As women connected to the earth, we are nurturing and we are fierce, we are wicked and we are sublime. The full range is ours. We hold the moon in our bellies and fire in our hearts. We bleed. We give milk. We are mothers of first words. These words grow. They are our children. They are our stories and our poems. —Terry Tempest Williams

Artist PAPAYA

Whether we use it or not, AI is shaping our reality, stories, thinking, dreaming. Our bodies, creating and becoming. Are you tracking how it is changing you?

I admit: I use it. Sometimes I ask it to shape my longer writings or reduce repetition. Not to create content for me. And…I just moved. I asked it to research sofas -comfortable, small-space, rust-colored velvet or cocoa. Still. I am going to buy the one I sat on in my town -instead of purchasing from an AI recommendation.

I love knowing things. I love learning. The machine gathers threads of what I know and creates pathways of study around my curiosities. It’s wild. I check everything multiple ways. And…still…I have to be mindful. Because Baba Yaga warned us that to know too much is to grow old too soon.

In my twenties, I had a teacher who was a Sicilian Baba -a true Strega Nonna —irreverent, salty, sassy and wild. Because I wanted to know know know oh so much, she would joke: “oh catapilla! you know so much and yet you still cannot cross the Great Divide. When will you become a butterfly?” Annoying.

I understand her now. Despite sitting beside rivers and trees, sunflowers and the buck and his shedding, I am in the modern, more and more. I’m nostalgic for the 90s. Heck, the 1890’s. I miss letting a question live within me for days, weeks, years without immediately reaching for an answer.

I want to be Goethe’s nature-loving god-daughter.
I want to encounter language even more phenomenologically.
I want circle a living story or poems for a year and a day.
I want to be seasoned for 13 moons by a question.
Some questions need to steep in the long dark.
They change us.
They rearrange us.
They require us to walk into the forest without knowing where we are going,
or who we will be when we return.

In times of fast immediacy, we are at risk of losing wonder and the process of questing, questioning, and crafting our consciousness and human becoming
through slow practices like listening, writing, witnessing, encountering
and waiting.

Artist: Kindra Nikole

Little by little —I am, you are, we are —being shaped by the machine. The World Wide Web is a different species than grandmother’s living spider web threaded through mycelium and stars. Its sticky spindly, artificial but intelligent threads are vine-ing around the human. Vine-ing through our neural pathways. Vine-ing into how we think, dream, seek, make, remember. Smartening and mechanizing us in a weird slow fast way, promising more intelligence. More polish. More glitter. More free time.

As the machine becomes more intimate with our minds, what is it doing to our human becoming? What happens when it mediates the encounters that shape us? Interprets the dream before we have sat with it? Explains the story before we have wandered through the brambles? Names the pattern, answers the question, suggests the words, reflects us back to ourselves and does the inner work for us?

Some of it is helpful. Some of it is astonishing. And some of it may be entering the places where our own consciousness needs to struggle, wander, wrestle, encounter, imagine and unfold.

We need edges.
We need to travel into them to discover.

Writing is one path that I love, for guiding us into these edge places.

Artist: Kindra Nikole

The edges of forest and language. Between self and psyche, other, tame and wild, visible and invisible, life and death, the story inherited and the story trying to be born.
Consciousness is an edge. Soul has edges.

Edges as meeting places for unknowing, uncertainty, possibility. Edges as ecosystem where something beyond touches us and our familiar shape can shift. As machines grow we have to become more deliberate about tending what cannot be mechanized. The good things. The true things: Soul. Psyche. Body. Mystery. Beauty. Relationship. Belonging. The long question. The long waiting. The inner seasoning. Shapeshifting. Writing and beautying. Mythos and meaning. Practices that bring us into direct encounter with life and re-story us from the edges toward the living center, changed.

Writing as (W)rites of Passage

Beauty as verb. Beauty as that which alters us.

Story as a way of knowing.
Story as verb.
Story as ecology
between image, body, memory, place,
ancestor and imagination.
Old stories do not explain their secrets.
We trust their blindfolds
as we go into the forest.
Into the dark linger.
Into hunger.
Into their blood, bone and milk,
ash, iron and fire
into their skins and sea.

Into the interior.

Fairytales and myths are slow soul food for fast times. Darkening, whitening, reddening. Alchemical cauldrons. They stalk us. They open their strange hinges and mouths, and invite us into their muthos and their mythos; to digest them the slow way. To drink their soul milk. To curl up inside and sleep with them. To enter sacred reciprocity with them and allow them to into-me-see with us. One eye in, one eye out.

They sprout and bloom inside our lived stories. They bring us closer to what is animal in us. They make us more red. They show us what wants to be composted, re-composed and re-storied while uncertainty and time season us honestly.

Artist: Alexandra Bochkareva

Writes of passage for exploring Story, interior, body, memory, place in held container that guides us through the wild and wonderful terrain of Story. Where we can separate from what we know about our stories and discover something unknown or shift our relationship to them; to descend if the season asks this of us. To release the stories that do not fit, creatively, and to emerge, more naked in our voices, our writing, our words and our stories with an elixir in our hands. That elixir may be a collection of writings as Apothecary of Becoming or it may be something found, in the process of the ordeal of reStorying, editing, shaping, reshaping, shape shifting our stories. It’s unique to each woman and her unique process.

Writing to circle Story. To become the circle. To discover one’s story pelt. To look for dragon smoke. To wild and swan into language. To ensoul and become more alive.

To write barbarian to uncivilize.

…where you feel it, down there
where it is hot and ripe and
juicky and alive. yes, juice-ky.
invent words, girl.
get out of your own way lady!

I have for years shared Natalie Goldberg’s invitations to keep the hand moving, to lose control and to write the worst junk in America. To write messy, tear-stained. To write into the fat, the meat, the gristle, the muscle.

Writing is magic, messy, hard, revelatory, dense and dark, and fucking difficult sometimes. I never know what I will encounter. Poison or possibility. I never know how writing will dismember or if the words will take a bite out of me. Writing strengthens my roots, gives me flexibility and helps me to find my wings.

I have to work hard to stay with the fermentation long enough for it to become nutritious for my belly. I turn the glob slop into gold.

I seduce words and discover new layers. I become a tracker. I felt-sense into sentences. Life force. I let my bones, my belly and my boobs speak. I write mountains before editing trees. I write molasses to discover iron. To sink into marrow. I write naked. I give my words fur. I open my mouth to discover butterflies.

To write like a barbarian feels extremely urgent. AI produces civilized language that is structured, coherent, legible, appropriate, and polished.

But what happens to writing that needs to bungle?
Jungle. Sway.
Scream.
Bite!

Ache.

What happens to the dirt?
and the writing that contradicts itself,
makes up words,
grows spikes or spits bones?

What about the dragon smoke? The leaps
that take us beyond
and back again
changed.

I want to know through contact, encounter, relationship, belonging
through a circle of women
what happens
when we gather
and take civilization out of our writing practices
and let go of
perfectly polish, permission, productivity
and getting it right.

I want to witness women
in the messy-unruly beauty
of their voices
before the work has been domesticated
into neat and tidy.

Artist: Kindra Nikole

I want to retrieve, with you
something hard-won
that cannot be generated for us
by the Wizard of Oz
behind the machine.

This is why I gather around thirteen. Because of you. With you. Because of your sacred mess. Because of your blood, sweat, tears and contradictions. I gather for the sacred, mysterious, taboo thirteen,
holding a promise for women
and their weird, wyrd, messy, unhinged and wild,
beautiful voices.
Not just the polished.
Fuck that.

Thirteen women. Thirteen weeks. Thirteen moons. We have to invite the Thirteenth Fairy to the party. the Forbidden fruit. Mystery.
Transformation.

This fall, Crack Open the Story gathers thirteen women for thirteen weeks of mythopoetic storytelling and embodied, animist writing.

We will gather around old, old stories and the wild nesting doll of stories within our wild nesting selves. Write. Listen. Move. Let body speak. Listen again. Follow images. Threads. Riddles. Stay with questions longer than the machinery of modern life generally allows.

We will let the old stories work on us. And we will write unruly. Like wolves and rivers and storms. Like barbarians. We will form new wild worlds w/ our wild words.

Because constellations birth new stories.
Because women tend one another well.
Because stories are medicine.
They crack us open.
We discover what unfurls from within -not from the screen.

Because writing can bring us back into contact with meaning and marrow
and with the places beneath explanation
where something in us
still knows how to listen.
Hallelujah!

If something in you longs to feral write and re-turn to Story, to meet the unruly voice waiting beneath the well-mannered words

I invite you to join me.

Bring all of you.

Crack Open the Story begins Sunday, September 20.
11:30–1:30 Mountain
6:30–8:30 UK
Thirteen weeks, live on Zoom.

A few spaces and partial scholarships remain.
Hearthandwheel.com
Xoxo,
Stasha

P.S. I wrote this over several many days. I slept with it and reshaped parts each morning and then let it simmer longer. Like a bone broth.

Some sections gave me hot flashes.
I celebrate that.

write with me

ask your body. Ask the season.
Ask the creek. Ask your dream.
Ask the roots. Ask the stars.

And listen.

Don’t expect instantaneous success. Become the question. Let the question enter you. Let it simmer. Allow it to ripen.

Tijana Lukovic

Creativity is a form of knowing.

Writing is generative. Writing opens us to what we do not yet know.

We consume thousands upon thousands of words each day. We scroll. We skim. We absorb other people’s thoughts before we’ve had the chance to notice our own.

Our human becoming is inviting us to become more, not less, conscious.

Writing asks something different of us. It asks us to slow down. To listen. To enter. To tune. To churn. To chew. To metabolize. To sort and discern.

Writing changes our thinking. So does AI. Not in the same direction.

AI can help us think faster. Writing helps us think more deeply. AI extends certain forms of intelligence. Writing can cultivate consciousness, creativity, and imagination.

It helps us know ourselves.

Writing cultivates relationship with ourselves, memory, body, imagination, and the living world.

Good writing comes from good sensing, good listening, and good tracking. Not from being smarter or simply knowing more techniques.

Writing steadies the nervous system. It calms. It nourishes. It brings us home to ourselves. It helps us metabolize grief, joy, rage, and the thresholds of a human life.

Writing does not always give us answers.

Hallelujah.

Artist: Tijana Lukovic

We need more practices that remind us life is not about having every answer.

Writing can turn us into the question. It opens another way of seeing and offers a quieter place for listening, so that an old story can slowly decompose and a new story can re-compose us into more space and freedom.

The written word has always carried power.

Words can wound.
Words can bless.
They can imprison.
Words can liberate.
They can destroy a life.
They can help re-create one.

Writing connects us to more than the mind. It can connect us to memory, mystery, Source, the Divine—however you name it.

And it can return us to a world that is speaking—not only through words, but through weather, animal, dream, body, image, and season.

Artist: Tijana Lukovic

AI is brilliant at finding patterns in language and helping us organize ideas. But no technology can do the slow, mysterious, enigmatic work of human becoming.

Become more you through the ancient practices of storytelling and writing.

Artist: Alessia Ianetti

If you long for a nourishing place to write—to discover, to generate words from within the alchemical cauldron of body, life, memory, place, and imagination—and to see what happens when myth, oral tradition, and story become companions in the writing process, I’d love to welcome you into my upcoming thirteen-week Crack Open the Story.

Equinox → Solstice
Online Sundays
Limited to 13 women

Artist: Brook Shaden

***I moved last week and it’s been a huge whirlwind. I’m still working on updating my website- you cannot currently find more info there.

If you feel called- write to me- movingthestory@gmail.com

Also- you can find a little bit on this Google doc!

More articles on why writing is good for you:

why writing is good for you

Expressive writing is healing

One of them began with a little girl in a bright red cloak.

Photo: Ksenia Luchkova

I first met her in an old collection of fairy tales illustrated by Arthur Rackham. I spent hours with those pages, my fingers touching the images of Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, and Cinderella long before I understood what any of them “meant.”

Even then, I knew they held secrets.

I remember approaching Bluebeard with respect and reverence. It felt forbidden like Eve’s apple, which made me want it all the more. I didn’t know why. I only knew there was more inside the darkness. Fruit. Secrets. Treasures. Transformation.

I imagined what it would be like to be Little Red Riding Hood. Every time I stepped into the forest to catch copper bellies or build forts. I wondered what it would feel like to enter the belly of the wolf. What would I discover inside of it?

And to come out again changed.

I never experienced these stories as warnings or cautionary tales.

They were invitations. Maps.

Thresholds.

Photo: Brook Shaden

The old, old stories are doorways into a reality mysterious and alive.

Every time I enter one, I return changed. I guide women into deepening, living, renewing relationship with them. I have witnessed stories change women from the inside out.

My grandmother’s favorite fairy tale was also Little Red Riding Hood. Her people were from Germany. She too loved the color red. But we carried very different stories.

Her Little Red Riding Hood was a tale about obedience. Stay on the path. Listen to your elders. Follow the rules. Do not talk to strangers. Do not wander. Be good.

For me, Little Red Riding Hood offered permission to wander into the ecology of Red. The Red apple. Pomegranate seeds. Marrow. Depth. Red Velvet cloaks. Bright red purpose.

