Come to your death as an angel to wrestle instead of an executioner to fight or flee from and you turn your dying into a question instead of an edict: What shall my life mean? What shall my time of dying be for? What is it going be like, that cottage of darkness?
The tree of life, the axis mundi is the central point, the pole around which all revolves. The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, but stillness is eternity. Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you are doing in the temporal experience -- this is the mythological experience.