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.
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Polar Bear Son, an Inuit folktale about an elderly childless woman who finds a lost polar bear cub and raises him as her own. When he grows up and the elderly woman finds herself unable to look after herself, he brings her food.
Wild Kin: Folktales & Fellowship with the Wild
Befriending the “monster”, or overcoming one’s fear of the “other”, is a common theme in many folktales where the relationship between the two main characters, one human and the other a wild animal, shifts from one of hunter and prey, to one of parent and child, ancestor and descendant, brother and sister, or lovers. It is a voice from the past that shows up again and again in stories from around the world suggesting that planetary ecological restoration may depend not only on conservation efforts but is, at its heart, a relational job calling for us to re-story ourselves into belonging with the wild.
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 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?
Read MoreYuletide: The Vital and Soulful Wisdom of Bothness
These twelve days between the Winter Solstice and the beginning of the next solar year are referred to as Yule or Yuletide in ancient Medieval Nordic folklore. What gifts does this sacred time belonging neither to the old year nor the new year offer us? How can we harness the transformative power of this bothness? Ancient folktales reveal that the past is not set-in-stone, but is continuously being reinvented, reimagined, and reweaved back into the upcycled tapestry of the present tense. This sacred time gives rise to the beautiful question: how can we cultivate new ways of relating to the past so we can move with wisdom into the future?
Read MoreFeathered Witch, Winter Weaver: How a Timeless Winter Spirit Wove Herself into Rhyme To Survive
Between the covers of a Mother Goose book, children’s rhymes and folktales are woven together with feathers and threads, preserving the magic of an ancient, shape-shifting winter spirit. Mother Goose, with her goose-foot and spinning-wheel roots, is said to echo Perchta, the pre-Christian Alpine goddess of winter, weaving, and liminal spaces. A guardian of thresholds—between old and new years, girlhood and cronehood, village and wilderness—she survives in story, rhyme, and legend, a powerful spirit whose magic endures in children’s tales across the centuries.
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