Growing up in a small Midwestern town shaped by fundamental religion and rigid cultural expectations, the path was too straight, too certain, too narrowly defined. Little Red Riding Hood announced boldly that there might be another way. That wandering was not a sin. Sometimes it was the beginning of an initiation.

She has remained one of the hearth-heart stories of my life. She still beats my heart more alive, more true, more red.

I have lived with her for nearly fifty years. And she has never once repeated herself. Each return has revealed something I could not see before.

I never really asked what Little Red Riding Hood meant.

I have been asking her what she is asking of me. Each season. Each cycle.

Photo: Ryan McGinley

Stories are not simply things we read. Or interpret. Living stories do not want us to analyze them. They read us. They stalk us. They wait. They too wish to devour us. To assist us in re-membering their wilds.

They reveal themselves over years, sometimes decades, asking different questions as we become capable of hearing them.

Red’s velvet cloak beats with another story altogether. An older than old story.

Not the one I had inherited, not the “Girl! watch out for man wolves!” but an older story sewn by the hands of the ancient, primal great great great (greatest) grandmother who remembers. The wolf has been trying to devour her for thousands of years. She tends the hearth of story, feeding it bread and wine. Offering it nourishment and aliveness. It is up to Red to set her free when she gets caught in the belly of the Wetiko-wolf of forgetting.

Over the decades, this story has continued to unfold and unfurl.

Photo: Brook Shaden

What if Little Red Riding Hood is not simply a tale about innocence and danger?

What if it is a story about the tension between remembering and forgetting?

About what is carried from one generation to the next.

About what is forgotten.

About cultural inheritance and cultural amnesia?

About what wears the face of memory after memory itself has been devoured.

About what it takes to restore the living thread between ancestor and descendant.

Artist: Enoki Toshiyuki

I won’t answer these questions. I invite you to curl up inside of them and become them. I invite you to enter your own questions about Living Story.

Living stories cannot be handed over as explanations. They reveal and ripen themselves in relationship. And relationship takes time.

But I will say:

Little Red Riding Hood has changed my relationship to Story. She still teaches me that a living story is cyclical, seasonal, shape shifting and renewing. It continues to reveal itself as we deepen our own capacity to listen.

Artit: Helen Perez Garcia

This autumn, inside Crack Open the Story, we’ll spend thirteen weeks entering stories in this way

not as texts to analyze, but as living companions. We will write our way into their mysteries, as living, embodied (w)rites of passage.

We will discover the Living Stories that breathe. Stories that remember. Stories that continue to shape the lives of those willing to walk with, sleep with and drink tea with them.

Little Red Riding Hood is just one of those stories. May she come alive for you differently and renew the color red in you.

After all these years, I still feel she is inviting me farther into the woods. She is inviting us deeper into mystery. Deeper into the treasure belly. And back again, ripened, changed, renewed, retrieved, reclaimed, re-membered.

Artist: Adolfo Sera

If you would like to join my upcoming Mystery School of Story + Writes of Passage -
Crack Open the Story

Please respond to this substack! Send me a message or share your interest in comments -I’m in the process of redoing my website. It’s so so close to being complete. 🍑💗❤️🫐💜💗🍑

xoxo
Stasha (RedWolf)

To me, Story is a mystery school.
Human beings are a mystery school.
Nature is a mystery school.
Embodied and sacred imagination is a mystery school.
Creativity is a mystery school.
(W)rite of passage is a mystery school.

Long, long ago -our most distant ancestors sat around the fire telling one another stories. They dreamed stories in from the beyond. These stories oriented them to pain, sorrow, difficulty, ordeal, separation, loss and the discovery or expression of new capacities and possibilities. they also spoke specifically to the nature of life/death/life. We do not all agree upon what happens after we die, or after a story dies…but in my humble opinion (and through many mentors or helpers who have guided me along the way) I have learned that creativity and stories and nature share this life/death/life cycle. It’s an arc, an orientation, a map.

Stories can imprison us. They can liberate us. We have been storytelling creatures for ten thousand years or more. Orality can be reciprocal, relational, community based. Everything is a story. I am a story. You are a story. I am filled with a universe of stories surrounded by a universe of stories -place, body, memory, imagination -we are navigating spiderweb threads of stories all the time. Consciously, unconsciously.

Image: Glenda Sburelin


Writing is a different way of seeing or understanding who you are or what you are going through. Writing helps us sift, sort, analyze, compose, craft, and discover. Writing is a solo journey -you go into yourself, your body, your mind, your memories, your imagination. You weave with information, you distill, you integrate, you synthesize. You create beauty.

We need both orality and the written word in times of change. As much as we need Stories with a capital S. We need fairytales and myths because they not only give us maps about initiatory cycles, but they remind us that our lives are filled with all manner of thresholds, transitions, ordeals, losses, as well as encounters, helpers, journeys, adventures, and more. Fairytales and myths can orient us to a different kind of grammatical shape -to separate, ordeal, return. To descend and ascend. To elixir and return. To witness and celebration.

To celebrate the ‘happily ever after’ in a story isn’t just about finding your long lost prince, or being saved by a hunter and marrying him in the end. It is about seeing something in you you or story that you haven’t seen before. Every character in the fairytale or myth is an element of your cast of characters within your enigma of the self that you are. You are a home to a host of different parts of yourself -some of these are in cooperation, some are in conflict, some are estranged, some are hidden, some are tricksters, some are magical beings of transformation.

Writing our way into Story, body, place, imagination, memory -can literally change the way we see ourselves, our stories and our lives, and assist us not only in composting the stories that no longer serve, but preserving the stories that need to be preserved, and harvesting their fruits. We can also experience a renaissance or rebirth of new parts, new capacities and new stories coming into seed or fruition.

We weave this journey with the arc of the wheel of the year, and the arc of the season of thesoul. We are not in the same seasons in our lives in all directions. We experience different seasons, different cycles in different stories.

You might be in summer but be undergoing a fallow season in your creativity.
You might be in winter, but experiencing a rebirth. We experience the birth, death and rebirth of different stories and different parts of ourselves.

The myths, fairytales and ancestral storytelling in this apprenticeship will move through the archetypes of the feminine -from maiden, to mother, mother to queen and queen to crone. You will re-discover how each speaks through you at this passage, as you shapeshift through archetypes and symbols in the stories.

Embodied (W)rites of Passage is a unique path for apprenticeship with living Story. It orients you to the deeper, older, and eternal questions we carry about ourselves and the world. And places you on the map of your larger Life Story.

I believe that writing can change the world, and I believe that Writes of Passage can change you and your relationship to your world inside and out. When we incorporate the body, we compost old stories, we water new seeds, we watch new stories rise and sprout and bud and bloom. When we let the body speak, we also discover deeper stories. The body never lies. The body has stories to tell.

“If you feel something calling you to dance or write or paint or sing, please refuse to worry about whether you’re good enough. Just do it. Be generous. Offer a gift to the world that no one else can offer: yourself.” —Glennon Doyle Melton

“Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?” —Danielle LaPort

“We must have the daring to be nothing but ourselves if we are to know what true power is.”

I am currently reworking my Website —and happen to be in a deep dance immersion all week. If you are called to this journey, please respond to this substack, or send me a message via email. movingthestory@gmail.com

Spaces limited to 15.

Once a Wild Matryoshka,

Always a Wild Matryoshka.

Yes, there were times when she forgot who she was.

There were passages of descent.
Of coming undone.
Of embodying the caterpillar dissolving itself.

There was fallow.
There was unraveling.
There was mess.
There was shatter.

But there was also discovery.
Imaginal cells awakening. Rearranging.
Emerging.
Rising.

Becoming.
Remembering.

Homecoming.
Return.

Artist: Brook Shaden, Bloom

Life isn’t a straight line.
It moves in circles, spirals, and seasons.

Healing is not a quick fix.

It isn’t as simple as a super-powered, one-time meditation promising instant success or happiness.

But are we humans inherently broken?

Or are we walking one another home?
stories connect us to one another

Re-membering?

It takes time to heal. The word healing originates from the Old English hǣling, which means “the process of making or becoming whole, sound, and well.” It derives from the Proto-Germanic *hailijaną, literally meaning “to make whole.”

It takes time to become whole. To realize our wholeness making. To become human.
And perhaps a lifetime (or several) to become more human.

We are complex creatures. We are not only physical beings.
Or emotional.
Or mental.
Or soulful.
Or creative.

I am, you are, we are
a nesting doll of stories.

Artist: Jess Polanshek,
Polanshek of the Hills

No one can tell you your way.
At best, someone can open a door and accompany you into the mystery. And trust the process of discovery.

I had a mentor who used to tell me the words of Bruce Lee —don’t focus only on the finger pointing to the moon -lest we lose sight of the moon.” Story is a creature with a living force of her own.

She knows when to hurl a story toward us because we need it.
She knows when a story has ripened enough to be gathered.

Humans are mystery schools of becoming.
We are enigmas.

We navigate thresholds, transitions, and ordeals.
We lose our way.
We find ourselves.
We share a need for belonging, air, water, beauty, and meaning.

We are stories.
We live in a universe of Story.
Thank you, Muriel Rukeyser, for reminding us that the universe is made of stories, not atoms.

I’m a Story.

I story.

I am story-ing.

Always.

Endlessly.

Artist: Alexandra Dvornikova

I’ve been leading (w)rites of passage and mythopoetic storytelling circles for women for quite a while now (and sharing stories, nature-based arts, crafts, and rites with children for many years too).

It has dawned on me recently that I’m not exactly a writing facilitator. Nor am I simply a storyteller. Something has been asking to emerge. I’m beginning to understand its name.

It has something to do with participating in a living relationship with Story. This autumn I’m opening the doors to a new thirteen-week immersion called Crack Open the Story.

I’d love you to join me.

Doors open today.

My website is currently undergoing reconstruction surgery. I almost waited until it was “finished” before sharing with you, but then I realized...I’m not a finished product either.

I’m still apprenticing to Story.
Always will be.

So rather than waiting for perfection to arrive, I’d rather open the door.
If you join me this autumn, I won’t ask you to arrive “finished” either.

Only willing.
Willing to participate.
Willing to listen.
Willing to be surprised.
Willing to be changed.

Together we'll gather around ancestral stories—fairytales and myths told live—and stand at the threshold each of us is crossing. Through embodied creative (w)rites of passage, we'll retrieve stories, reclaim voice, and renew our relationship with the sacred imagination.

This container is a habitat for ripening.

Not to become someone else.
But to become more fully alive.
More fully human.
More spacious in relationship with your own story.

And perhaps...

to carry home your own apothecary of becoming.

❤️

Artist: Kindra Nikole

Artist: Jennifer Parks

Hi, I am so grateful you are here. Tonight we gather inside a fairytale: The Girl Who Kept the Flame. This post is a journey into the power of myth and fairytale, and a re-membering of a time at Asheville Waldorf School when one of our first grade classmates became terminally ill, and a fairytale guided us through. It also carries the Zoom link for tonight's live Story Medicine gathering, which is for paid subscribers. I would love more of you to join me. If you'd like to access the live story or the recording, please consider upgrading. And to entice you a little further: I'm offering a three-card reading: past, present, and future, with a written reading reflection, emailed to you —to everyone who upgrades today.

Myths and fairytales are initiation texts and they are stories that carried our ancestors through major life thresholds. They help us make sense and/or how to face the beast of life, death, life when the story is larger than life. They teach us how to navigate ordeals. They show us the different parts of the psyche in all the characters of a story.

Joseph Campbell wrote of myth’s four main functions:
Here they are:

Mystical: To awaken and maintain in the individual a sense of awe, gratitude, and wonder before the mystery of being. Myth as the thing that opens us to the numinous.

Cosmological: To present an image of the cosmos and of nature in such a way that the mystery shines through it. To show the world as sacred, not just mechanical.

Sociological: To validate and maintain a specific social order, to encode the moral and ethical codes of a culture and bind people to them. Campbell was also critical of this function, feeling it could be used to enforce conformity and tribal identity at the expense of the individual.

Pedagogical: To guide the individual through the stages of life, from birth through death. To carry a person across the great thresholds: childhood to adulthood, midlife, elderhood, dying. This is the initiatory function. Myth as map for the passages of a human life.

I have been working with Myth and Fairytale for over thirty years. As a storyteller, a Waldorf teacher, and a mythopoetic writes of passage facilitator. I have told somewhere between one thousand and two thousand tellings of fairytales, myths, legends, fables and inspirational stories to children ages six through twelve. And for the last three years, dozens to adults. I believe that myths and fairytales can facilitate healing and transformation in individuals and communities -and that they teach us something essential about ourselves and how to navigate this long labyrinthine, path of becoming human. They also teach us how to navigate a world in which its stories are coming undone.

When we enter a story, feed it, and allow it to work on us, it speaks through psyche, body, and imagination. To step into a myth is to apprentice to it. To have sacred reciprocity with it. To braid mythos and memory and to shapeshift through characters landscapes, objects and animals. To enter the myth is to adventure —remember —nothing ventured, nothing gained —and discover yourself reflected back through the symbolic landscape of soul, returning, changed.

