Story with me

inside the Wild Remembering

Art: Autumn Skye

I’ll break open the story and

tell you what is there. Then, like

the others that have fallen out onto the sand,

I will finish with it,

and the wind will take it away.

Nisa, a !Kung San Woman, 1969

It began with a story. Sometimes a Story walks into a Room. Sometimes you have to hunt for the Wolf with a bloated belly full of stories and cut precisely to get to the marrow of Story. Story has the capacity to spin one around and around and around.

It can heal or destroy. It can freeze or thaw. break us open or apart. Stories die. Stories rise with new life. Story shapes us, transitions, interacts with and is informed by place.

It transforms. We think we are in control of it. We think it controls us. We discover it is something else entirely. It stalks us, like a greening plant. It cracks us open. Creation lives inside the crack. So does the messy stuff.

Creation has its own intelligence. Something new forms while something old is taken away. It was a caterpillar story. It was a mess. It grew a new container, a sanctuary. Now it is a butterfly. Emerging.

Unknown photo

Story with me.

Change your story.

Inside and out.
Rewrite your life. Re-rite your life.

Because it is TIME to wear your stories in your crown.
It is time to become the Author of your Life.
More embodied. More whole. More integrated. More wild. More free.

We need the deep stories. The old stories. The grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother’s stories. The Wild stories. The Mythopoetic Stories.

They assist us in finding ourselves on a map.

You are a nesting doll of story. Crack open a story and another one emerges. The world is a nesting doll of stories. There are stories layered within stories and stories circling within stories, and stories above, stories below, stories behind and stories around the corner. Stories that light the way. Stories that darken the day.

There is a Navajo song that sings about Beauty —Now I walk in beauty. beauty is before me, beauty is behind me, above and below me.

I’d like to also sing:

Now I walk in Story. Story is before me. Story is behind me, above and below me.

We cannot deny that the stories make or break us. The stories in the world can make or break us. It’s a hot mess in the world of story. And, there is so much beauty in the world of story —in the cracks. In the unassuming places. In the forgotten nooks. In the fleshy crevices. In the land. In the sea. In the hearth. In the sky.

All this to say: I live and breathe and sing and dance and walk Story. Inside the Wild Remembering. The Wild Remembering that is alive, that is remembering me, that I am circling ever closer to the center, making contact with its animistic, rewilded ever renewing heart.

Art:Lucy Campbell

I once felt trapped by the stories that patterned my life in painful, tangled ways. I made a vow to self and story—that I would write and dance my way through those stories, following the spiderweb threads and mycelial networks they wove through me.

Through my ancestral lineage—known and not known—this mysterious vein of story revealed itself. Imagination + Movement + Body + Writing became the lantern along the thread.

Through place—the origin stories of my grandfather’s parents, who immigrated from Northern Italy to the upper edges of Michigan near Lake Superior—

and following ancestral mother and father line threads backwards through time.

Through the layers of my own biography, cycle by cycle.

Through the inner and outer archetypes of family—mother, father, divine mother, divine father, inner mother, inner father—

And all the while tending my creative baby: Story.

The Wild Remembering of Story.

Not trapped. Not silenced.

But Free. Retrieved. Remembered.

Writing. Rite-ing. Voicing. Transforming.

Shapeshifting my way through story.

Through the strange story of place, seeded before my people walked the land where I was raised—an Anishinaabe tale whispered through birch bark and trillium, along sacred groves where the puckwudginee roam. The Lost Girl helped me find my many lost girls—lost parts, lost stories.

The Maiden Leelinau, whose name means Delight, helped guide me through the moss-covered, hedge-thick path of Story. She chose not the old deer hunter, but the Puckwudginee—the brown-skinned, feather-haired, moss-drenched little people—becoming one of them. Her own hunter. A follower/tracker of the rewilded way.

Praise be to the Puckwudginee! Also known as Kontomble. Sidhe. Fae. Puck. Pooka. Pixie.

Their inspiration sparked ferality, life force, and creative aliveness in my art, writing and soul, infused my body with courage to reweave my stories into a new cloak—

a bright red, marrow-red, bloodline cloak:

Little Red Writing Hood.

Feeling my way into the dark wolf belly of story, becoming my own hunter, a story stalker.

Entering the forest with Vasalisa—the brave, persistent story-sorter—

Sorting true from false stories, origin from distortion.

Writing and dancing my way to Baba Yaga’s hut, Keeper of All Stories—

To seek the creative fire. The Skull of ancestral wisdom. The spark that kindles bone-deep truth.

Becoming Persephone in the underworld, tending the shadow stories, fragmented tales, and death stories. Writing within dismemberment. Dreaming in the fertile dark. Writing grief and release.

Tending stories like seeds.

Listening to the garden of my multidimensional StoryBody.

Weaving myth and meaning, salt and sky, fire and water.

Moving backward, forward, inward, outward.

Storying myself from edge to center—and back again.

Becoming Selkie, wearing my old/new skin.

Swimming the ocean of return, of memory, of soul—seula, the ancient word for soul.

Freeing myself.

Returning home to the soul of story.

Shapeshifting through Story—in all its forms:

Moving it. Writing it. Churning it. Singing it. Dancing it.

Creating the new from the tossed and turned, spun and stitched, webbed and woven truth of Story with a capital S.

If I can, you can too.

I have the container: A year-long mythopoetic, grounded, embodied, creative writes of passage—into the belly of story.

Beginning September.

thewildremembering.com

Spiral into Story with me.

Reply to this message if you’d like to know more. I’m offering 15-minute calls. And applications. There will be space for 13 women.

Are you one of them?

Other ways to find your way inside of story Mythopoetic Rewilded Tarot Sessions -
and One-on-One life story/mythopoetic writing coaching.

Let’s get into the wilds together. I’ll keep your thread tethered. I’ll hold a lantern. I’ll guide you in and out of the liminal, in and out of the stories. Through body, place, memory & imagination. And your pen, that is actually, a crafty caduceus. Your pen, that is a bow —straight and true —aiming for the center of the self, the center of the Wild Remembering as it rewilds its way through you, through your stories, through your transforming becoming.

Can you hear the call? Reply with a yes. Or howl. Or sing. Dance! Stomp!

I can’t wait to welcome you into a rewilded cauldron coven of alchemical creativity!!