Jumping Mouse

A Story for Times of Collapse

---

Jumping Mouse: A Story for Times of Collapse

Artist: Lisa Ericson

What stories do we need when everything is falling apart? What stories can help us navigate massive changes?

When systems we trusted are breaking down. When forces beyond our control are annihilating heart-centered creations. When livelihoods disappear overnight. When the structures we built our lives around—jobs, institutions, identities—suddenly end. When we’re asked to navigate transitions we never chose and can’t control.

Recently, I asked this question to Sage Hamilton, an elder storyteller and educator who has worked with transformative theater, song, and story as medicine for over forty years.

She didn’t hesitate: “Jumping Mouse.”

I love the story of Jumping Mouse. I have unfinished business with this story. I first encountered it during my Waldorf teacher training. It was the first time I cried when hearing a teacher tell a story. I felt myself inside of that little tiny Mouse. I carried this story for years and then wrote a musical play about it for my class of second-grade children at the Asheville Waldorf School. Jumping Mouse was a girl. It felt like an animal saint story about the tiniest, humblest, most unassuming little creature navigating dangerous and difficult thresholds to bring her closer and closer to complete transformation.

Sage’s insistence that it holds medicine right now and her return to it again and again in her own life crises has nudged me to look more deeply into what it offers us in these times of collapse. I had a long conversation with Sage about it. Recently, someone gave me a tiny little portion of a mouse skull that they found outside on our property. It’s on my altar.

Jumping Mouse has been on Sage’s altar for a long, long time. Sage first discovered Jumping Mouse decades ago through Hyemeyohsts Storm’s book Seven Arrows. According to Sage, Storm said he had to share this story because “people needed to learn from this teeny tiniest mouse about surrender and compassion”—even though his tribe was upset he shared it publicly.

Sage shared ”Whenever there is a crisis in my life, I go to this story. It gives me medicine. And I feel there is medicine in it for many others right now. Especially adults who have forgotten how to follow the call, who have settled into the busy-ness and safety of the tribe, who have lost touch with wonder and awe.”

She calls this a “high teaching story”—one of many in her personal medicine bag that carries initiatory wisdom for those inside of change, feeling small inside of the enormous beast of life death life and change, transition, collapse, composting. Recently, Sage told me the story again. It has rekindled my love for this special little tale.

The Story:

Artist: Lisa Ericson

Once there was a mouse. Mice keep to themselves. They do what they need to do to survive. They are busy, busy, busy.

But there was a mouse who was curious and wonder-filled and not afraid to step away from the norm. Here is this mouse who stops and listens to the call for her highest unfolding.

She goes on a journey from being mouse to becoming eagle. It is compassion and surrender that moves her every step of the way.

Mouse is the lowest on the food chain. Everything is life-threatening. She stays with the tribe for safety. She knows it is a risk to travel away. The odds of making it are slim. And yet there is a moment in which she must step away because she hears the sound of a river and that call is too loud to ignore.

She travels to the river where she meets Frog, who tricks her to jump. And in her jumping, she gets her new name: Jumping Mouse. When jumping for the first time, she sees a glimpse of something mice never see, never even know exists: she sees the sacred mountains and this mountain calls her. She knows the odds of making it to the sacred mountain are slim, and yet it calls her even louder.

She must leave the tribe. She tries to tell them of what she saw—none believe her. She smells of water, a body of water the mice have never been in before. They assume she has been in the mouth of a predator. They fear her. They think she is crazy. Speaking of rivers and sacred mountains. They know what it is to be mouse. These words are foreign and too strange to understand.

She leaves. Runs across the plains, careful of the shadows of the predator birds. She comes to a burrow of high plain mice —to Elder Mouse and his wife. He teaches her the truth, and how important it is to be safe at all costs. He confirms what she knows. Her knowing and calling is more than a crazy idea. He wants her to stay, to apprentice with him, but she must continue on if she is to truly know and see the Sacred Mountains.

She meets Buffalo on the plains. He is sick. Every encounter feeds her awe. She acknowledges that all these creatures are far greater than her. Every step of the way, this little tiny mouse experiences awe, listens to the call, and gives something up of herself to continue crossing the threshold of fear.

Only her eye can heal the great Buffalo. She knows how tiny she is. How could her tiny little Mouse eye possibly help? She gives up her eye. It is the ticket to ride across Buffalo’s back.

And then she encounters a Gray Wolf, who has forgotten his true voice, his true calling, his true self. He is demented. With compassion, this little awestruck mouse recognizes: can my other eye help? She is so filled with compassion that she gives him her other eye and makes him whole. And he is the only one who can take her to the sacred mountain. As soon as she gives him her eye, he remembers who he is and what he’s meant to do.

Mouse gives up both her eyes and her ability to see in order to help others. Her ability to see where she is going. To rely on inner sight. Trust. And in that giving, in that blindness, she finds the very thing that will carry her to the mountain.

Mouse doesn’t see the whole path. She can’t know what will happen. But she hears the call and she follows it. At every threshold, she has to cross her fear again. Wolf carries her to the foot of the Sacred Mountains, where she eventually must surrender even more—blind, alone at the top of the mountain, vulnerable to all manner of attack. She eventually becomes Eagle.

Why this story matters now:

This little darling of a story, as Sage calls it, gives us so much medicine for times of collapse.

Because, as Sage teaches, “Transformation doesn’t happen through conquest. It happens through contact. Through compassion. Through surrender.”

