To be poor and be without trees, is to be the most starved human being in the world. To be poor and have trees, is to be completely rich in ways that money can never buy.
As long as a woman is forced into believing she is powerless and/or is trained to not consciously register what she knows to be true, the feminine impulses and gifts of her psyche continue to be killed off.
There is a time in our lives, usually in mid-life, when a woman has to make a decision - possibly the most important psychic decision of her future life - and that is, whether to be bitter or not. Women often come to this in their late thirties or early forties. They are at the point where they are full up to their ears with everything and they've "had it" and "the last straw has broken the camel's back" and they're "pissed off and pooped out." Their dreams of their twenties may be lying in a crumple. There may be broken hearts, broken marriages, broken promises.
Stories set the inner life into motion, and this is particularly important where the inner life is frightened, wedged, or cornered. Story greases the hoists and pulleys, it causes adrenaline to surge, shows us the way out, down, or up, and for our trouble, cuts for us fine wide doors in previously blank walls, openings that lead to the dreamland, that lead to love and learning, that lead us back to our own real lives as knowing wildish women.
The soul has no gender.
Without art we live under the illusion that there is only time, and not eternity.
To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.
Story is far older than the art of science and psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes.
When a creature is exposed to violence, it will tend to adapt to that disturbance, so that when the violence ceases or the creature is allowed its freedom, the healthy instinct to flee is hugely diminished, and the creature stays put instead.
It makes utter sense to stay healthy and strong, to be as nourishing to the body as possible. Yet I would have to agree, there is in many women a 'hungry' one inside. But rather than hungry to be a certain size, shape, or height, rather than hungry to fit the stereotype; women are hungry for basic regard from the culture surrounding them. The 'hungry' one inside is longing to be treated respectfully, to be accepted and in the very least, to be met without stereotyping.
Story is a medicine which strengthens and arights the individual and the community.
...stories that rise from deep suffering can provide the most potent remedies for past, present, and even future ills.
A runner is real when she takes the first step.
The body is like the earth ... as vulnerable to overbuilding, being carved into parcels, cut off, overmined, and shorn of its power as any landscape.
Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags and crazy people.
If logic was anything, all men would ride sidesaddles.
I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with the monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets.
The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar.
Solitude is not an absence of energy or action, as some believe, but is rather a boon of wild provisions transmitted to us from the soul.
While archetypes may emanate through us for short periods of time, in what we call numinous experience, no woman can emanate an archetype continuously. Only the archetype itself can withstand such projections such as ever-able, all giving, eternally energetic. We may try to emulate these, but they are ideals, not achievable by humans, and not meant to be. Yet the trap requires that women exhaust themselves trying to achieve these unrealistic levels. To avoid the trap, one has to learn to say 'Halt' and 'Stop the music,' and of course mean it.
Freud's translator accidentally omitted 'fashion' in the psychoanalytic list of primary instinctual drives; along with the drive to sexuality there is the drive to wear odd garments that may cut off circulation, occlude vision, make toes grow sideways, cause riots.
Any time I find medicine that's helpful, I share it with everyone I know.
Ritual is one of the ways in which humans put their lives in perspective, whether it be Purim, Advent, or drawing down the moon. Ritual calls together the shades and specters in people's lives, sorts them out, puts them to rest.
Failure is a greater teacher than success
I became married at a young age and had two daughters and divorced at 26. I had to go on welfare to make ends meet. I had no way to support myself.
