What’s In a Name?
Choosing a name to encapsulate or at least begin to articulate the relationship I have to the stars was both immediate and the journey of years. “Mini Myth Astrology” was the name as soon as it occurred to me to need a name, but it began over twenty years ago, with a gift.
When I was eleven, all I wanted was to escape how alone and out of place I felt. I asked my grandmother for one thing, the Dragon Riders of Pern. She handed it to me on Christmas day. It was a brick of a book that smelled like new ink. It was the first, the first fantasy world I explored, the first place inhabited with dragons, the first of my many paper shelters that helped me hold onto myself in the midst of teenage tumult.
Being a reader, I have a whole treasury of words I have never heard spoken aloud and an equal number of fantastical names that I have invented my own pronunciations for. From one of these invented pronunciations came the name Mini Myth. A bronze dragon from Pern, Mnementh, became Min-a-myth in my imagination. I named beloved objects after him, my little sister wrote stories with characters that shared his name, truly, anything that needed a name that spoke to wonder, and the power of story was christened Minamyth .
As I have gotten older, I continue to marvel at the human impulse to tell stories, to weave narratives out of the unknown, and the ways we carry myths with us. I have had the chance to witness firsthand many people take back their place in the human tradition of meaning making and storytelling. I have watched as they pick up the proverbial pen and begin anew to tell their origin story, to decide what their experiences mean, and to expand the scope of what they believe they are capable of becoming.
The mythic tales we tell ourselves matter. They help us find what matters to us, the ways we want to matter to the world, and the ways we want to inhabit the matter that is our body. We are each writing our own Mini Myth. I have yet to find a lens or language that more fully places us back into relationship with our capacity to speak our myth and meaning into being than astrology. Partially because it itself is woven from the myths that came before but more importantly it reminds us of the singularity that is our starry expression.
Your birth chart paired with your context is an unrepeatable possibility. There will only ever be one being that walks in relationship to both earth and the sky the way you will. At the same time, you are part of a collective storytelling reaching back along the lifeline of your ancestors of blood, place, and tradition. You, like everyone before you, have all twelve signs, all twelve houses, and the same celestial bodies represented in your chart. Astrology can acknowledge both your shared celestial context and the entirely unique way you are in relationship to the universe. In turn it needs you, your perspective, your voice, to contribute to telling a more elaborate and whole narrative of human possibility.
So, from escape into fantasy worlds and the refuge of dragon wings, to becoming my own star stuff storyteller, to my longing to share this vast and personal system with you the name Mini Myth arose. It holds my love of stories and certitude that the act of writing our own is a necessary part of creating a more inclusive and holistic myth of what being human, part of the world, and part of cosmos means. So, here is to your "Mini Myth” an essential part of the collective myth we are co-creating with all of space and time and to that little girl that’s mispronunciations echoed across my lifetime to hold my next step and hopefully yours.
Warmly,