Through facing and meeting what’s in front of us rather than trying to control it. Through giving what we have rather than hoarding what little we think keeps us safe. As Sage says about Mouse: “She doesn’t hoard what she has. She doesn’t protect herself at all costs. She asks: Can my eye help?”

Because it shows that being small isn’t the problem.

Mouse is the lowest on the food chain. Everything is a threat. And yet her smallness and her vulnerability, her willingness to give from her limited resources is exactly what creates the conditions for transformation.

Because it honors that we can’t see the whole path.

Mouse crosses each threshold afraid. In times of collapse, we rarely get the full map. This story teaches us to move threshold by threshold, encounter by encounter, following the call even when we can’t see where it leads. It’s about listening. About being willing to cross the threshold of fear again and again, not because you’re certain of the outcome, but because the call is too loud to ignore.

Because it reminds us that what we’re protecting might be what needs to be given.

Our eyes—our way of seeing, our certainty about how things should work, even our compliance with the ways of the collective and our lineage patterns—might be exactly what we need to surrender. We can’t approach it through how we saw it with our Mouse-conditioned eyes. Blindness, not-knowing, becomes the condition for being carried forward. Because in blindness from our former way of seeing, we begin to see through new eyes —the eyes of what transforms us. In this case, Eagle medicine. We have to see the story with new eyes.

Because collapse asks us to give up old identities to become something new.

Mouse doesn’t make it to the Sacred Mountains as mouse. She can’t get to the sacred mountains if she is mouse. She must die to what she was in order to become something new. She who is Not. She doesn’t just transform from Mouse to Eagle. She completely dies to what she was. The death of what we were is the condition for transformation into what we’re becoming.

This story can assist us in re-compositioning our lives.

Times of collapse strip us down and make us raw, vulnerable and bare. They take our livelihoods, our certainties, relationships and our sense of safety. They ask us to cross thresholds we never wanted to cross. Sometimes they just strip us of our masks and want us to be truthful with the mess that we are standing in. They leave us blind, feeling our way forward with no guarantee. However, at the same time, they want us to grow, to thrive, to become more than what we think we are.

As I reflect more on the beauty of this story, I’m so struck by little Jumping Mouse: Yes. Yes. Yes. Change is exactly the path. Even if it feels impossible. Even if only a tiny thread winds its way into your hands and it’s just a fragment to follow, to dream into. Especially because it feels impossible. It’s crazy. Especially if it’s crazy. That’s what makes it have heart. The call that you hear is true. You don’t need to be convinced of it by anyone else. Certainly, it helps when we have allies and friends who can see us clearly—Frog, for instance—allies who give us new names, not just Mouse but Jumping Mouse after we’ve leaped to see what’s possible! Friends who encourage us to follow the path that has the most heart and meaning. Also, Mouse teaches: Give help where it is needed. Give. Kindness. Compassion. Empathy. Listening. Perhaps her way of seeing is exactly what somebody else needed in order for them to become more whole. It’s a riddle, isn’t it?

Artist: Lisa Ericson


And then... trust what you can’t see. When you are blind—and here’s where it gets so, so messy—at your most vulnerable, can you trust not knowing, not having the capacity to see, just being inside of uncertainty? The shock of losing your former way of seeing. Knowing that danger is everywhere... Can you allow yourself to be carried by that which is larger than you? Hope? Trust? A miracle? The most unexpected thing. A teacher once said to me in my 20s when I was in the earliest stages of my mouse journey: you are in God (god, goddess, mucka wucka, creator—whatever you want to call it) and God is in you—and can you trust that you are evolving and God is evolving. It isn’t about YOU. It’s about something far greater that is wrapped up inside your destiny. The Sacred Mountains are real. You trusted the path of the heart, made sacrifices along the way and now—at the very top of them—here sits Destiny. Not just your fate. And destiny requires us to surrender BIG TIME.

This isn’t a story about heroism. It’s a story about humility, surrender, and the willingness to keep moving even when you’re afraid. Especially when you’re afraid.

So... sweet little Jumping Mouse tells us: If you’re navigating collapse—personal, professional, collective—this story has medicine. It won’t tell you how to fix what’s broken. It won’t tell you to stay stuck in the old old story. But it will show you how to move through it with persistence, grace, compassion, and trust. At some point, even mouse has to realize that she has apprenticed long enough, that she can’t keep apprenticing with a wise older mouse. Jumping Mouse has in her heart exactly what she needs. She just wasn’t looking in the right places.

The question isn’t whether we can avoid the thresholds. We can’t avoid them! They are uncomfortable and challenging and sometimes so very messy. The question is: what are we willing to sacrifice in order to cross them? What story do we need to let go of in order to become more of who we came here to be?

Artist: Local Boulder Artist captured this photo this week! I cannot remember his name! it’s tiny in the image


I leave you with the gift of a song by Ahey Blakely (I brought it to a women’s song circle this morning and sang my heart out. (It feels so aligned with this beautiful darling of a story.

Decisively Defeated (click here to listen to the song!)
I know it feels like
you won’t get through this
I know it feels like
you might not make it back
I know it feels like
there’s nothing else to lose
Maybe there’s not
Maybe it’s time to be
decisively defeated
And just fall
fall into the arms of Grace
Nowhere to go but down
nowhere to go but deeper
nowhere to go but down
nowhere to go but deeper down
This is the place
where we are reshaped
by a mystery