Make your plans now to join us in the festive week between year-end and new year’s. This is our last Mythsinger StoryNight for 2024... We'd love to see you!
WHEN: Saturday, December 28th from 1-3pm Pacific Time
WHAT: We gather for the 3rd annual Creation Myths for the Turning of the New Year
WHO: Judith-Kate Friedman and Audrey di Mola, your hosts-- and you!
RSVP ON EVENTBRITE and invite a friend :) The Zoom link will be sent to you upon registration.
Tickets are offered on a DONATION basis: $5-$45 pay as you wish, pay as you can.
All funds contributed will benefit the continued work of the Mythsinger Legacy Project– allowing us to continue our quarterly StoryNights and more– throughout 2025.
Thank you for your support!
ABOUT THE EVENT:
As always, we invite you to partake and add your voice to the magic that happens when we join together around the virtual hearth to share music, hear master mythteller and beloved teacher Daniel Deardorff beam in from the archives, and “feed the stories” and mythic experience which so deeply feeds us.
We meet on Zoom, blending ancient tales and 21st century technologies in the Oral Tradition. After listening to Daniel's and Judith-Kate’s original music and creating a sacred circle, we follow Daniel into the StoryHut (via video) and witness as he calls fire in the traditional manner with flint and steel and sings about the tradition of calling, and tending, fire.
This season’s StoryNight stories are the trio of Creation tales that Daniel always shared at the turning of one year into the next.
Three myths will be told from very different traditions: one Norse, one Sumerian, and one from the Toba people of South America.
In this soulful time we'll open our imaginations and collective intelligence and discover what the ideas in each story, and the associativity between cultures, say to each other and to us.
In these challenging times with so many unknowns, we turn to the old stories for a sense of what endures over time. For the old stories hold medicine, and in traditional lore are understood, as mythologist Sean Kane has it, to be "the voice of the earth herself, speaking through people."
ABOUT DANIEL DEARDORFF, MYTHSINGER:
Mythologist Martin Shaw says of his longtime friend and collaborator: “Deardorff was the greatest storyteller I ever saw… a Taliesin moving between hawk, salmon, and grain of wheat. It’s breathlessly exciting, what he is pointing towards.”
Daniel Deardorff was a "Singer" in the old sense: musician, storyteller, mythologist, and maker of ritual, a composer, performing artist, independent scholar of myth, author, and survivor of paralytic polio. In his mythtelling, he accompanies himself on djembe drum and invites us to find our own lives in the old stories. A survivor of childhood polio and resulting paraplegia, he used a wheelchair for most of his sixty-seven years; his lived experience of “otherness” gave him a perspective that deeply informed his views on myth. Learn more about Daniel at mythsingerlegacy.org.
If you’ve joined us around the Zoom hearth before you know that, amazingly, the potency of what Daniel delivered in person, when well-captured on audio and video and held in a sacred circle, truly conveys the essence of what he hoped we could receive from him for generations.
If you never got to meet Danny in his lifetime, it’s truly not too late. Those who knew him well, and those meeting him for the first time through these events, speak to the power of his presence as an ongoing gift.
ABOUT THE MYTHSINGER LEGACY PROJECT:
When Daniel Deardorff flew “out of this story and into the next” in 2019, he left a great many recordings, teachings, and ways for us to continue to access his guidance, love and wisdom. The Mythsinger Legacy Project (MLP) is honored and grateful to carry on his legacy and to work toward fulfilling his vision and mission– to restore the wisdom of myth to culture and community. MLP does this by creating experiential programs and contexts that bring together a growing international community of artists and misfits of all ages, cultures, and abilities. Those who gather share a common purpose or conundrum: to acknowledge, honor, and ultimately welcome the Other in society and in ourselves. We give people access to hearing the “old stories” (ancient myths) which Deardorff carried, in formats that catalyze healing.
MLP is also proud to represent Daniel's classic text, The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture, and Psyche, published in a posthumous, expanded, 3rd edition (Inner Traditions, 2022, distributed internationally by Simon and Schuster).
Founded in January 2020 to carry forward the music and mythic arts of Daniel “3D” Deardorff, MLP operates as an independent charitable organization in WA state and is, for national and global projects, a fiscal sponsee of Songwriting Works Educational Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit arts organization.