I found you through Stephanie Bell, and I always appreciate what you share, the way you are working to ground activism in something deeper, in love and belonging rather than outrage.
And I agree that stories can guide us in both directions. We have models of wisdom and seeing more deeply - Gandalf comes to mind. And we have the imagery of interconnection, belonging to a greater whole among the Na'vi of Avatar and in many other stories. But we also have the nearly-universal-in-fiction trope of good vs. evil, the evilly-evil bad guys who are so corrupted, so empty of love and humanity that they must be destroyed. And of course we must be vigilant for any secretly-evil infiltrators among our allies, must be ready to cast them out when they slip up and show themselves...
As I shared in my last post, I feel that our stories need to become grounded, in our shared experience of aliveness, wonder, thousands of meals and hugs and conversations, billions of heartbeats. Beneath all of our conflicting, chaotic stories there is one story that we all share.
As a longtime lover of books, this really spoke to me. There are characters I have loved and/or admired so much, they are like real people in my life! And I love how this essay meandered from books to the moon and the wisdom of the natural world which plays its own formative role in all of our lives (whether we see this truth or not). I especially loved this, Bri: "The question isn’t whether we’ll be offered moments that matter. The question is how we’ll meet them." Amen! <3
I found you through Stephanie Bell, and I always appreciate what you share, the way you are working to ground activism in something deeper, in love and belonging rather than outrage.
And I agree that stories can guide us in both directions. We have models of wisdom and seeing more deeply - Gandalf comes to mind. And we have the imagery of interconnection, belonging to a greater whole among the Na'vi of Avatar and in many other stories. But we also have the nearly-universal-in-fiction trope of good vs. evil, the evilly-evil bad guys who are so corrupted, so empty of love and humanity that they must be destroyed. And of course we must be vigilant for any secretly-evil infiltrators among our allies, must be ready to cast them out when they slip up and show themselves...
As I shared in my last post, I feel that our stories need to become grounded, in our shared experience of aliveness, wonder, thousands of meals and hugs and conversations, billions of heartbeats. Beneath all of our conflicting, chaotic stories there is one story that we all share.
As a longtime lover of books, this really spoke to me. There are characters I have loved and/or admired so much, they are like real people in my life! And I love how this essay meandered from books to the moon and the wisdom of the natural world which plays its own formative role in all of our lives (whether we see this truth or not). I especially loved this, Bri: "The question isn’t whether we’ll be offered moments that matter. The question is how we’ll meet them." Amen! <3
Moon’s isness moves seas,
Her rhythms, primordial.
Sacred her cycles?
Tales as maps, mirrors,
instigate inner heroes.
Moon, power model.