The ocean is a prominent and enigmatic feature in many folktales around the world including: the Irish folktale of the Selkie, the Inuit folktale of Sedna, and the Vietnamese folktale of Dragon and the Crane. According to Carl Jung, the radical and inspirational psychoanalyst, we can explore the meaning of the ocean as a symbol of the unconscious and through this process we can find ways in which the characters’ struggles and transformations resonate with our own illuminating the path to our own self-discovery, forging a deeper connection to our own true authentic identity and our full potential.
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 MoreThe Mitten: the undercurrent of synchronicities that connects us all together
There is a folktale about the importance of generosity when faced with a scarcity of resources that can be found in both Ukrainian folklore and in Abenaki folklore. In the Ukrainian version, woodland animals try to fit into a mitten to stay warm even though it is too small, and in the Abenaki version they are all coerced into a bag to feed a hunter and his grandmother even though taking all of them exceeds the hunter’s needs for the winter. Myths and stories that reveal shared values and themes despite having originated from two distinct cultures and landscapes reveals a collective consciousness: an undercurrent of synchronicities that connects us all together.
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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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 MoreOwl and Raven: A Folktale of Beauty and Reciprocity
Must beauty always be something unattainable and unachievable, something we relentlessly pursue only to have whatever small gains we have made swept out from beneath or feet by the latest new seasonal trends? . . . Or can we hear the ruffled feathers of an ancient folktale perched on the branched edges of the tree of modernity, just waiting for us to notice it and hear its song? An ancient Inuit folktale about two charming friends, Snowy Owl and Raven, weaves beauty and belonging back together again with old world enchantment. . .
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