The Human Smorgasbord

"Myths lay out pretty clearly what is on the human smorgasbord: what we want, what we fear, what we would like to have, what we would very much not like to have. Those human fears and desires really have not changed, and they're reflected in the myths that have been with us for a long time."

---Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist and poet with a sharp appreciation of myth. Of her novel Surfacing, a book I find compelling, beautiful and frightening, she says, "You can be part of the machine or you can be something that gets run over by it. And I think there has to be a third thing."

The emergence of the third depends I think, on how well we engage with our stories, with the tales we tell of our lives and the larger cultural mythology of which they are a part.