The Girl who Changed her Fate
When we write, we free what is gnawing at our bones. it is and it isn’t subtle. the way habits wrap their vines. the way they curl, wind and crawl. tough sinew threads inching towards mind, sky and crown. the way they hide beneath branches and leaves. beneath the forest’s canopy.
Image: Kelly Louise Judd
the way they whisper lies. the way they stick and spin and pull one in. spiders they are. and all spiders are story makers. habits and their crafty legs spinning spinning spinning fates. web wizards. web mistresses. weavers. habits are that too. they do make and destroy stories. they try to suck the marrow out of the fleshy, cornucopia stories. making gurgling sounds as they swallow. fat with pride. plump with the catching. dream catchers. they are this too.
habits grow and habits swell. they slip through our fingers. changelings. moon time they know this too. they speak the language of mold, bone and mushroom. they grow quickly. one moment they are not there. night gives birth to herself. in the morn they are ripe and bulbous.
the girl who changed her fate had wild lioness eyes for seeing in the dark. she knew which mushrooms to pluck. which bones to suck and which ancestral memories to carve and which to cull. born a naked star, hurled out of myths. vulnerable to the vines of ancestral memory and karma. clearly a tender shoot in spring. sea anemone floating across dunes. opening and closing, feeling and finding her way through the ecology of becoming human. sometimes caught. sometimes not.
Artist: Lucy Campbell
when a constellation says victim it also says heroine. when one is fated to something one is also free to destiny. turn a story inside out on itself and butterflies explode out of caterpillars. deep in the unconscious there was and there wasn’t a victim story. not the kind you think. it’s more subtle than that. it’s the victim to habit. the victim to sleep. the victim to forgetting. but turn it in on itself and there is remember. return. recreate. turn it in on itself and she is pregnant with destiny.
stories come and stories go. myths repeat themselves in different languages. and then there is the choose your own adventure kind. rather than following the sequence of the pages, she skips ahead to pg. 86. then she closes the book and writes a new story in the language of baby stars. to die would be an even greater adventure, said peter pan. not the dying to the flesh kind of dying. but the dying to the self. the dying to the old story. the firebird kind of story. the rising and renewing. the flaming and the blazing. this is and this isn’t a true story. firebird feathers are and aren’t real.
Artist: Lucy Campbell
dreams grow paths where before there were brambles. one day she pricked her finger. the next she was awakened. one day the lioness gobbled her up. the next day she grew fur and roared at the old vines and ran wild and free through the once tangled forest.
Words: The Wild matryoshka 🪆
Stasha Ginsburg
Artist: Lucy Campbell
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Become a spider woman in the multidimensional land of story.
Wild and winsome, the whispers and the whirling enliven the barest bones of the story.
Love you, Stasha!