The first flakes of snow usher in the beginning of winter, and according to old Germanic folklore, they are the feathers from the featherbeds of Old Mother Goose. According to the Brothers Grimm, she may have been a goose herself, or shapeshifting between an elderly woman and a snow goose, because in some versions of the story she has a one large foot, like that of a goose, perhaps a splayed foot from pressing the treadle of her spinning wheel. Due to her shapeshifting nature between a white goose and an elderly woman, she represents both maiden and crone, as well as the transition between life and death, lightness and darkness, representing this transitional time of the year: the Winter Solstice.
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Although I did not take this photo, this is what the landscape looks like where I live around this time of year. It is such a familiar scene, the colors, the trees, the gray sky. . .it reminds me of an opening in the forest where there are birches and reeds at the Hapgood Wright Forest Trail in Concord where I sometimes walk. Mikhail Luchin has captured it brilliantly here with his photo (available on Pexels) so much better than I ever could.
Waking up to the Dark: The Rich Gifts of Winter
Though the darker, colder season of winter is often associated with death and stagnation, folktales that feature winter and death reveal that darkness can offer a potential for spiritual enrichment and be the dark womb within which the seeds of new life incubate and begin to germinate. The darkness of winter and death is rich with meaning, and ripe with transformative potential if we choose to harness it, fearlessly welcome it, and recognize how it connects us to the great mystery of this wild and precious planet.
Read MoreAutumn's Gifts: Beauty and Bereavement
Autumn gifts us with the beauty of dying leaves, or, in the words of Rebecca Solnit, the reminder that beauty and bereavement can sometimes intertwine. What the autumn reminds us of is how feelings of grief and loss (and the dying of the leaves) can be felt at the same times as we experience something beautiful and joyful (the vibrant golden colors of the leaves) and how this complex combination of opposites is often at the heart of our human experience and weaves its way into many ancient folktales.
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The Birch Goddess: Baba Yaga & The Wisdom of Fall
Inspired by the Slavic Folktale Katrina and the Bright Falcon, featuring Baba Yaga, the enduring powerful female wilderness creatrix from Russian folklore, beautifully described and redefined by Natalia Clarke in her book Baba Yaga: Slavic Earth Goddess which she writes from her own Siberian heritage. The wisdom this folktale offers is how a deep relationship with a wild Falcon and an unconventional wild elder woman who lives in the deep forest, can be a pathway to birth our True Authentic Selves.
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Caribou Sky, inspired by a folktale about the caribou and their connection to the seasonal cycle of the sun which draws loosely from several ancient stories from Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, including many elements from indigenous Sami folklore. Here photographed in the process of being carved.
Summer 2023 Newsletter
Sharing several new handmade prints in my shop! Each print contains a precious folktale from the past, a mythos, reminding us of our ancient and intimate kinship with the wild, expressed with a multitude of endearing voices of the earth. Whether it is the sound of clanking antlers, or the mischievous pecking of a black crow, or the whisper of a tiger’s whiskers these heartwarming stories lyrically weave us into the circle of life and remind us of our extraordinary human imagination.
Read MoreThe Old Woman Who Weaves the World
Like the concept of Yin and Yang, the folkloric archetype of opposing forces that create the cosmos, weaves its way into so many different landscapes and cultural traditions secretly behind a veil of different stories and visual motifs . . yet here it is hidden in plain sight, in the White Mountain Apache folktale of The Old Woman Who Weaves Together the World and the Black Crow who pecks at the loose ends and unravels it again. What wisdom might this folktale offer us in rethinking our relationship with the wild?
Read MoreSedna: Gift from the Salt Womb
Sedna is an Inuit folktale about how unimaginable pain can be transformed into our greatest gift to others. Though Sedna drowns at the hands of her father, she transforms from the role of victim, to the mighty goddess of the underworld who births all life. Complex, fallible and real like each one of us, Sedna is a deeply lovable character in a heartbreaking tale that offers up ancient wisdom that wakes us up, like the salty spray of an ocean wave.
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