Story has the power to strip you down to the essentials. To reweave you. To teach you that life is full of transitions, necessary rites, ordeals, thresholds, and life-death-life transformations. Story can provide a map for initiation when we are in those larger-than-life passages. And it teaches us that what is lost can return in new form. Because Story herself is the great shapeshifter.

All this to say: when we offer sacred reciprocity to a story, the story offers us back the water of life -she restores our dried out brains and their over processing, over analyzing, over detecting and compartmentalizing tendencies.

Artist: Josephine Klerks, Passion Flower

This time of year I re-member one of my dearest students, who was in first grade at the time. Josh. His celebration of life date is June 25th. A day after St. John’s festival. The same time of year that the Firebird rises at Summer’s Rise. Solstice.

Josh had been born with a terminal illness and had, against all odds, survived. He and his mother had spent years in hospitals, where she was told again and again he wouldn’t live. He did. He surprised everyone. He was a miracle. He was a firebird. He was such a special boy.

That fall a flu turned into meningitis, and sent him into a downward spiral. He was in and out of our class throughout the fall and winter. Come spring, we didn’t see him anymore. He was in the local hospital -sick with strange symptoms that would not get better. We didn’t know what was going to happen. It was frightening, painful, and tender for all of us.

In Waldorf pedagogy, story is more than curriculum. It is a carrier for soul, spoken in ways children receive not intellectually, but pictorially. The stories can help children understand that we all carry struggles, we all face ordeals, we all have larger-than-life challenges on our journey of becoming human. And we can overcome the greatest obstacles. Every fairytale that year was a medicine story for our class -because inherent in every fairytale is the mystery of life/death/life and overcoming difficult ordeals.

I chose the fairytale of Ivan, the Grey Wolf and the Firebird for our class play that year —Josh had heard it earlier -before his sickness -and our entire class had cheered when the youngest prince was brought back to life. I choose it for its themes of ordeal, death and transformation. Ivan, the youngest prince, after a miraculous adventure aided by the magical grey wolf, is killed by his older brothers out of envy just before returning home with the Firebird, a Golden Horse, and the most beautiful Princess. The grey wolf (the magical helper throughout the story) finds him alongside a mother raven and her baby who are about to eat him. He demands the mother raven fly to fetch the water of life and the water of death. She does. After sprinkling Ivan with the water of death, his head reconnects to his body. After sprinkling him with the Water of Life, he sits up, restored. He returns just in the knock of time. The brothers are punished for the harm they caused. Ivan marries the Princess, and everyone celebrates the possibility of a new story.

Artist: Unknown

I dreamed of Josh throughout his journey. In one dream, he showed me he was not afraid of death. His soul revealed the spirit of an indigenous warrior man who had faced death many times before. He told me: it will be a grand adventure. I’ve come to do what I came to do.

I knew Josh might not survive. As his journey progressed, I knew we were in the belly of life/death/life mystery. My hope was that the fairytale would plant seeds of mystery inside the initiatory journey of becoming, and especially of the truth that there is so much about life and death we cannot ever fully understand. The story told of Ivan’s miraculous resurrection. We had no idea what would happen to Josh. But the story gave us mystery. Possibility. A different orientation to death.

We performed the play at the end of the school year, the grey wolf carrying Ivan across the ninth and thrice-ninth kingdoms, at the exact moment Josh was evacuated by grey helicopter from a hospital in Asheville to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, the same hospital that had cared for him throughout his earliest years. We performed the play in honor of our dear classmate, and in honor of the mystery we were all inside of together.

Josh died just after Summer began. The day after St. John’s festival, just after Solstice. Ivan, in Russian, means John.

The story didn’t tell us that Josh would come back to life. But it planted seeds about the mystery of the human spirit. When we reunited in the fall as second graders, the children were certain Josh was everywhere in nature. They saw him in the intensely fire-red sunset at his end-of-life celebration. “Miss Stasha, Josh is like the Firebird from the story!” We all cried. He was an unexpected rainstorm and a subsequent rainbow. “Miss Stasha! There is Josh again! A rainbow!” He was the fall winds of change and the trickster squirrel who dropped acorns on us as we wandered on field trips. Josh was the first winter snowflake. He was also the first crocus in spring. Josh He was the hawk circling the school field in the sky, after a story about the power of birds.

Photo: Asheville, 2019, Josh’s Celebration of Life

Death and life. Life and death. Soul craft. And the power of Story.

It humbles me and brings me to my knees every time it reveals its larger-than-life potency. For children. For adults. For thresholds.

Not only do I think of Josh this time of year, but I also think of how, no matter how difficult the threshold, there is often a medicine story that meets the occasion.

Artist: Hazel Terry

All this to say: Tonight, I’m telling a story for you live on Zoom -Not the Ivan story -that will come this fall -but another story that sparked my imagination for the Solstice threshold and tomorrow morning’s full Moon in Capricorn

Tonight, Sunday June 28th at 6:00 PM MT / 8:00 PM ET, let us gather for The Girl Who Kept the Flame, a midsummer story rewilded from a Czech telling I first caught many years ago.

The Strawberry Moon rises to fullness Monday June 29th at 7:57 AM MT.
How does this story season you?

This gathering is for paid subscribers of The Mythopoetic Hearth. If you have been reading here as a free subscriber — poet, seeker, artist, healer, writer, rites of passage guide, threshold-dweller — this is your invitation to come closer.

Upgrade before tonight and receive:

A seat at The Girl Who Kept the Flame, live at the Strawberry Moon. We will write our way into the story. It’s a fun opportunity to experience how I work with stories and writing as doorways for healing and renewal.

You will also receive a personal Solstice Seasoning: a three-card mythopoetic Norn reading, delivered in the days following. That which was. That which is becoming. That which shall be. A written reflection in the language of myth and soul, for this exact threshold in your year.

$7/month or $70/year

If you upgrade, reply to this email with the word FLAME so I can prepare your reading.

The Zoom link is below.

P.S. Story is alive.
Story is Firebird.
Pass it on.

Remember to send me a note w the word FLAME if you upgrade, so I can send you your full moon 3 card reading + written reflection

Read more

Shakespeare said a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But I think he was only half right. Names are spells. They carry frequency. They open doors or they close them. They fit, or they don’t. And when they stop fitting, something in the soul begins to itch.

I am a name-changer. A shapeshifter. A shifting shape.

I recently learned that my fatherline intentionally changed the spelling of their name in the 1950s. Tricksters. Game-changers. A little bit mafia, if you want the honest truth. It is noting to hide that I come to this more honestly -yet I must admit -I carry a restlessness with names, and a refusal to be pinned down by a single spelling of myself.

Once upon a time there was a creator who spelled creation…

I have tried on many names since I was a girl. Stacey Lynn Ginsburg never quite fit. Too neat. Too 70s cheerleader. I tried Staci, Stacy, Stacie. Nope. I tried Anastasia — because that is the golden root from where Stacey is born, and if the name means Resurrection, I thought, may as well go for the gold. I eventually landed on Stasha — the nickname I was given when I lived in Moscow in 1992, in search of the elusive but also utterly in-your-face Russian soul, dusha, in a foreign language and a collapsing world.

Stasha still means Resurrection. Thank you name for the spell you carry in me. It’s rough sometimes I must say!

Of course this aliveness with names would bleed into my business name. How could it not?

Artist: Beth Conklin

She was From the Belly
because that is where the words told me they come from, when I first embodied them -they were the Baubo belly hearth. Spicy too.

Then Seasons of the Soul
because we are all of us seasoned by soul and seasons, and the wheel of the year has always been the foundational thread of everything I write and story.

Then The Wild Matryoshka
where we rested a good long while, because I am a nesting doll of story and so are you. Crack one story open and you never know what it will unfurl.

Lastly, The Wild Remembering
because it is so much better to remember than to forget. And to re-member is to bring back together what was scattered. Thank you to the Wild Remembering for being non-static and gathering what was lost and forgotten into what is found and re-membered.

And…here’s the deeper truth I wish to Story. Let’s be honest.

My fire went out.

I have been in a difficult midlife passage —er… divine demolition —the former livelihood, the former stories, the former shape, even the former fairytales —none of it was fitting anymore.

Can I just scream for a moment because it hurts to lose all your bearings and be stripped down says Inanna in the under. World went asunder. I got plundered. by soul.

I hung on a meathook. I was skeleton woman chasing the heart of a lonely hunter. I was the strange red bead speech woman rising from the plant smack dab inside the wound. And after all that still the soul said -let’s strip her more. good long while longer. And so…I thashed. And stomped. And hiked. And moaned. And wept. And wept. And yelled. And yelled. And cried some more. And hauled Imbolc found deer bones across the earth on St. John’s Tide to release the burden and the weight.

And I’ve been meeting with an ancient ancient ancestor. And am tending and tending and tending the health and hearth of that stream. Long live the ancestral hearth.

And then just last night, on the cusp after the Solstice fire, after finding St. John’s Wort blazing sun stars in the field and meditating with the plant and the ancestors

I woke from a dream. About ancestors and power.
I pulled a Rune.
And got Kanez.
The Torch. Or sometimes known as the sore/the ordeal.
Either way I re-membered
wildly, suddenly, of course!
that which is essential
is invisible to the eye

and
Off with her HEAD

because…
she needs to get into

The heart.
And I remembered a secret spell I’ve been tending drawing it for decades in circles and spirals, widening, ever since 1998

h e a r t h e a r t h e a r t h

Write it in a circle. Watch what happens. It is a spell. A urobourus eating its tale. It is a hearth containing secrets from the book of nature.

You will find contained inside:

Heart. Hear. Ear. Art. Earth. Heart.

Out of the head and into the heart.

The wisdom of living earth. The book of nature is the best book to read from. She contains so many secrets. We still only know so few.

The importance of true listening with the ear
that in ancient Sumer also means wisdom if we truly hear
what creation is spelling for us.

The beauty of alchemy and creation.
Art -sacred shapeshifter shaman art who makes and remakes us.
The blank canvas we sometimes must become in order to become more

And Heart -alchemical heart.
Which is alive.

The Mythopoetic Hearth.

Geez louise….My people named me Stacey which means Resurrection and throughout this lifetime, it has been the one constant, no matter how much it hurts during the ordeal of it.
I am a living resurrection.
Of cycles and scraps.
Renewal. ReStorying.
Re-membering. The fire tended back to flame.

Which brings me to a story I’d like to share with you on Sunday.
Live on Zoom

The Girl Who Kept the Flame
A fairytale of sacred reciprocity and the wheel of the year

A Strawberry Moon Story Gathering — live at the Hearth

Artist: Jessica Pascucci

Let’s see now…where are we? Oh yeah…
We are halfway through the year. This is a great story for you if you are in the Northern or the Southern Hemisphere. I would love you to join me regardless of where you are. Let’s

The Winter Solstice, that dark spiral to the seed moment, is exactly behind us now, (for those of us in the Northern); six months past, on the other side of the wheel. And the Summer Solstice threshold is passing, her high solar flame just barely decreasing. We stand at the loom of the world, threads in both hands.

We must look walk backwards in order to walk forward into the future.

The Norse cosmology offers us three sacred weavers for this moment: the Norns. Urd, Verdandi, Skuld.
That which was.
That which is becoming. and
That which shall be.

They do not predict the future. They weave from the threads of everything that has already happened. Is happening, and shall become.

Artist: unknown

I have told this story many times to children in the deepest hearth of winter. I love working with opposites -whenever there is a story to spell at one point on the wheel -it naturally fits with its opposite point -it offers a different perspective wherever we are on the wheel when we encounter it again.

The Girl Who Kept the Flame is a Slavic fairytale about a girl sent into the impossible cold to die. Her dark stepmother demands strawberries in winter. She demands an impossible task and throws her out. How many impossible tasks does our psyche demand of us? We can stomp and resist and fight it and be bitter and resentful. Or, no matter how impossible…we can face our path and walk into the frozen forest, and the wastelands of our lives with empty hands and an open heart.

Have you ever had to face your barren most self? And just love her up?

Our holy wild girl discovers the twelve months gathered ‘round a fire. The wheel is centered around the hearth, didn’t you know? Isn’t that why we jump over it at festivals? Without being asked, without knowing why, she tends it. With gratitude she tends it. With respect, she tends it. With sacred reciprocity -despite being frozen, despite being hungry, despite being unsure of where she is supposed to be and however she will complete the impossible task…she keeps the flame.

Oh quiet acts of humble service to self and to earth, to ancestor and more than human world. To mystery. To the hearth. To dream tending. What are you tending in your own life? what are you tending during your own wasteland walkabout? What are you tending in paradise? Oh come out come out wherever you are or whatever you are not, or whatever you are between….and listen:
tending a fire that isn’t hers, for beings she doesn’t know
creates miracles. moves energetics. changes the Story.

And so…June takes the high seat.
The snow melts in a circle.
The strawberries come to life
she witnesses them grow and ripen
in the impossible cold.

Oh Abundance.
Abundance is in the giving,
not the having let it flow.
Oh generosity Oh Oh Let it Flow.
When we think we’re all for getting,
we forget we’re all for giving.

