The Dreaming of the Earth: Creaturely heroines and the marriage-place of worlds

Since the first dreaming of the world, there have always been stories in which the earth found a body, a voice, and a face through which to enter our human world, dreaming herself into human form. Creaturely heroines are not merely figures who move through the landscape but an expression of the courtship of human imagination and the earth, the way the land births herself into being in the storied world, this marriage-place of worlds. Through the creaturely heroine’s ecstasies and griefs, her shapeshifting and return, we are welcomed into an imaginal realm beyond the limited scope of our human experience, and we begin to see see the world through the wild’s eyes. She is the earth’s emissary, the way the wild enters into our world embodied, drawing us into an emotional kinship felt before it is understood.

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