The best medicine in the fairytale is waiting for you to hear it, to sleep with it, to dream with it, to journey with it, to slow cook and simmer inside of it.

Not quite here, not quite there is like uttering an ancient spell: abracadabra. A door or portal opens to the liminal .

Snip snap snout and happily ever after. The door, the portal slams shut.

We are humble, open, cautious , innocent, guarded, curious, hopefull

When we cross the threshold of story.

We begin in the here and now and we venture to the timeless mundane

And face ordeals and trials, initiations and ritual deaths.

We descend, or venture to the deep dark forest with revolving huts, revolving worlds. We are devoured by beasts. We shapeshift or witness shapeshifters and tricksters, ogres and evil stepmothers. We journey to heaven or hell and return. Stronger.

Fairytales speak of the human soul and psyche and what’s its archaic ancestors knew. Once upon a time is the souls timelessness.

Once upon a time is the language of the soul.

Let us begin with an incantation…

Story story sing to me

From the roots and from the leaves

Story story sing to me

From the bottom of the sea

Story story sing to me

From the edge of everything…

Let us uncover this adventure of life together… join me on Substack to gather more seedlings…

Muriel Rukeyser says that the universe is made up of stories, not atoms.  Imagine this infinite universe alive with all the stories that have ever breathed, birthed, lived and died. In this universe are all the stories that ever shall be. Body stories. Soul stories. Blood stories. Root stories. Bone stories. Medicine stories. Poison stories. Spine stories. Gut stories. Birth stories. Death stories. Love stories. Erotic stories. Passion stories. Tragic stories. Coming of age stories. Aging stories. Foolish stories. Wisdom stories. Secret stories. Hidden stories. Forgotten stories. Ghost stories. Ancestral stories. Memory stories. Wounded stories. Scar stories. Healing stories. Cosmology stories. Star stories. Big bang stories. Transformational stories. And Firebird Stories, to name a few.

While our stories are as diverse as the world we live in, we have one story in common with one another —the story of becoming human. We simmer in and are seasoned by the stories that make us human. Each one of us journeys through an odyssey of stories in this lifetime. Within us too, are the seed stories of our death and the adventure stories that lie beyond all that we have known in these bodies. 

Sometimes we are predators to the story, and sometimes we are prey. We may alternate roles too.

You may be the stalker of your stories, or the one being stalked. In the land of story we catch, gather, flesh out story bones, write eulogies for the stories that need to be settled and grow new wings on old stories that long to be freed. In this way, we do the work of story retrieval. The story undergoes an alchemical process, and you, who have journeyed with this story, are changed. You retrieve your story, you retrieve your soul. You die to the story and emerge more whole...

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