Listen to this amazing song by Lawrence Cole here

Image: mystic mama -Strawberry Full Moon

At this Strawberry Moon gathering we will:

We will share song, prayer
and/or gentle meditation
or writing warm-up prompt.

We will Enter the story. Our constellation matters -it shapes how the story Stories itself through us. We will write together — an embodied (w)rites of passage invitation to find yourself inside the story, to ask what your own months have been giving you, and what flame you have been quietly tending.

We will have a ritual anointing — (bring your favorite scent). We will also name the flower and one of first gifts the months give her, the flower of humble heart, the ancient medicine of sacred listening. In ancient Sumerian, the word for ear was the same as the word for wisdom. At the Hearth we will sit with medicinal aromatics— for heart medicine, heart anointing oil.

Time permitting, we will briefly look ahead to the fruits of what is to come, and the arc of the wheel, reorienting, re-centering. The story knows where we’re going. Let’s recenter the flame inside the wheel. Let’s offer the mystery to one another and receive, heart open, hands open, with curiosity. How will this story shape you? I don’t yet know! But it is so fun to find out through the writing prompts that follow!

When: Sunday evening June 28th at 6:00 PM MT / 8:00 PM ET / 10 AM Sydney/Melbourne Australia

(We gather on the cusp — the moon rises to fullness Monday June 29th at 7:57 AM MT Daylight. We meet her on the threshold.)

Where: Zoom — link sent to all paid subscribers

Recorded: Yes — if you cannot join live, and you are a paid subscriber -the recording will be in your subscriber archive.

Sometimes I offer stories in the morning -to meet time zones in the US And Europe; this offering is for the US and Australia/New Zealand. Solstice brothers and sisters. Winter/summer.

Artist: Unknown

This online gathering is for paid subscribers of The Mythopoetic Hearth.

If you’ve been reading here as a free subscriber — poets, seekers, fathers, mothers, elders, artists, healers, writers, storytellers, rites of passage guides and threshold-dwellers of all kinds — this is your invitation to come closer.

Upgrade before Sunday and receive:

✴︎ A seat at The Girl Who Kept the Flame — live story gathering at the Strawberry Moon

✴︎ Your personal Solstice Seasoning — a three-card mythopoetic Norn reading, delivered in the days following. That which was. That which is becoming. That which shall be. A written reflection in the language of myth and soul, for this exact threshold in your year.

Upgrade to paid — $7/month or $70/year

Artist: Tijana Lukovic

To my existing paid subscribers and Torchbearers: I am so grateful for you! You have tended this flame with your financial support. It makes a difference during this strange livelihood and shapeshifting transition I have been in. Thank you for reflecting gratitude back at me. Thank you for your sacred reciprocity with me.
I am more grateful than I can say.

Your Solstice Seasoning — a three-card Norn reading in the language of myth and soul — is my gift to you.

That which was. That which is becoming. That which shall be.

Simply reply to this post with the word FLAME by July 4th and I will send your reading in the days following the gathering. ✴︎

(Depending on the number of requests this may take a little time — I will tend each one with care.)

With love and a sparkling match,
Stasha ✴︎ The Mythopoetic Hearth

Artist unknown. Deck The Wild Unknown

Plant Yourself into the Sun of Summer: Walking with St. John of the Wilds

A couple weeks ago I deleted Instagram and Facebook from my phone. I needed a reminder of my own medicine. What is the Wild Remembering anyway? It ain’t gonna come through my connection to technology — that is for sure. I love seeing everything inspirational and beauty and mythopoetic and earthy and the human wonder that grows from every corner of the world that I can link into via this technical web of wonder. However. I need earth truth. Elements. Simplicity.
Earth. Water. Fire. Air. Ether.
Wonder.

So I decided to wander. The way I used to. Into Wonder. Not phone-led or marketing-driven or the constancy of imaging myself or my words to you through social media. Wandering into my feet, legs, my hands. This began a month ago during a basket weaving intensive, when I regrew my hands. My hands are remembering what else they do beyond holding a mini computer and scrolling to read the fake book of Facebook. My hands have led to my own self-designed fieldwork footwork— a wild hermitage back to nature. Hermiting toward sun, green, yellow, flame bright flowers and the life force of nature.

It is important we turn off our phones and get into our feet and our hands and our hearts and wander walk the earth again. Into the wilds. In order to be human, we must delete social media from time to time. And re-turn to reading the Book of Nature which is full of secrets.

Artist: Taryn Knight

All this to say —I’ve been led by the plants and more than human world in this write/rite of Summer - towards sun-lit flowers shining -and the elusive hard to find St. John’s Wort beaming like an arrow towards nature’s revelations. This has led me to a wild remembering of the historical figure of John the Baptist and the folk plant magic wisdom of St. John’s Wort.

John was an ancient wild wisdom man.
Christianity is a complex thing to write about. In many environments, it has become domesticated. Flattened. Plastic. Fundamental. It was not a domesticated affair in the way-back times. However, it wasn’t romantic to be on the earth at this pivotal moment -Roman conquerers, slavery, hatred, animosity, paganism, Hebrew wisdom and ancient desert wilderness. Judea was a small, occupied province under a heavy hand. Herod's line ruling; Roman government, taxes and peace enforced by the cross.

John was a shaman-initiate who baptized others into the wilds of water. He could cross into another world on another person's behalf and come back changed enough to change them too. Historically he stood in a lineage of Hebrew wilderness prophets who walked out of settled life to meet God where there was no roof and no priesthood standing between. He was a humble River-keeper.

The river was older than the temple. John was a keeper of the river, baptizing others to facilitate mystery initiations. According to Rudolf Steiner, in ancient times, baptism had the power to release the life force or etheric in such a way that one could experience metanoia. John knew how to loosen a person’s etheric life force body from the physical on purpose — so that instead of ordinary drowning-terror, a person crossed fully conscious into the threshold between life and death and came back changed.

Metanoia carried a profound, transformative change in one's heart, mind, or way of life. Rooted in ancient Greek (literally meaning "beyond the mind"), it describes a fundamental shift in perspective, spiritual awakening, or complete psychological rebirth that alters how you view yourself and the world. John midwifed a willing turning of consciousness, a small death undergone on purpose so something new had room to enter.

The history on John is sparse and wild: locusts and wild honey. Camel hair cinched with a leather belt — the same garment given centuries earlier to the even more ancient prophet-wild man Elijah. John preached at the river, not the temple. Some trace him to ascetic water-communities at Qumran, to men who lived apart and washed themselves toward a coming reckoning. John drew crowds large enough to frighten a king. Eventually the king had him killed for it. His blood spilling upon earth. Herbalists have read his death into the flower ever since: Paracelsus called the red that weeps from a crushed bud Johannes-blut —John's blood — the wound folded into a plant that blooms each year for his birth and carries, in its own sap.

John spent a wilderness lifetime preparing to recognize the moment the Sun Being would step into a human body at that river, and then, deliberately, he stepped back. He must increase, I must decrease. This phrase a potent reminder for what the Solstice mysteries in us this time of year.

Summer Solstice -photo unknown

Sun Logos Wilded. Ancient agricultural sun cycles through a western mystery tradition carried a greening, druidic memory of sun mysteries and tell a parallel story for this same week of the year: the oak at the height of its power and mistletoe cut from its crown in the one druidic rite Pliny troubled himself to record. The light-king reaching fullness before the year turns toward dark.

Different gods, different tongues. Sun-king, sun-child, Christ-as-light. The human form is built to be the meeting place between heaven and earth. We are the one creature who stands upright on earth, crown lifted towards sky, spine-axis where heaven and earth cross through a single body.

St. John’s wort keeps the same geometric cross in its own sacred architecture. Look straight down on the plant and you’ll see a pair of leaves growing, the whole stem reads as a cross, over and over, all the way up — decussate, botanists call it, from the old Latin word for the shape an X makes. The plant builds the same axis, in rhythm, year after year, leaf over leaf, summer after summer, the same crossing of directions the human spine performs once, standing up. Every human now carries the possibility to be the place where sun and soil meet —a mediator between life-force and form.

In Latin, we call St. John’s wort Hypericum perforatum —hyper-eikon.
Over the icon. Over the apparition. The plant blooms at the exact moment the sun gives everything it has. We bloom and simultaneously die inside increase/ decrease plant mysteries. The plant guards the sacred and wards away that which tries to dismantle sacred. fuga daemonum or flight of the devil in Latin. In Italian scaccia diavoli — demon chaser. For thousands of years people hung the plant over the door on St. John’s Eve to keep witches and the evil eye away. In our modern times, the plant has become one of the world’s most common remedies for depression.

Lithograph: St. John’s 1911

I gathered this sacred plant from a burn scar. While tending the burn scar of my heart from an unexpected story dismantling that has devastated a piece of me the last two years. The foothills between Lefthand and Lyons, sparse and blackened where wildfire went through, new green breaking up between the dead black pine. A forerunner plant, doing forerunner’s work — same as the wilderness holy man whose name it carries, clearing a way for what was coming and stepping back to allow it to flourish.

I brought cornmeal as offering. Two buck sat as sentinels above silent, antlered. The buck symbolizes for me the wild masculine undisguised: the wild hunt, the wild earth, the sun himself wearing antlers, velvet tipped, rayed over earth.

I encountered mullein everywhere. Soft, soft-leafed, one of the first plants to return and softening the burn after fire. Sacred Regenerator. A patch of bright purple Beebalm spiced the air, bright and decisive, the bloom of it in my mouth making me feel spicy alive through and through. Harmonizing my solar plexus w/ St. John. Calming soft Catmint low along the path edges. A lullaby on the rising heat of an old story transmuting within me and before my eyes. St. John’s wort rising through it all, five gold points breaking into bloom, a firebird of return. And my beloved folk magic cinquefoil scattered at its feet wilding protective, abundant, luck changing circles around me.

Gathering it heightened me, lengthened me, increased and decreased me in the same breath -as if I were beaming, blooming, radiating and fire birding out of a burn scar. I love the bitter of its mucilaginous bud. I love the red that crushes between my fingers — marking my hands with the look of wounds, of blood, of the plant’s own life force passing into mine. I sat amid it with my eyes closed and watched colors swirl and bloom -watermelon hearth-red lighting up a watercolor yellow fire, widening, warming, lifting. An ember broadening, sunning, summering, solsticing me. Seasoning me more true.

Artist: Tijana Lubovic

When I poured the spirits over the flowering tops, the liquid went from clear to fire -to watermelon tourmaline within minutes, deepening for hours after. The blood red ember of its life force humbling me. Potentizing me.

There is a wild humility in surrendering to this plant. In surrendering to the true meaning of the Wild Christ sun-son. not the domestic sit-in-the-pews version, but the one kneeling in a church beneath blackened pine and golden eagle circling; among verdant truths and five-petaled secrets bursting and star-ing the desert, brightening and wilding me out of domesticating-forgetting into earth-plant-sun remembering. I am human body creature holy with stars, salty with tears, wrinkled and wisened with time and age -and a bridge between heaven and earth, rising this Solstice -in the love song delight of all creation.

All creation sings

Tijana Lukovic


Brighter. Lighter. Less gravity. More ray. Antlered. Feathered. Heathered. Fire flowered. After, overheated and pinprick-opened, the way the leaf itself is perforated with light —as though tiny mysteries reawakened in me —perforating my hardened desert edges to let more light and love through. The way trees have pores for opening wider in response to the song of birds, I drove to the river, threw off all my clothing, hidden away from the domestic sunbathers and dove, headfirst, glacier-cold, into the soul of the River. Renewed. Refreshed. Remembered. The River calls. The song of the River baptized me wild clean. Wild pure. Wild water fire girl.

Artist: Firecracker City

Wild John baptized others two thousand plus years ago, in a river much like this one. His shamanic initiator earth heaven wisdom is embedded somewhere in my bloodstream memory and through the life-red blood stream of the plant’s healing properties. The fire of the plant, the truth of the desert, the song of the river. I went in aflame —old story scar burn regenerating, replenished, fairytales and water of life’d —carrying a secret of the sun handed off at a river two thousand years ago, still passing from hand to hand, plant to plant, river to river, down to me.

Artist: Unknown

P.S. Join me for a wild river trip of transformation and mystery. We write. We sing. We ceremony. We pray. We return to Nature’s threshold of transformation. We go humbly, curious, open.

I’m co-leading a river trip with two other fabulous facilitators -Elana Brody -kohenet song priestess and Lauren Bond -creator of The River’s Path and naturalist/rite of passage guide

-to experience the river’s wild,
the river’s potency and the potency of desert labyrinth
and nature truth.

We need radical time away from the domestic.
To step into the wilds.
To rewild.
To replenish. To renew.
To rite and to threshold
and to write and to sing.
To story.
We will be led by a sacred earth based medicine story -
From the Plains. About the longing, the call, the quest…to the River. And the even wilding turning towards the Sacred Mountains within and without.

The Great Leap
aka Jumping Mouse.

Would love you to join us.
Ages 18 - 80.

Threading the River

Artist: Driftwood Designs

It was helpful that it was soul in a foreign language. Made it somehow more elusive and accessible at the same time. It was my first encounter. Soul, on foreign soil amidst a revolution from communism to democracy. She goes by many names: dusha, soul, anima/animus, psyche, atman, seele, seula, alma. She is a heart beat I have followed since.

