The River is Calling

Threading the River

The River is Calling

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.

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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