What weaves its way like an underground warren beneath the borders of conquest and control, preserving our collective wild sisterhood with the earth across time, cultures and landscapes? The ancient link between hares, the divine feminine, and the moon journeyed from Asia to the Americas—carried by storytellers, pilgrims, healers, and wanderers. What might we reclaim if we traced their sacred steps?
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. Bone Woman’s song is sung the world over, it is the mythic medicine we can heal from if we dare to gather what’s been forgotten and scattered together into the same circle of honoring. 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 MoreSelkie & Dragon: Reclaiming The Pelt For Our Times
What wild and precious part of ourselves have we lost and forgotten in the ocean between and betwixt our domesticated divisions, that finding and reclaiming will bring us to a deeper sense belonging? Exploring the synchronicities between two oceanic folktales, the Irish Selkie and Vietnamese Dragon & Crane, is a journey of self-discovery and a form of maritime medicine. Reconnecting these folktales requires that we swim fluidly with the restorative tides of underworld love magic and surrender to the cross cultural currents that transcend our modern national and cultural categories, shifting the way we think of people, place and belonging. . .gifting us with wisdom to weather the stormy seas of our times.
Read MoreThe Sky Goddess: Generously Weaving Together Worlds
Bridging continents and cultures, the Eswatini folktale of Cloud Princess from Africa and the Haudenosaunee folktale of Sky Woman from North America, offer us their shared and relevant wisdom enriching, deepening and expanding our understanding of the meaning of “generosity” in unexpected ways. We learn generosity is the vital and sacred choice that can weave us back into relationship with each other, draw us into closer kinship with the wild, and open ourselves up to belonging to a larger whole.
Read MoreBoreal Bears and Feral Females: Twin Bear Folktales from East and West
The Norwegian folktale “East of the Sun West of the Moon” and the Japanese (indigenous Ainu) folktale entitled “Crescent Moon Bear” are folktales featuring fearless young women who dare to engage in greater intimacy with a bear whether it is marrying a bear, or having the courage to pluck the whisker of a bear. Both involve traversing a formidable boreal forest landscape to save their husbands from a “spell”. These folktales are so strikingly similar in theme and shared values, giving voice to their parallel nature deepens our sense of interconnected history, and rekindles a feeling of belonging to a shared storied boreal landscape, weaving together people, bears, ancestry, stories and hearts. . .
Read MoreAntler Bone Necklace: The Mythic Cartography of Kinship Redrawing Borders of the North
Reindeer folktales can be found in Finland, Russia, Greenland and Canada, and the United States (specifically Alaska) circling the arctic like a wide necklace made of woven strands of interconnected stories and antler bones that tell of a time when humans and reindeer lived together as one family. These folktales transport us back to an ancient magical world where humans lived in fidelity to the migration of reindeer rather than confined to national or political borderlines encouraging us to rethink people, place and belonging.
Read MoreBetween the Dragon and the Crane: Hatching the Vital Bothness into Being
What hatches into being when we dare to hold multiple truths at once? When we cradle multiple eggs in one shared nest? For thousands of years, an ancient Vietnamese folktale has safeguarded and tended to this complex question within a warm nest of white feathers and salty scales. Its gift hatches season after season, fragile and luminous, growing ever more vital in times of division. Can we open ourselves to it? Can we open ourselves to this gift, and let its ancient wisdom take root within our hearts?
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