Moscow, 1992 - 1993. Combat Boots. Cobblestone. Red Square. A matryoshka doll waiting to be cracked.

I was a girl in transition -becoming a woman- standing smack dab in the middle of massive societal transition. I went to Russia during my junior year abroad in college and my multi-linguistic Russian Studies professor, a brilliant soul of a human being at a small liberal arts college in Minnesota simply said:

to understand the soul you need to live inside it.

Before Russia I was Stacey. A small town girl from upper Michigan (born in Hollywood). Boy crazy. Wild. and a bit of a mess.

After Russia I became Stasha. Digested by the belly of transition and transformation. Given a new name -made a new shape -still a mess, but at least, one covered in the sheath of a cocoon, shimmering and calling opportunities to delve more deeply in. To soul.

I learned way back, when I didn’t have a language for soul or dusha, that the way in was living encounter, and the only context I had for that was the absolute foreignness of everything. Everybody speaking a language I was barely learning. The rules of an entire society coming undone. And because revolution grows in all directions, the rules of my own inner order had to come undone too.

I knew it was dangerous territory. J.R.R. Tolkien says it is dangerous business going out your front door. I didn’t fully know what he meant. The word dusha felt forbidden. The way it curled out of my professor’s mouth like velvet smoke circling an enigma with a liquid gold center. Dusha. Dusha. Dusha. The poets and writers knew about it. Some of them had written about it in their own blood.

I was an inostranka — a foreigner in my own being.

The rules were reversed or non existent. Soul was full of tricksters and thieves. Gold toothed sellers at the market offering their hand in marriage. Soul was slippery on a train to St. Pete. Soul shone iridescent and gilded in Rublev’s icons at the Treytyakov Gallery.

It was dangerous and devouring. It picked and pecked its way in. Dangerous because once you encounter it, there is no going back. It will turn you upside down. Shake your pockets and your brain loose. It will carve you a new name. It will strip you of outworn identities.

The spark to answer my very first call to adventure seeded something in me — a question, a quest, a desire to know: what even is soul? Russian or otherwise? Why do I need it? How does it shape me? What does it make of me? What does it know that I don’t?

What happens after I encounter it? What is it going to churn me into after it ordeals me? Bones or butter?

Baba Yaga knew more than I did. I didn’t even know her name back then.

Artist: Tin Can

I returned from a larger than life adventure from the belly of the wolf. Was devoured by the Russian volk of change. I was changed. Was changing. Inside the underground fumbling and tumbling.

Moscow was a gritty, salty city teeming with dinosaur-sized black birds and the terrible stench of exhaust from ubiquitous Lada cars and the rank smell of papirosy … those cardboard cigarettes. I saw a society chopped to its knees as elders stood on street corners till midnight selling sausages for financial sustenance. Neo-Nazis and Hell’s Angels — the Night Wolves — rose. Mafia was becoming king. I saw communism die and capitalism spawn slick devils at crossroads that smelled like urine. I puked the underbelly of Moscow on the side of the street after eating poisonous buterbrod sandwiches made with wild foraged mushrooms just so someone could pay for their own food.

Moscow was wild, untethered, desperate, ignoring all the rules. Moscow was also holding on tight and putting on its Stalinist uniforms and marching down Tverskaya to Red Square in honor of the old. And, Moscow was taking off her clothes and stripping in techno clubs blooming from old order ashes.

Soul was a young woman discovering her power after years of iron curtains and ice.

Artist: Uldus Bakhtiozina

Soul was sitting stoic on the metro with Dostoevsky in its lap. Soul was a family of tsiganki -gypsies - playing guitar in the perekhod, occasionally clawing their way into my empty pockets finding nothing but a scolding. Soul was a babushka with an evil eye elbowing me like a football linebacker. Soul was ugly. Iron lipped. Tight fisted. And also peeling, cracking, revealing hidden meaning and teaching me how to hold suffering and exquisite beauty in the same breath.

Soul drove on the opposite side of the road with me in the backseat, clinging on for dear life. Soul stormed into a video bar with masks, bullet proof vests and machine guns to take hold of the most wily parts inside of me -terrorizing me from the inside out. Soul gave me apocalyptic dreams in black and white and spoke secrets in old Church Slavonic. Soul was a thin beeswax candle in an underground tomb of monks and drank mead in meadows where old folk weddings happened in wagons driven by horses. Soul was a mystery wrapped in brambles, picking wild cherries to make a fresh pie and host a feast despite making only twenty five dollars a month on a Russian pension.

There are many stories in my wild matryoshka belly. About soul and becoming. About transition and the strange rites that initiate us. I’m thick with mythos and memory. Braiding the past with fairytales and biography to make sense of the riddle of becoming.

All this to say: Baba Yaga churned me a new name. My identity went under. My confidence went asunder. My sense of what I thought I was was dissolving, dissolving, dissolving. A caterpillar without a cocoon. Standing naked inside transition without a map, compass, or any sense of the new order. Occasionally she blinked and flashed me a secret while lifting up her skirt.

Descend. Underworld it, girlfriend. Get down on the meat hook and trust the strange and unpredictable dis-order of change.

Becoming a girl inside of woman inside the dissolution of an entire socio-political system in a foreign language is great and terrifying soul food. And, it is terrible mental health food, if there are no bearings to guide your return.

Upon return: anxiety. I didn’t know it had a name. Depression. I didn’t know that was a thing either. And a wild car crash — rolling and rolling and rolling through a cornfield off the highway in South Dakota on my way back to Upper Michigan, because I fell asleep at the wheel, because I was coming apart at the seams and didn’t understand the rules of driving. Ego had taken a backseat. Soul was in charge. And soul actually isn’t very good on a highway.

When you are thrown headfirst into soul with no guides, no maps — it’s brutal territory. The world calls it mental illness. Insecurity. Depression. Fill in the blank. Particularly in 1993, when there was far less language for what I was moving through. From the outside it looked like breakdown. From the inside, I had been hurtled into a cocoon, my mouth covered with gauze for mummification and I didn’t know how to speak or ride the currents of dissolution.

From the outside looking in -something had happened to Stacey. She wasn’t happy go lucky. She didn’t just want to go to the Mall of America and buy stuff. She didn’t want to watch Beverly Hills 90210 and go to frat parties and conquest hot boys. She wasn’t chugging beers on drink-an-entire-12-pack day. She didn’t want to be in a sorority anymore. She didn’t know what to say. She became quiet. She swallowed her voice. She wrote poetry and played the grand piano in between classes. Sometimes she drank vodka from a thermos between classes to calm the what the fuck is this jitters that had been creeping in thick.

My Russian Studies professor was my lifesaver. An angel of mercy. A mysterious helper in the story. He knew I was in the in-between. The liminal.

Denis — Cronk, as we called him, a nickname from his Croatian last name Crnković -said:

Stashenka. It is simply dusha. Best read Dr. Zhivago. It’ll give you more insight than anything I can tell you. Trust the great writers. The poets. The old stories. They know more than we can figure out.

So I did. I read Dr. Zhivago. And Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Poetry by Esenin, Akhmatova, Blok. And listened to songs from my favorite Russian rock band DDT, over and over, gleaning what I could from their lyrics. Their song Poslednaya Osen'or The Last Autumn gave me truth in its story about an epoch burning out like a farewell bonfire. Poets departing. Stones coming to life. Yuri Shevchuk, the lead singer calling out to Pushkin across the centuries — why didn't you tell us how to hold this? How to love through the final autumn? I didn't know yet that I was asking the same question. I was calling out to Pasternak with the same question -how do I hold this thing that tears you from the inside out but remakes you in the same breath?

Pasternak offered me Lara’s sight about what it truly means to stand inside change -when the old order crumbles and the new order isn’t yet standing:

Everything established, settled, everything to do with home and order and the common ground, has crumbled into dust and has been swept away in the general upheaval and reorganization of the whole of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that's left is the bare, shivering human soul, stripped to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself.

Dusha. Dusha. Dusha. It sounded like an exhalation. A rounding out. A life force of creation.

It changed my name from Stacey to Stasha.

Either way, my name still meant resurrection.

Have you listened to the voices inside your belly?
Really listened to them? Beneath the surface hunger.
The deeper hunger. The desire for life.
The ravenous hunger for creation.
green snakes and blue butterflies transmuting and transforming,
squirming and opening and closing, screaming:

“sing! dance! create! write! or we will eat you!”

words are food.
make a feast.
have an orgy with them.
eat them and eat them
and eat them.
nourish yourself with the pleasure of language.

let the wild in.
write, create, dance, sing, pray, paint,
jump on the earth and make love like a barbarian.”
— Stasha Ginsburg

There is a hunger in me for what has been lost.

In traditional cultures, changes in life story were marked by ceremony. Everyone participated. Tribe and community gathered to witness a person leaving one way of being and entering another — at birth, the threshold of adolescence, marriage, crossing into elderhood, death. Elders and guides held the container. Nature re-architected the collective. Initiates faced ordeal. The old story was shed, ritually, so that a new one could be born.

Vision quests, ceremonies and rites of passage filled with song, storytelling, movement and prayer are ancient technologies of transformation. They are creative, expressive and holy wonder-filled ways of placing a person on the map of their own life and saying: here is where you are. Here is a chrysalis for dissolving. Here is where you are headed. here are nourishments for activating the holy imagination. So that you can leap. Beyond what you know. Into the miracle. These ceremonies told the people: you are not alone. You belong. You are changing. I see what you were. I see what you are becoming and I welcome you over the threshold.

In the contemporary West, particularly here in the United States, we have largely abandoned this map that is more than thousands of years old. Millions of us stand at thresholds we cannot name, in transitions that have no witness, carrying grief or fear or anger or confusion — or fill in the blank — that has no ritual container. We find ourselves stuck in the in-between, neither fully in the old story nor arrived in the new one. The American mythologist Michael Meade and storyteller/author Martin Shaw have said that we are a culture stuck in adolescence, waiting to be initiated into something we have no ceremony for.

The hunger for initiation does not go away simply because the culture has forgotten it. Maybe you recognize yourself in this in between without a map. With a call for something that connects you to your truest version of you. Where you can be held in the arms of Grandmother Nature. Can you hear the call? The River is our true guide on this journey. She is calling me. Can you hear her calling to you too?

Perhaps something has ended in your life -recently or longer ago - through your own choosing, or through the rug being pulled from beneath you without warning. A relationship. A role. A version of yourself that no longer fits. Perhaps you have been in the in-between for longer than feels bearable: neither back nor forward, grieving something you cannot fully name, a kind of metaphorical still birth -moving toward something you cannot yet see but feeling stuck all the same.

Trying to figure it out with the mind doesn’t work. When we are in the great between the mind alone is not the best ally. Getting out of the head and into the mythic heart- leads to subtle and not so subtle transformation. Poetry. Singing. Story medicine. Nature. Creative intelligence and mythos offers us food and tools, doorways and openings when we are in between stories.

Thresholds, tended creatively in nature and with witnessing become passages. The in-between becomes initiatory and dissolution becomes not only the sacrifice and the release, but also, the spark, the star, the seed.

Are you ready to cross into the unknown with me? Why do you need a sacred crossing? What is changing in you and in your life? What do you want to mark sacred in holy nature time? Let’s do this. I’m waiting for you. Let’s step into mystery. She is so much wiser than any one of us combined.

Art: Brook Shaden

The river holds flow. The river facilitates change. Nature holds mystery. Nature is a transformer.

There are places on this earth that are power places — hallowed cathedrals of the great mother, carved by water and time into something that exceeds ordinary geography. Labyrinth Canyon on the Green River is one of these places. Red canyon walls rise hundreds of feet above the water. Silence is thick with remembering. River moves with patience and intention. Can you imagine simply lying beneath Milky Way -looking up into the most vulnerable belly of the goddess of night herself? I can. I cannot wait.

When we place ourselves in landscapes this old, wild remembering kicks in. We make connection with deep and ancient time — ancestral time — before the before story time. Masks dissolve. Ego restructures. Seeds spark. Imagination leaps.

Earth. Water. Fire. Air. Ether.

It’s simple, really. Yet our busy busy busy cultural overstory tries to fool us into believing that we don’t have time. It won’t actually do anything. Maybe next year.

If you feel any semblance of stirring listen to it. She is telling you something good.

Art: Kindra Nikole

Say yes. This is what it means to take the great leap.

All this to say…this leads me to one of my most favorite of stories — Jumping Mouse (I’m calling her The Great Leap — the smallest little mouse in a nest of brothers and sisters, cousins and family — all busy busy working working — yet who hears a roaring she cannot explain. It stirs in her. It deepens in her. It awakens something in her. It forces her to listen. To pause. To really listen. To be curious.

She cannot deny the stirring of the sound and it takes her away from what she knows -until, guided by a new animal friend psychopomp (thank you Raccoon) and a gatekeeper at the River (thank you Frog) she finds herself at the edge of the River. And from that moment, her life will not be the same.

