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.
Read MoreWild 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 MoreSkye's Feathered Weavers of Worlds: Dream Carriers, Winged Messengers, and the Liminal Magic of Migrating Birds
The old Scottish folktale of the Dreammakers from the Isle of Skye whispers a quiet knowing: that beneath our feet and beyond our sight, migrating birds carry more than wings. As they journey across shifting skies and ushering in the seasons, they bring us our dreams, weaving the outer world with the inner landscape of vision. Resting on the edge of worlds, they remind us that our true belonging rests at the meeting point between here and there. . . from the threshold loom of the open sky where feathers and wings thread landscapes together.
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