Starshine and Clay: Polaris Manifesto Part 1

I am a commitment to celebrating a mythic worldview

Hi, friends! Before we dive in, please consider supporting families displaced by the recent fires in the Los Angeles area. I am amplifying those in Altadena who were affected by the Eaton fire because my beloved and I live just down the hill in Pasadena. Visit bit.ly/rebuildAD to see an ongoing list of GoFund Me campaigns for more information.

"I will find peace." 2019, 36in x 48in | Image Credit: Stephen Towns

We don’t have to live like this

Myth and fiction have transformed the world. With every encounter, they remind me that we can have a different world if we want it. I believe that wielding the power of our collective imagination can lead us to a future where we are all free and whole, and I am committed to creating this future by showing others the social justice cheat codes in myths and speculative fiction.

During the height of COVID-19, I noticed that I was experiencing deep, unprocessed grief and rage about the dreams, lives, and potential for transformative change that we ceded to the pandemic collectively. Imagine if the U.S. had kept sending relief funds to households throughout the country? Imagine how the deaths of the people we lost to the virus rippled through their communities? Imagine if, instead of starting book clubs about racism, companies redistributed those resources to local organizers. Witnessing the compounded crises of a global public health emergency, structural and systemic violence, ecological collapse, and economic decay awakened a rage that I am still learning to hold. Like many, 2020-2022 left me depressed and debilitated, and in the depths of despair, I heard myself repeating over and over, “We don’t have to live like this.” But this is a story about moving from rage to despair to devotion...

Myth and fiction are necessary journeys into escapism and fantasy, especially when we need a break from a world that demands dissociation or compartmentalization to withstand its relentless onslaught of horrors. If we look closely at mythic texts, they reveal a secret: we made them up! I don’t make that proclamation to question whether they are historically accurate and True™️. Rather, I believe that the stories we read, the ways we spend our days, the currencies we use, what we believe happens to us after we die—those things are real in part because people alive before us said so, and we consent to and reify their visions in our own lives daily. Accepting that presupposition—that our collective imagination constructs our reality—opens up innumerable possibilities for reshaping the world. So I decided to let my neurotic, suicidal fixation blossom into a mantra and a research question: "We don't have to live like this!"

What even is a myth?

A myth is a world-building, often cosmological and cosmogonic story that explains how something came to be. A myth is not merely a religious fiction or collective delusion, but a narrativized set of organizing principles that shapes the reality of entire groups of people. Common examples are the Judeo-Christian creation myth that says God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, or the Greco-Roman story of the Trojan War that shows what happened when rage and grief consumed a man supposedly blessed by the gods. I would also argue for looking at the concepts of whiteness, capitalism, and even Black excellence with a mythic gaze; each of these phenomena has symbols, language, texts, rituals, and figures that shape how its adherents and detractors move in the world. These stories are collective memories that offer explanations for the world as it exists and instructions for its inhabitants' participation in that world. When we learn to apply a mythic lens to the world by understanding the stories in our culture, we gain a formidable weapon against systems of dominance - both external and internalized.

The Polaris Manifesto is an invitation into a mythic worldview. This is a guide for people who are curious about how imagination, creativity, and social justice intersect. It is a toolbox for people who want to transform themselves and the world. Use the prompts that follow to awaken your creative vision of liberation, and then talk with your loved ones, comrades, and colleagues to see where your visions intersect. Tell me about them, too! Transformation starts with an enlivening, exciting vision ushered forth in community. I want to help you bring that vision to life.

Creative Prompts

Use these prompts to pull new worlds from your imagination. Whether you're a writer, a visual artist, a musician, or something in-between, use that spark of imagination to invite us into your creative vision.

• What are the organizing principles of the world you inhabit? Put differently, what are the basic stories you know for the reason the world exists as it does?

• What is your role in that world, and how do you know?

• Did you inherit those stories or did you create them?

• Why do these things - the stories and your belief in them - matter?

CEUs

I am a child of the internet's syllabus generation (shoutout to

Jessica Marie Johnson

at Kitchen Table History), so it's important to me to share other resources that may help you tap into the wave of wisdom that informed this part of the Polaris Manifesto. I've curated several free resources on Are.na for you to enjoy, and a shorter list of pdf and epub materials for paid subscribers below. Enjoy!

• Stephen Towns, The Night Light Fell From the Sky (artist’s website) (exhibition)

• Storied by PBS, Fate and Fabled

• Crash Course, World Mythology

• For the Worldbuilders, Why Worldbuilding? Permission to Actualize Audacious Desire

For paid subscribers