She answers the call. Little busy mouse answers the call. As soon as you answer the call, things start to rearrange. The great leap starts to seek you. To leap you. To rearrange you. This story leads her through several threshold crossings, ordeals and rememberings — sacrifice, beauty, healing, tending and witnessing —ultimately she gives away some of her most precious gifts in service of something larger than herself. Sometimes we need to give away our old way of knowing sensing or seeing. And sit long enough in the mystery to rediscover how to truly see, and listen and remember. She can never go back to who she was — even if the world around her has not rearranged to meet her -she can not go back to the old way. She is ready for the great leap way -a new way of seeing has seeded itself into her. Her transformation is food for our journey as we delve into the call of longing, beauty, song, creation and more -as we journey solo for our own short vision quest and are witnessed by one another upon return; as we journey into the belly of mystery alone together. Together all one. Inside a labyrinth canyon. Led and nourished by song, nature, rites, prayer, ceremonies, mythos and writing that serves as a creative rites of passage.

This story has lived in indigenous North American traditions as a map of initiation of what it means to hear the call, to leave the known, to make the sacrifice, to cross the threshold, and to be named anew. For thousands of years. Thank you to the Plains people for the gift of this special tale. Thank you nature medicine. Thank you mythos. Thank you earth. Thank you sky. Thank you river. Thank you to all the invisible beings who lend their eyes and ears. Thank you sacred holy.

Artist: Tijana Draws

We are offering you seven days on the river as a living enactment of this story.

Seven — magical number seven days — of water and canyon. Sky and stone. Song, writing and mythos. Ceremony and prayer. Creative rites of passage. Sitting alone in nature long enough to vision and to hear your own name spoken back to you by something far larger than any one of us. Of being held in a circle of others who have also heard the call — who have also arrived at the edge of the great water — and chosen to leap.

The moment you commit yourself, the journey begins.

Where oh where will this journey lead you? Where oh where will you travel within and without? Let us sing into the mystery! Let us sing beauty. Let us write mystery. Write beauty.

Threading the River is a seven-day creative rites of passage journey through Labyrinth Canyon on the Green River, held within the living mythic container of the Jumping Mouse story. We will travel by water, camp beneath open sky, write and sing, release and make beauty, and celebrate together at the threshold of the unknown.

We are three facilitators -each tending a unique container for this River Mystery School —Elana Brody is a kohenet, song priestess, ceremonialist and much, much more -her song medicine in Boulder has nourished me so deeply. Lauren Bond is the owner and guide of The River’s Path -she has been guiding unique, boutique river trips for many years. She is a wilderness guide and rites of passage guide and naturalist. Also -she’s a really great write -her words about this river have carved themselves into me.

I’ll be tending story, mythos and writing. Our writing will be alive. We will be bewildered by wilderness in the best way.

This is for you if you are in genuine transition — if you know, in your body, that something has ended and something new has not yet arrived. If you are ready to cross the great water. If you are willing to be named. This is for you if you love to sing songs w/ harmonies, parts -and if you are curious about finding your medicine song. This is you if you love writing in nature and also experiencing nature rites and ceremonies. But mostly -this is for you if you are longing for a container for your own personalized creative rites of passage. Where owl song, coyote cry and Milky Way accompany our journey.

The place is waiting for us.

Threading the River is facilitated by Stasha Ginsburg, Lauren Bond, and Elana Brody. August 22 – 29, Labyrinth Canyon, Green River, Utah. If you are interested — if you are hearing the call — please don’t hesitate to reach out to me by replying to this email -for an exploratory call. xoxo

For more information -go to The River’s Path

© Stasha Ginsburg | The Wild Remembering

Previous Substack announcement here!

Zoom Link Below!

We tune into flowers. May. Feminine Agency. Mythos. Writing. Sharing. Healing. Transformation. Poetry. Truth.

Read more

How does May and the flower queen speak through you?

Artist: Kathi Hatgi

We will encounter threads of Welsh and possibly an indigenous story that bring us into a living encounter with Eros — not just the lusty kind, but the living life force of nature kind. The meadow-of-flowers kind, full of pollen baskets of gold and blossoms opening wide, singing the names of the essential things.

How does life move through you in spring turning to summer? What is weaving around your crown? What flowers are calling your name?

And how are you pouring yourself into her story — not just receiving it into your soul, but how do you feed nature this time of year? How do you feed the sacred? How do you feed the flowers and the crowns of gold?

Artist: Kathi Hatgi

We are weaving in sacred reciprocity with life, death, life — and the otherworld. This story helps us make contact with just that.

Join me for a spell into the sensuous.

✦ May 6, 2026 ✦ Free for paid subscribers

Artist: Sarah Jarrett

‘Tis a Flower Moon in transformative Scorpio.

She is my moonshine. I serve her. She is the living dark in me — the life-death-life of my ebb and flow, cycles and rhythms, patterns and swirls. She governs me, growing flower-secrets in my womb.

In May, she goddesses me.

Artist: AmySey

She reminds me of my sovereignty — the flower-face behind my mask. She connects me to Maying: ceremony, ritual, ReStory. She sings deep time in my marrow.

She is a mystery-keeper, a threshold moon, a liminal sister — priestess of body, soul, and nature. She threads the old stories to me. She spells the names of the goddess. She spells me into new shapes.

She is the innermost chamber of the time when men married the goddess of the land to serve the old ways, the soul ways, her way.

She is Blodeuwedd, Flower Face.

She is sister owl, the shining dark, May’s queen, maiden blooming.

In her dark sister aspect, rising new in descent — Samhain — she is death’s bride: Persephone descending, Ceridwen cauldron-ing. She is scorpion, snake, blade, sting.

In springing towards summer she rises to find her king: golden honeybees, the crowned oak. She seeks her mate, dancing where pollen hides between thighs, inside flowers humming, vivacious.

Awake, she opens. Awake, she beckons. Awake, she sings.

I am the song of myself — weaving branches, ribbons, storylines, weaving with the Divine Mystery, weaving with the Sacred Greening.

Words: Stasha Ginsburg | Art: Kathi Hatgi — Flower Faces

© Stasha Ginsburg | The Wild Remembering

We opened the book of imagination and wonder together.

Photo: Mila listening to sunset and milk pod fluff

Nature is teacher. Nature is psychopomp. Nature is mirror and facilitator.

There were times the story became so alive it startled us all. Once, I was performing on an outdoor stage at night in Vermont — telling a story about the light that shines out of darkness — when fireflies and bats came flying in around me as I spoke, and flew out again when the story was done. In another journey, a deer literally walked into the circle, towards the birthday human as I was telling a story about gentleness. Dragonflies swarmed over us during a story about dragons and the courage to see clearly. Butterflies arrived, literal and mythopoetic, into stories already alive with transformation.

I have journeyed on many lands with hundreds of stories in my pockets — west to east, north to south, south to southwest and back again to the mountainous center carrying a calling to meet children and communities where they are most alive: in their bodies, in the living world, inside story and song and the wheel of the year.

The land does not lie. She is the truest curriculum I have ever encountered. As Waldorf teachers, we work in harmony with the more-than-human world — with the spiritual world, with the elemental world — and we trust each day to bring living encounters. The nature spirits are trickstery like that. They always hav a secret up their sleeve.

— — —

In Vermont, our school sat on the edge of the Northeast Kingdom, encircled by rolling hills and dozens of acres of land. That year, my daughter spent an entire year in an outdoor classroom — a tipi, a fire in the woods, making kindergarten soup in the snow, the long cold season her teacher.

Photo: Mila going to check out her classroom, Orchard Valley Waldorf

My first grade students and I harvested apples from the orchard and wandered deep into the woods to a place called The Crack: a geological mystery, possibly shaped by a meteor thousands of years ago. Our classroom came alive through Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. The elements were not metaphor. They were the lesson plan. We sang to them, bellowed with their winds, sledded on their ice stories and discovered frogs and woodpeckers in their secret nooks.

At what was then called Sacred Mountain Sanctuary — now the School of Living Arts, in Candler, NC — I had a class of fifth and sixth graders perched atop a mountain. We natured, we learned, we sang. Appalachian-style, unselfconsciously, joyfully. Those children loved to lift their voices; they performed for their parents, for the community, for chickens and horses, and the sky. I created living story journeys with the faculty, spelling stories at stations among manzanita trees and creeks and boulders, letting the land hold the narrative across the entire wheel of the year.

Photo: my students at SOLA reading with a hen

Photo:my daughter in animal arts

At Asheville Waldorf School, we spent as much time as possible outdoors — on field trips, harvesting, building forts, singing in the woods, storying in clearings.

Photo: my Students at apple orchard outside Asheville

Photo: Asheville hiking with second grade

also that year- one of my first graders became gravely ill. We walked with Josh as a class, as a community, all the way through. He came to me in dreams letting me know he was prepared for the adventure. In one dream he appeared as a warrior from a different lineage, in his adult self, unafraid.

The veil between the worlds became extraordinarily thin in the classroom. I wrote a musical play about the Firebird in his honor, and that fairy tale came to life among us as we navigated his illness and, eventually, his death. He was literally airlifted by helicopter from a local hospital to a larger children’s hospital far away while we performed our play in his honor as the grey wolf carried the young prince Ivan(John) to kingdoms beyond the beyond, retrieving the Firebird, the golden horse and the golden soul, for his journey.

Photo: Josh’s celebration of life- we sang and shared gratitudes

Josh passed in the summer, around St. John’s fire. So apt for a story about a young prince moving between life, death, and life again — through the numinous world, through mystery and love. S

Later in second grade -COVID changed everything, I finished that school year online, sending children outside mid-session on Zoom to find things in nature that reflected number patterns, letter patterns — anything to keep their hands in the earth. To make mandalas and nature spirit faces.

That autumn, I co-created a living homeschool enrichment pod, and the children named it Rainbow Creek Crow, after the way the stories had come to life on their land.

Three years in Sedona — thousands of acres of red rock formations, mythic and ancient, becoming the book we read from every single day. I began with a class of first graders and eventually moved into different roles across every grade, bringing choir and poetry to middle schoolers, bringing song to community festivals. Those Sedona children were so lit up by the natural world that in first grade they created their own play — based on the elements, written from the inside out. It was genuinely beautiful.

I would occasionally encounter my students of their own volition, creating sacred shapes in nature like this:

— — —

Learning without nature, in my humble opinion, can be so dry. So dead. Nature restores education. She is, for me, the heart and soul of every educational encounter I have ever been part of. She does not separate the academic from the somatic, the mythic from the mundane, the grief from the joy. She holds all of it.

I am now turning toward my next decade as an educator and am dreaming.

I am dreaming living school communities deeply rooted in the soul of the year, in its festivals, its thresholds, its seasonal rhythms as the organizing heartbeat of community life. Schools drawing from the well of Waldorf education and other inspired methodologies, as well as the soul-centric developmental frameworks of Rudolf Steiner and Bill Plotkin. School rooted in nature and coyote mentoring, with a rich, living story curriculum woven through every year, and educators who carry diverse gifts but are hungry — hungry — to shape rites of passage curriculum together: for the nine-year change, the twelve-year threshold, the long initiatory passage of adolescence.

And perhaps a school that also turns toward the parents — offering land-based and story-based body based and art based teachings to help adults re-pattern their own childhood passages. Not just observe their children’s, but enter their own.

I am dreaming into collaboration across distance: co-creating curriculum with educators and storytellers in other parts of the world, mentoring teachers who want to bring this medicine into their own classrooms and circles, and letting the web of story do what it has always done — travel.

I have been blessed to witness what is possible when a school is rooted this way. When the land is vast. When there is room for movement and magic, for communal singing and rites of passage, for the Firebird to arrive at exactly the right moment.

I am looking for communities, for land, for collaborators, for people who feel this in their bones.

If something in you says yes — I would love to hear from you.

© Stasha Ginsburg | The Wild Remembering

In his recent book, A River is Alive, Robert Macfarlane says:

“Our fate flows with that of rivers –– and always has.”

“River's song is the song of songs, sung in spirals and stars and roars and other notes beyond hearing...”

“In English there is no verb "to river". But what could be more of a verb than a river?”

“Spring becomes stream becomes river, and all three seek the sea.”

“The ghosts of rivers lie all about us.”

“Hope is the thing with rivers.”

“A hypothesis: Earth and River are both gods made of
time, but even Earth has cause to fear River.”

“Rivers are easily wounded, but given a chance they heal themselves with remarkable speed. Their life *pours* back.”

What is a river to you? A source, a dream, a flowing possibility, a prayer or song? What happens when you truly encounter River? When River witnesses you? When River receives you and reStories you? When river sings you into a new poem, a new song?

I’d love you to journey with me, Elana Brody and Lauren Bond-into the the verb of river. Let’s River. Our stories, our songs, our bodies, our hearts, our truth.

Threading the River — tends soul, body, place & imagination through a creative rites of passage weaving nature, medicine story, animist writing, and the birthing of your true song.

We will be immersed in the archetypal world of nature:

red sandstone walls rising on both sides
layered ochre, crimson, old gold
Cottonwoods willowing at the water’s edge
A canyon wren threading liquid song.
The river unhurried, unhurriable,
carrying you somewhere deeper.

Canyon as labyrinth. River as story,
as thread, as song. Something in you, older than your history,
already knows the way.

