trauma

Myth, Fairytale, and Dream | companions and guides to the inner work of finding and freeing our souls

An essay on myth, fairytale, and dream. Introducing my new epic poem “What’s Hid Beneath the Bones of this Great Tree.” Here’s the background on the poem as well as an overview helping you understand why mythopoetic material is the material of soul-work and how things like poems, tales, dreams and even artwork are necessary to help us consciously take the “journey of the soul.”

In the dark winters of my childhood, my mother would gather us around our wood-burning stove for story time. It wasn’t as long ago as that sentence makes it sound. I was born early in the 1960s at the feet of the great Rocky Mountains. Boulder, Colorado’s winters were cold; its social environment hot. My parents carried me to anti-war marches on their backs, and trundled me along when they walked door to door promoting progressive politics. I felt my mother’s grief when JFK was killed; I knew her despair when MLK and RFK were cut down, the way she tried to keep her hope alive in the midst of such loss. . . .

Nourish Our Inner Lives: Second in the Series, "What Matters Most Now: Life, Love, Liberty in these Uncertain Days"

Here’s the second sermon in my fall sermon series: "What Matters Most Now: Life, Love, and Liberty in these Uncertain Times."

We’re facing a number of crises crashing in upon us. They threaten our wellbeing, personally and communally. We feel these threats in our bodies, minds, and souls. At the same time, we’re being summoned by God to engage this urgent moral reckoning as a nation.

The series aims to draw on ancient wisdom, freshly imagined, to help people recover habits and patterns for living in these times.

The series focuses on the universal feelings and experiences that unite all human beings. Charlie MacKesy’s book, "The Boy, The Mole, the Fox, and the Horse," does this beautifully, especially the way he brings together the four characters (boy=curiosity, mole=enthusiasm, fox=suffering, horse=wisdom). We will pair five of Charlie’s best sayings and joins them to biblical wisdom says to help ground us in these uncertain times.

This sermon was based on Proverbs 17.3 and a saying from Charlie MacKesy’s book, in which the boy says to the mole: “Isn’t it odd. We can only see our outsides, but nearly everything happens on the inside.”

1.

What are we going to do now?

Each week another worry. Each week another brick in the wall between Americans. Each week another weight drops on our shoulders.

We don’t all experience these crises the same way. There are those for whom the recent death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg isn’t a tragedy but an opportunity. There are those for whom the failure of the grand jury to indict Louisville cops in the death of Breonna Taylor isn’t a travesty of justice. There are those for whom the US Postal Service slowdowns, the voter suppression, and fact that America leads the world in COVID tragedies isn’t alarming. But for a majority of Americans today, all this is deeply troubling. It feels like our world is unraveling, our democracy is crumbling . . .