What weaves its way like an underground warren beneath the borders of conquest and control, dancing through differences and softening divides, preserving our collective wild sisterhood with the earth across time, cultures and landscapes? The ancient folkloric association between hares, woman, and moon traveled from Asia, through Persia and the Nile, across the forests of Europe and to the Americas, not by conquest and control but by word of mouth through storytellers, pilgrims, elders, weavers, healers and wanderers. The mystery and magic of this trio’s unyielding presence across landscapes and cultures is nothing less than the eternally regenerative aspect of the Earth Herself whispering through worlds and weaving Herself beyond borders untamed and free.
Read MoreCarving Memory, Gathering Bones, Singing Her
La Huesera, the ancient folktale of the mythical Bone Woman of the desert southwest, wanders the arroyos gathering scattered bones of wolves, singing over them until they reassemble and return to life. What if Bone Woman’s song is also ours to sing—the mythic medicine, the nourishing bone broth we can heal from if we dare to gather what’s been forgotten and scattered together at the same table, into the same circle of honoring? Bone Woman is the sacred feminine, known by many names, in many tongues. Her task is not to forge new connections, but to uncover what’s always been there. This is Old Story Medicine, the elixir She offers from her sacred cauldron when the world seems starved of connection, and in need of healing and repair.
Read MoreEnemies Made Sacred: The Last Howl of the Gospel of the Grasslands
In the heart of the Mongolian grasslands wolves and sheep herders once lived in harmony with each other. Nomadic herders regarded their fiercest enemy as their sacred teacher, weaving wolf-wisdom into myth, ritual, and the rhythms of daily life. Their folklore—part gospel, part guide—taught them the ways of wolves: resilience, loyalty, and reverence for the wild, helping human communities endure the unforgiving land. Wolf Totem captures this vanishing world, where enemy became ancestor, and folklore fed both body and soul.
Read MoreThe Goddess Isis: Shedding and Becoming
In the beloved Egyptian myth of Isis, Isis searches for the scattered parts of her murdered husband’s body, resembles him, and breathes life back into him, and makes love to him, which then gives birth to Horus who becomes the next Pharaoh of Egypt. Isis shows us that taking the aerial point of view, or birds-eye-view, gives us the power to hold the tension between what is dissolving and what is emerging, to see the whole instead of only the parts, and to recognize our own agency in the potential for transformation.
Read MoreReassembling Rites: Piecing Together the Ancestral Bones
There is an archetype that weaves its way through many ancient myths and folktales that centers around the sacred work of recovering and reassembling what has been disassembled. This ritual of singing over the ancestral bones, honoring, mourning over, and reclaiming what has been buried or lost, is a devotional act. In these stories, grieving takes center stage and plays a transformative role allowing the folk-heroine or mythological heroine to reach a place of wholeness, aliveness, and joy again.
Read MoreTern Teachings: Guests that Nest & Give
It is not only humans that tell stories. . . In the voice of bright white feathers and a charming black cap, a story darts its way through gusts of wind off the coast of Massachusetts hatching out of makeshift nests of pebbles and dry grasses. during the months of April and May. It is a seasonal story with themes of reciprocity and interdependence between the arctic tern, a migrating bird, and local coastal cloudberry flowers suggesting that even temporary guest can still contribute to a landscape’s thriving.
Read MorePower Beneath the Surface: The Psychic Waters of the Unconscious
The ocean is a prominent and enigmatic feature in many folktales around the world including: the Irish folktale of the Selkie, the Inuit folktale of Sedna, and the Vietnamese folktale of Dragon and the Crane. According to Carl Jung, the radical and inspirational psychoanalyst, we can explore the meaning of the ocean as a symbol of the unconscious and through this process we can find ways in which the characters’ struggles and transformations resonate with our own illuminating the path to our own self-discovery, forging a deeper connection to our own true authentic identity and our full potential.
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