We will be held by an indigenous medicine story throughout our time together — a tiny miracle of a tale with layered thresholds and portals for deepening, journeying, remembering, and return. She gets into your heart. This is one of my most favorite stories to share. She is tiny and mighty and she will change you.

Artist: Lisa Ericson

For anyone ready to be undone by a river and reclaimed by the wild.
For dreamers, song keepers, poets, writers, healers, mothers, fathers, journeyers, soothsayers and magic makers…

This journey is a special collaboration with three guides:

theriverspath Lauren Bond — naturalist, river guide, and rites of passage guide — will bring her deep knowledge of this land’s earlier peoples, ancestral nature craft, and the living stories of the canyon itself. She knows every secret spot.

elanatreestar Elana Brody — singer-songwriter, song midwife, kohenet/priestess — will meet us at the threshold of song and prayer with the more-than-human world, and midwife each of us into the birthing of our own medicine song.

& me, Stasha (@wildremembering) — mythopoetic storyteller & story midwife— will hold the mythic container, bringing the medicine story and a unique (w)rites of passage & story body tracking that threads animist writing practices.

Where edges meet is where the medicine deepens.

You will retrieve stories. Reclaim voice.
Discover your true name. Your true song.
Your true story.
The river reshapes you.
Re-spells you.
Turns you into a talisman.
Sings your truth back to you.

Seven days. 45 miles. 16 people maximum. Labyrinth Canyon, outside Moab, Utah.

Can you hear the call?

If interested, please reach out ASAP. We journey May 12 - 19. Lauren is an experienced river guide with decades of guiding on the Green and St. Vrain rivers. We will be in the most incredible portal of wonder -Labyrinth Canyon (do google it!)
We will be tended well with delicious food. You do need to bring your camping gear. We will sing on and off the river. Story on and off the river. We will ritual on and off the river. We will prayer on and off the river. We will ceremony. We will make beauty.
The river will undress us. The sky will witness us. The red rock will cradle us. The earthbeat will reStore, renew. ReStory.

Please check out The River’s Path website -
Please email me if you have questions.
We need river’s now more than ever, and nature’s soothing medicine to return to self, soul, nature and beauty.


xoxo

Stasha

She is a plant, this story, and she grows a chalcedony eyed creature with translucent skin. She requires the midwifing wisdom of an ancient dirt woman. A humble woman who owns nothing more really, than five cows. But who knows the earth. And who has listening for eyes.

Artist: Nicole Hague -Andrews

I am smitten with the old stories from Siberia, Alaska, Mongolia, Aleutian Islands. A friend handed me a massive book the size of my upper torso, filled with illustrations and Mongolian tales. Since then, I’ve been hooked on the Eur-asian stories. They travel differently than the Northern European stories I’ve gathered for decades, since first being handed a small Arthur Rackham illustrated book of fairytales when I was six.

Martin Shaw has written a beautiful re-telling of this story -Red Bead Woman. He said it first —she was born of dirt and longing. That sentence is a portal, a doorway, a keyhole, an entrance.

Fairytales. They remind us to get out of our heads and into a different way of seeing, sensing. I’ve long read books about them, books —wise wise ones that unpack them and offer them up to us as guides. I love seeing into the story and uncovering its deeper layers. And, I love simply being with the story, with a gathering of people, and seeing what the tale hinges upon in each listener. There is something unsettling, something uncertain, something hinged, something liminal about being suspended with a fairytale and then being invited to write one’s way in -to discover, to glean, to somaticize, to alchemize, to retrieve, to reStory.

Artist: sabina Hahn

Without interpretation or a map.

Artist: Nicole Hague-Andrews -A year long Intentional Creativity course..Codex. Acrylic on canvas. 120 x 100 cms..The title is ‘ Love the Questions ‘ from a quote by Rainer Maria Rilke.

‘ Be patient to all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves …’

Life is uncertain. Transformation is uncertain. Transition is uncertain. It’s okay to be suspended in the patient unknowing.

In fact, I believe it is healing, healthy and regenerative to be able to do so. And I believe Fairytales are one doorway for experiencing the power of patient unknowing.

Why should we sit in patient unknowing anyway?

Patient unknowing reminds us that there is generative potency in surrendering to the unknown. In the Tarot, there is an archetype called The Hanged Man or The Hanged One. This archetype turns us upside down, and suspends us right in the middle of change. It’s damn uncomfortable. It activates fear, anxiety, existential angst.

We are full of modern rooms in our brains -rooms that compartmentalize, categorize, hypothesize, philosophize the all of everything, especially times of uncertainty.

What if, just for an hour, ever so often, we entered into an old, old story. One from the before times -from when there were no electric lights or fancy machines. When story itself was a living dream, a living possibility, a living imagination for re-membering?

All this to say -I prefer to protect the mystery of the tale. And I am happy to step into my storyteller DNA and share the tale with you, to enter it with you, as if for the very first time, to see what we might see, to follow the cracks, to listen below the surface.

In the story, the old, old woman with five cows hears things that seem impossible to hear -except for one with attuned ears for hearing the real sounds. She hears the needle, the thimble, the scissors. What mystery will be born from these sounds?

Nicole Hague-Andrews

What might you hear in this story that surprise you? Where might this story take you? Travel with this story. It is drug free, but it is a free trip. Activate the ole’ imagination. shake it up. stir it. let it pounce. Let it travel the plains across the backs of red horses, pounding their awakening into the dirt.

Artist: Nicole Hague-Andrews

XOXO

Stasha

Join me! Zoom link below. We begin Today. April 1. 11:30 AM MOUNTAIN STANDARD

Europe
5:30pm —UK

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She was born of dirt and longing. What in you is born of dirt and longing?
What story grows from the dirt in you? What is this story’s deeper medicine for you?

xoxo

If you aren’t a paid subscriber -please consider for access to all of story seasonings. If it is a hardship -and you really want to join -reach out!

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11:30 min time

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Story

A writing prompt

Sharing

This story is a phenomenal story from Siberia

I want you to hear it

Paid subscribers this is for you free!

What will come from longing, married to dirt?

Art: Jana Brike

storytelling is good for you. Couple things that you might not know but should know or be reminded of is this:

When you hear a story spoken aloud, your brain syncs with the storyteller’s brain. We do neural coupling. the listener’s neural activity begins to mirror the teller’s. The teller is going deep diving into the land of imagination, symbol, archetype. Hope. Love. Possibility. Foreign travel. Across senses. Traveling together changes us all.

The teller and the listeners share a mind. We hive.

Our bodies respond as if they are inside the story. The story is alive. It makes us more alive. It regenerates us.

What is dry in the brain becomes moist. Metaphorically speaking, but also neurologically speaking.

Our Stress hormones rise and fall with story, narrative arc, emotional expression.

Our heart rates synchronize.

Artist unknown

The motor cortex activates.

the same system that massages dreaming, memory, and imagination lights waaaay up.

Our imaginal cells, zing, and sing and ring. We light up. Our brains become pliable. We get out of the linear way and into the non-linear way. We move out of the straight line and into the spiral. The heart says yes.

We become circles.

We listen better. We breathe together. We remember. We retrieve memories. we return home.

Repetition, rhythm, and formulaic phrasing in a story are neurological ramps that pull the listener deeper into entrainment. Enchantment. Sensory aliveness.

Once upon a time, call-and-response, the thrice-repeated task, the liminal pause before transformation, the edges and the center, ordeal and the descent, the retrieval and the elixir are calibrated, over millennia, to the architecture of the listening brain.

The story is a living creature. It plants seed inside of us. They grow in their own rhythm and timing, not ours.

The story is an ancient technology for moving energy. Emotion. Soul.

Artist: Jana Brike

The story is a bridge. A pathway. A possibility. A Psychopomp. A grail. A well. A forest. We journey an infinite number of ways and in an infinite number of directions. Portals doorways rivers.

out of one story and into another and back home again changed.

All this to say it lights me up to tell stories to you and to feed the story with you and to experience the animal of the story in the story and to witness the way the story moves through grows growl leaps panthers, prances, bellies, bellows, becomes.

Artist: Ruth Evans

so let’s gather.

For a story with a heart

and a heart with a story…

it will be the first week in April. Full moon day or the next. I will let you know ASAP. Zoom live. I will tell you the story and there will be an opportunity to art your way in or write your way in. There will be sharing. This is for all gender expressions

And..is an offering for paid subscribers. If the subscription is a hardship, let me know and or if you want to join, but don’t want to subscribe. You could send a donation.

Did I tell you that the story comes from the Evenki people of Siberia? It does and it is my new favorite. Every time I tell it, it changes me. Every time. It brings me to the heart of longing. it restores the order.

I challenge you… That once you hear it… You set off and tell it to someone you know. Someone that you think needs to know it.

Xoxo

Also, I have such Exciting news

I am over the moon. I will be leading a river trip with Lauren from the Rivers Path

May 12 through May 19.

You can find out more at theriverspath.org and checking out their green river trips. Labyrinth Canyon. Nature Psychopomp. Lauren has had some pretty epic people on her river trips, including David Abrams, Craig Childs, MaMuse and more. I feel so lucky to be joining her.

it’s going to be amazing because unplugging is brilliant. As is:

Writing. Rivering. Storying. Singing. Naturing.

Red rocks. Blue sky. Green River. Pure and primal.

O most honored Greening Force,

You who roots in the Sun;

You who lights up, in shining serenity, withina wheel

that earthly excellence fails to comprehend.

You are enfolded

in the weaving of divine mysteries.

You redden like the dawn

and you burn: flame of the Sun.

—Hildegard von Bingen, Causae et Curae

Tis the greening time. Not the Saint Patty Green, but the greening truth or viriditas. Come oh faithful ferns and fronds. Grow your spirals through me. Antlers and branches reach through my skull. Stretch beyond the beyond towards a new constellation. Where plants sing to stars and stars draw rooted, winged humans across galaxies.

Green. Oh lush rolling hills. Verdant echoes of moss. Daffodil before the bloom. Violet leaf and hidden flower. Mathematically perfected from seed to flower. Patterns of sacred geometry growing gently unfolding unfurling whirling twirling microcosms of planets dancing round the sun.

Green. Arms digging into earth the first touch of spring the first descent of toe into mud the first dandelion peek a boo leaves toothed and fierce. Alive. Heart’s forest spreading wide her wintry cocoon, expanding now that birds may fly. High, higher now acorn caps split cracked shoots push push pushing through the impossible cold hard crust now escaping first light of sun ecstatic kiss.

Green. I am to thee your bride. Marry me oh green. Surrender that I may know the healing touch of resurrection that from out of wintered stalks yellowed and gray, brown and forgotten a new bud swoons. Paint my lips crimson with the love of you gardening in the soul of my soles, the soul of my soil, the green of spring so new so unmistakably bright golden almost not the autumnal kind but bright, cheery, hip hip pip the piper blowing songs through bamboo forests grown a girth wider. Green. To thee I sing the body of you I surrender too. Green me into a thousand medicinal roots and shoots from out of every limb I blossom too.

Green. Grass and blade. Lichen meandering blanketing my bosom soft and sweet the smell of hay wet and damp, dank and the smell of rain rippling the creek beds rising the mother earth hugging her plenty bursting forth at the seems. From out of every crack a green thing emerges. Tiny, succulent, ripe and sweet. May the good goddess feast of viriditas that life, pregnant, creation bursts forth without punctuation or apology.

Artist: smileworldshine

Green. The truth of green. The bright yes of green. To boldly follow you off the path towards the ivy to where the deer dream of your holy sentences held fast by every tree now singing. Green. The awakening. The ecstatic longing. The healing of green. The heart a hive now humming growing sweeter by each step taken barefoot slowly away now into the green wild world scampering beyond concrete beyond hedges into the secret chambers where pistil and pollen, stigma and stamen await the sacred dance of bee and butterfly. Holy opera of foliage and flower, forest and bough, wild and domesticated, garden and field.

If you, dear traveler are forlorn, lost, dry or forgotten, return to the sun. Return now, whether or not you missed a turn on the path, return. The way leaves do, new. Listen, can you hear the way the grasses sing? She’s flowing, more powerful than the rivers, the flow of greenness penetrating every aspect of all life. A reflection of the Divine on Earth.

Green your spring. No apologies. Green cartilage. Green tongue tip. Green dreams. Green rising. Green truth. Green petals. Green blood. Green beauty. Green it greener.

be a magician of green

Focus on everything greening

Sing green

Hug green

Love green

Live green

Believe green

Magic green

Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world.
Then we took it for granted.
Discontent began a small rumble in the earthly mind.
Then Doubt pushed through with its spiked head.
And once Doubt ruptured the web,
All manner of demon thoughts
Jumped through—
We destroyed the world we had been given
For inspiration, for life—
Each stone of jealousy, each stone
Of fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light.
No one was without a stone in his or her hand.
There we were,
Right back where we had started.
We were bumping into each other
In the dark.

And now we had no place to live, since we didn’t know
How to live with each other.
Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on another
And shared a blanket.
A spark of kindness made a light.
The light made an opening in the darkness.
Everyone worked together to make a ladder.
A Wind Clan person climbed out first into the next world,
And then the other clans, the children of those clans, their children,
And their children, all the way through time—
To now, into this morning light to you.

Image: unknown


A note before we enter this myth from Ancient Persia: it comes to us through a patriarchal recording tradition — kings, golden daggers, solar lineage. It was told orally before that. This is the root, for better and for worse. Maybe there is something medicinal in there for us. Maybe not. Let’s find out.

This story has a shape of Redemption. I’m also reworking that. I’d love your help composting the old old shape. And blooming, with me, the new. Let’s rupture it. Let’s sit with it, and let’s rewrite it into a blooming new dawn.

I am highlighting the seeds of this story -in honor of the Seed Point we are at of Saturn/Neptune conjunctin in Aries —at the Seed Point —the same point that it was LAST at 6,000 years ago. Steiner places us on the map of the Ancient Persia Epoch. I reference Zarathustrianism mildly below. As a seed framework of something seeded there, then.

I tell this story as a woman re-membering it. I’d prefer to tell it live. Putting it into words always changes everything. Perhaps we shall sit together? And re-write it.

Underneath the king and his golden dagger lives something older. The womb of the earth. The ones who tended fire through the long winters.

I am re-membering that older thing.

Artist: Hana Moazzeni

Once upon a time and in the beginning, Ahura Mazda, the Creator of Great Light looked upon the world and chose a man for king. His name was Jamshid. Jam — twin. Shid — sun. Twin of the Sun.

Ahura Mazda placed two sacred gifts in the hands of Jamshid: a golden dagger and a golden seal. With the dagger he would tend the earth. He would make a sacred cut into the fertile soil and plant seeds for the very first time. With reverence and respect. With the seal he would steward the living world and the living word. Ahura Mazda said to him:

“Tend my world responsibly. Nourish the earth and the living world. Take care of the seeds of civilization. Tend them like children. Teach others how to tend these great cycles. Bring the knowledge of agriculture, healing plants, music, animal husbandry, the sacred cycles of time to humans. Hold these gifts well. Teach them well. Honor them well. Love them and be grateful for them. Hold the covenant between heaven and earth. Teach right relation with all life. Bring forth life out of the earth in harmony with stars, elements, and all living beings.”

In the Avestan and Zoroastrian worldview, the relationship between the human being and the living world was genuinely one of sacred covenant. Ahura Mazda didn’t give Jamshid power over creation. He gave him responsibility for it. These gifts came with obligations. The golden seal wasn’t a mark of ownership. It was a mark of accountability. You are steward. You answer for what happens here.

And Jamshid was a good, responsible ruler. For many, many years. He ruled a golden age. He tended well. He honored Ahura Mazda. There was no disease. No death. No cold, hard winter of the soul. Father and son, mother and daughter, elder and youth walked together, all appearing as if fifteen years old. The earth stretched and swelled with life. Abundance was the nature of things. Light and darkness from the sacred fire -illuminated between sun and moon was seeded in grain. Light was in animal. Light and dark earth was in relationship between the human being and the living world.

The ancient Persians had two words for what lived inside every human choice. Asha — truth, right relationship, right tending. The force of things in sacred order. And Druj — the lie, distortion, wrong relation, things pulled out of their right place. Every thought. Every word. Every deed. Not abstractly. Cosmically. The Zoroastrian ethical triad — good thoughts, good words, good deeds — Humata, Hukhta, Hvarshta — was the understanding that every ordinary act either strengthens Asha or strengthens Druj in the world.

Ancient Persia seeded polarity consciousness in humanity. Through myth and story it was the first civilization post the Atlantean Epoch to teach the story of opposites. Ahsa/Druj. Good/Evil. Hard/Soft. Extremes — desert shadows. Extreme Cold and Heat. Light/Dark. Ahura Mazda (sun spirit) and Ahriman (cold demon).

Artist: unknown Ahura Mazda (creation) fighting Ahriman (destruction)

Ahriman, the ancient Persian demon of cold and darkness, the force of hardening and separation, was watching Jamshid. Ahriman knew he could not destroy Jamshid’s heart through force. So he used a subtler weapon. He whispered to Jamshid’s pride. He stoked it. He lured it. He tempted it. He fed it.

“You have done all of this. You are the source of all of this greatness! You are not just a king. You are divine. You are Creator! You should be honored as a God!”

And Jamshid who had done so much, who had given so much, who had held so much for so long and tended light and truth for so long… weakened and weakened. He ate it. He was nourished on this. He believed it.

The moment he did, the xvarənah left him. The divine light, the sacred fire that had rested on him like a crown, lifted like a bird taking flight, and was gone.

Darkness flooded in. The divs (demons) rose. Chaos entered the golden age. Stark contrast of creation and destruction ravaged the land.

Ahura Mazda came to Jamshid after a time of darkness and warned him: “a great winter is coming. A winter sent by the forces of Ahriman. Ice and darkness will cover the land. Hardening. Deadening. Darkening. The seeds will die. The animals will perish. Everything built will be unmade. You have created this through your pride and that pride has moved through other men. Seeding pride and evil in many. This seed will continue to bring cold, dark and separation from humans.

Build a Vara. Bring the seeds of the sacred to the Vara. Build it now so that the seeds of what creation has given humanity can remain intact. Even in seed form, as the world is ravaged by the forces of the demons of evil and darkness.”

A Vara is an underground sanctuary. A womb deep in the earth. Earth mama womb mother. Holding both the dark and the light -the darkness of earth and the inner illuminating light, self sustaining, sacred fire burning within. A container to hold the Seeds of sacred fire.

The king built it. But womb knowledge is older than every king. The earth knew how to hold seeds in the dark long before Jamshid was born. Women have been tending the seeds in the dark for tens of thousands of years.

We know this in our bodies.

Into the Vara, Jamshid carried the finest seeds of every plant. Two of every animal. The most beautiful and wisest of human beings. Every art. Every song. Every knowledge of the healing plants and the sacred cycles. Into the womb of waiting. Into the sacred underground.

And life waited. In the dark. Held. Protected. Tended through the long winter.

There are those who are still tending the light of these hidden seeds to this day.

The völva seers. The Strega. The covenant keepers who carried old knowing in the memory of the body itself — they knew. We know it through the cellular memory they have seeded in us. They tended the Vara when no one was watching. We have been tending Vara for millennia.

Artist: Kindra Nikole

After Jamshid’s fall from grace, and despite his determination to save humanity’s seeds, the darkness that flooded in took a specific shape. It grew in even darker ways. A man named Zahhak eventually rose to power. His myth-story is the Luciferic extreme made mythic flesh.

Ahriman came to Zahhak in three disguises. First as a flatterer — convincing him to murder his own father so that he could become more powerful. Then as a cook — introducing him to meat-eating, which in Zoroastrian tradition represented a break from sacred covenant with the animal world. And then Ahriman kissed Zahhak on both shoulders — and from each shoulder a black serpent grew. Serpents that could not be cut off. Serpents that had to be fed.

Two young human brains. Every day.

Zahhak ruled for one thousand years of evil tyranny. How many humans were sacrificed for power? The golden age was inverted. The king who was supposed to tend covenant with the living world was sacrificing it to darkness — daily, systematically, using the most vulnerable. Power corrupt. Power corrupt. Power corrupt.

Sound familiar?

He was eventually defeated by a hero named Feraydun but not killed. He was imprisoned under Mount Damavand, the great volcano in northern Iran. Chained. Waiting.

The myth says he is still there, straining against his chains. That when earthquakes shake the mountain, it is Zahhak moving. Perhaps we can feel his rumbling now in the corrupt and tyrannical powers of our own time. Seeds bear fruits, even deranged fruits, for thousands of years.

Iranian protesters today still call tyrants Zahhak. The myth is alive.

The tradition says there will be a final renovation — Frashokereti — when all of creation is restored. The cosmic father Sun-God resolves it from above.

But I am a woman re-membering this myth. And I think the renovation comes from below. From the Vara. From the seeds that were tended in the dark by the ones who never stopped tending. From the womb of the earth herself. The redemption isn’t coming. It has been gestating. In you. In me. In every circle where women sit down together and speak truth.

The myth doesn’t speak of an opening of the Vara -we only know that the sacred seeds are in a sanctuary in the earth; perhaps they have been gestating for a long 6,000 years in each of us (as well as the seeds of the Druj or evil -the Zahhak, who rumbles in the below. Maybe we have all been choosing which seeds to tend.

Perhaps the sacred seeds have gestated in you -in me -in us. And it is our time -to scatter them further. To sing them awake more. To rupture the myth and rewrite it our way. To let the seeds speak/sing/move/howl dance through us. In a new story.

Artist: Hana Moazzeni

Perhaps we have all been in a long, 6,000 year great winter.

Which seeds have you been tending?

I know you feel the sacred fire of something stirring in the womb of your becoming. Your story burns with it. Maybe these seed embers are in your hands. Ready to be scattered across the four directions with the fierce heartbeat-hoofbeat of thousands of red fire horses riding across fertile meadows.

What of Zahhak? Will we see him rise or fall? Will Zahhak change? Is evil a part of being human? What do we do with it, really? I do not know. I name it. I also focus on good thoughts, good words, good deeds. Beauty. Mythos. Imagination. Creation. I have felt, seen, touched the cold darkness. It is a plague. It is systematized in our very reality. I have read the tales of his distortion for too many years. It tries to throw me off balance every day. I am staying close to the womb of life. The sacred seeds. The sacred fire. I know which energy I wish to stoke.

I trust that the sacred fire — Baba Yaga’s skull torch — name it how you wish — karma — fate — checks and balances — Ma’at — will burn away the grotesque distortion in those who carry it. I believe they will face their karma, their choices, their actions. It will be difficult for them. Really, really difficult. Whether this life or the next.

Baba Yaga’s skull is not at all a gentle lamp. In the old, old Slavic tale, Vassalissa earns the skull by doing impossible tasks —tending, sorting, being present, doing the work without knowing why or how. Baba Yaga gives her the skull not as a gift but as a consequence of having done the work —and, Baba Yaga is well aware of the evil that Vassalissa has been facing. When Vasya carries it home it burns her stepmother and stepsisters to ash. They are reduced to a pile of ash. Please picture those in power using their power in evil ways, as being seen by Baba Yaga’s burning skull -may that fire bore into them.

The skull does and doesn’t redeem the wicked. It doesn’t redeem in the old patriarchal christian way of looking at it. It burns them away. It burns them from the inside out. What does that mean, truly?

This is the force I am naming. Not redemption from above. Not the cosmic father resolving things from on high. Something older and fiercer. The earth composting what is dead. Ma’at’s feather weighing the heart and finding it heavy with lies. Karma as cosmic consequence, not cosmic punishment. The sacred fire that burns through what has lived too long in distortion — underground, self-sustaining, burning from within — the same fire that lives in the Vara. The same fire that the völva seers tended. The same fire that burns in the skull on the fence post at the edge of the dark forest.

Zahhak is under the mountain. The sacred seeds are also underground. They share the same earth. The womb holds both. And the fire knows the difference.

Where do you land in this story?

What do you want to rewrite?

Write it. Write the womb seeds. Rite them. Find yourself and discover.

Perhaps it does not have seeds for you. I don’t know. What I do know: it is important we keep naming and seeing the poles of evil on either side — cold/hard/materialist/dead thinking and extreme/fire/hunger/pride/lust/distortion and to find our own balance. To stand soft and firm. To gestate and tend what is sacred. To rise from the greening stalks of our becoming.

I am asking myself: what lives in my Vara? What lives in yours? Name these seeds. Water them. Plant them. Protect them. What seeds have you been tending in the underground sanctuary of your own interior in the dark, in the not-yet, waiting for the light that are ready now to be carried above?

We have been shed. Stripped bare and clean.

It is time to be shod.

The Fire Horse is on the horizon. I see it in the sunrise and the sunset. The red of possibility. The red of bold. The red of war. The red of blood. The red of the cock crowing its ego into the dawn. The red of velvet cloaks stitching new stories in the hem of the interior. The red of marrow and ancestral memory. The red of pride and arrogance. The red of armies. The red riders tossing red seeds. Red birds singing across meadows. Firebirds rising. The red of bold, courage, heart-led movement riding across the plains toward freedom.

Whose freedom? At what cost?

Depends on the rider.

Depends on how the rider holds the reins.

Depends on the seeds the rider carries in his hands. In HER hands. In our hands.

Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world.
Then we took it for granted.
Discontent began a small rumble in the earthly mind.
Then Doubt pushed through with its spiked head.
And once Doubt ruptured the web,
All manner of demon thoughts
Jumped through—
We destroyed the world we had been given
For inspiration, for life—
Each stone of jealousy, each stone
Of fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light.
No one was without a stone in his or her hand.
There we were,
Right back where we had started.
We were bumping into each other
In the dark.

And now we had no place to live, since we didn’t know
How to live with each other.
Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on another
And shared a blanket.
A spark of kindness made a light.
The light made an opening in the darkness.
Everyone worked together to make a ladder.
A Wind Clan person climbed out first into the next world,
And then the other clans, the children of those clans, their children,
And their children, all the way through time—
To now, into this morning light to you.

—Once the World was Perfect —Joy Harjo