in the economic system. But as the “helping professions” have become more and more systematized and standardized (in other words, more focused on the bottom line) we are hearing about teachers and nurses leaving their jobs in droves. Having entered their respective professions passionate about making a positive difference in the lives of others, they are finding that the system is precluding them from doing what they believe to be right for the people they serve.
Having exited from a job in which (I imagine) he had felt a similar sense of futility, John subsequently chose to spend a significant part of each day carrying stones up a hill, in a way subverting the myth of Sisyphus and transforming the act into one of meaning and purpose. And there’s another thing that sets John apart from Sisyphus. He was not taking his stones to the hilltop to build a monument to be closer to God. In other words, he wasn’t trying in futility to climb the corporate ladder; he was doing the opposite… he was trying to be unemployed! Unlike Sisyphus, John accepted death; we can unemployment as a type of professional death.
When living things die, they decompose and become earth once again, so mud is actually both and image of death as well as of the fertile potential for new life. In this way (as well as in physical characteristics) mud is akin to marshland, which is full of death and decay, as well as being a hotbed for new life. Marshland is transitional territory, and John, who has been paving his way through the mud during his time of transition, is representative of the whole world going through this mucky, murky time of uncertainty when vocational demoralization and the disruption of bottom-line economics seems to be the order of the day.
Mud, of course, is made of water and earth, and in the ancient Chinese tradition of divination known as the I Ching, the image of water over earth is known as “The Holding Together”. The Holding Together is a symbol of community, but it also refers to what Carl Jung called individuation: to be united and indivisible in oneself, holding together with inner truth and not being split between two masters. I see John’s “trying to be unemployed” as a way of honoring and nurturing this form of holding together after feeling split between serving the external master of the corporation and his own inner authority that spoke the truth about what it meant to do good work.
In ancient astrology, the elements of earth and water are considered to be feminine in nature; they symbolize the principle of yin, of receptivity. Mud is feminine. In Vonnegut’s novel, the military (which can also be seen as a representation of patriarchy) wished to do away with mud altogether, leading to the creation of ice-nine; and like ice-nine, patriarchy freezes the natural ebb and flow of life into rigid structures that ultimately cease to support life whatsoever. Springtime mud, on the other hand, comes from the thawing of winter’s ice and prepares the earth to give rise to new life. Patriarchy has suppressed the feminine but, the solution to patriarchy is not the reactive suppression of the masculine; indicative of a healthy balance, we still need the so-called masculine elements to grow new life: the wind (air) scatters the seeds, and the sun (fire) offers its energy to our living systems. Instead, the solution to patriarchy lies in our ability to rediscover what it means to embody healthy masculine energy while bringing warmth to the structures of our society in order to unfreeze the feminine, allowing it to flow freely once more; in this way, we heal both the feminine and the masculine within us and within the culture.
Instead of the heroic exaltation suggested (albeit, ironically) in the story of Sisyphus, John was laying his stones in the mud. Whether or not he meant to, he has created an image of healing and of balance between the opposites of the masculine and feminine principles – the enormous stone of Sisyphusian patriarchy has been broken into manageable pieces and actively delivered to and placed within the fertile mud like seeds waiting to spout. John wasn’t just fixing the trail; he was “holding together” with his own soul, and thereby doing his part to create a sense of balance and healing in the world during a time of universal chaos and transition.
For today improvisation, I’m sharing an excerpt from a piece that came to me around the same time that the ideas for this essay were coming together. I had not consciously connected them until the essay was complete, and I realized that the piece captured what it might feel like to be Sisyphus caught under the weight of the stone, laboring to get it up the hill, interspersed with a release of that pressure with a more blossoming musical passage.
Thank you for listening to and supporting this podcast. I always appreciate when listeners share the show with a friend, and if you have a moment, I would love for you to write a review wherever you listen. If you’d like to further support the show, you can become a member of the MeadowSong Podcast Listeners Club, and for $2/month, have access to additional musical content (including the full recording of the following excerpt), as well as input in some of my larger upcoming projects. Learn more at patreon.com/meadowsongpodcast.
If you are already a member, you can find the full recording of this improvisation by going to Patreon and looking for the post titled “Stone and Mud”. We will have a listener submission after this excerpt.
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Today’s listener submission is a dream from a man, age 57. Here’s the dream:
I dreamt that I was in a group of people including my boss, and he was encouraging me to do more work in order to get something done; and I was feeling overwhelmed and looked at him and said, “No, I can’t… I’m feeling like I’m going to get burned out because of everything I have to do.”
The listener shared that the dream closely resembles the dynamic with his boss in his waking life, but this scene with all the people present has never actually happened. He also shares that the feelings in the dream were that of overwhelm, as well as courage in standing up for himself despite feeling uncomfortable with all the people around.
Well, it seemed to be quite a synchronicity that this dream should be shared at the same time that today’s essay was coming together. I’ll say first that, of course, any thoughts I might have about the dream are coming from my own imagination about the listeners situation, without knowing anymore or having him here to ask for more context.
When I first read the submission, I had the thought that the psyche might be providing the ego with something like a trial run for something that, perhaps, needs to be communicated to the listener’s boss. But, after I sat down to the piano with the dream, something else came to me which I think is really interesting. I was focused on the crowd of people, and while the boss in the dream is the central source of pressure, it seems to me that the feelings of overwhelm and self-consciousness are at least exacerbated by all the people around. They are like what we sometimes call our “inner committee”, and depending on the types of inner figure we have convened in our committee, they might come across as like a jury, or a fan club, or just a bunch of people with differing opinions.
So when I sit down at the piano with a dream, it’s kind of like I’m using the music as a way to open up little bits of insight that might not sit right on the surface, and even perhaps explore what could come next if the dream kept going. And what occurred to me is that, after the dream ego speaks up about feeling overwhelmed, the crowd of people – who at first seemed like they might be judgmental or critical towards the dream ego – actually begin to voice their support for him; and I’m left with feelings of inner solidarity (kind of like the idea of “The Holding Together” from the I Ching) which is a very calm, peaceful and reassuring feeling.
Here's the music that came from the dream. Thank you to the listener who shared this dream, and to everyone listening, thank you for sharing your time with me. If you’d like to submit a dream, story, poem, or intention for use on another episode, go to meadowsongpodcast.com and click on “Get Involved”. I’ll leave you now with the music. Until next time, I wish you all things best and beautiful.
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NOTE:
Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle