How To Build A Story Like A Vessel

I've been reading a lot of Ursula Le Guin recently. I won't hesitate to call it an obsession. But maybe the better word is an apprenticeship, or a hunger, or both. I've apprenticed myself unconsciously to her words, because they are full of something I am hungry for, something I didn't know I was hungry for until I found it. For a while I couldn't articulate what "it" was. Only that the way she made worlds, and words, filled me up with a sense of both light and dark, a sense of rightness and of wonder, an astonishment at the breathtaking imaginings that humans are capable of, the strange familiarity of her planets and peoples. But it wasn't until I came across a few brief descriptions in Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew and the introduction to her short story collection A Fisherman of the Inland Sea that I understood what it was I was responding to. Naturally, Ursula needed to explain it to me.

Here are the two passages that, when read close together in time, brought with them a revelation—

"The rhythms of prose—and repetition is the central means of achieving rhythm—are usually hidden or obscure, not obvious. They may be long and large, involving the whole shape of a story, the whole course of events in a novel: so large they're hard to see, like the shape of the mountains when you're driving on a mountain road. But the mountains are there." (from a chapter on Repetition in Steering the Craft)

"The beauty of a story may be intellectual, like the beauty of a mathematical proof or a crystalline structure; it may be aesthetic, the beauty of a well-made work; it may be human, emotional, moral; it is likely to be all three." (from the introduction to A Fisherman of the Inland Sea) 

What she doesn't say outright, but what I took away from both of these tidbits, is this sense that a story's structure is meant to be as beautiful and sound as the language with which it is told. Structure can mean many things, but it isn't primarily about how you've ordered your paragraphs or the clever way you've fragmented your narrative. That's still surface stuff. Structure to me is primarily about the inherent rightness (be it moral, human, emotional, ecological) with which the story is constructed. The way its characters, landscapes and themes move and dance around each other. The pattern they make, which should be in some way harmonious, but never perfect. This is the innerness of the story, like the interior structure of a clay vessel thrown on a wheel or built by hand.

The brilliant potter and poet M.C. Richards writes about the innerness of vessels; how in throwing a pot you are really shaping empty space, not clay. How, long after the pot is broken, its interior space still remains, somehow made eternal by the shaping of its clay. Which makes me think of Rilke's "unusable space" built from the "tremulous music of stones": a temple (Sonnet X from Part Two of The Sonnets To Orpheus)

Andrew Cornell Robinson

Somehow the shaping of clay feels like a useful and important metaphor for the shaping of a story. Words are the clay, but a story is more than words, like a vessel is more than clay. The inner structure of the vessel must be able to carry the beauty of its exterior; they must be in balance, must match, must create an inner and an outer that together is a whole. 

This is what Ursula Le Guin's writing does. This is why her novels satisfy on a deep profound level. Their prose, which is deceptively simple but in reality profoundly poetic,  perfectly mirrors an inner narrative beauty, a strength of story, of psyche, of plot, of the things that make the rhythms of ancient myth last for thousands of years. Just read The Telling or Tehanu and you will see what I mean. It's an ineffable thing, but you know it when you read it, when you feel it in your bones. 

So, my question is, how do you learn to shape a story like you would a vessel, its innerness shaping its outerness? I will be the first to admit that I tend toward the poetic, the lush, the (at times) overly dense. This has always come easily to me. What is more challenging for me as a writer is carrying plot, and yet this is what truly shapes the story. Its inner structure—the way humans, animals, plants, land interact through conflict and resolution. The way microcosms and macrocosms are evoked, repeated, sung... You see, I can hardly write about it in any clear way.

We all, of course, have our own ideas about what makes a beautiful story. It's very subjective. In the same way that we all have different ideas about what makes a beautiful vessel. 

Akira Satake

In the midst of all of this thinking about the inner and outer beauty of stories, I discovered the art of Japanese tea bowls, also known as chawan (thanks to my dear friend Catherine Sieck, who is an incredible potter). More to the point, I discovered something of the original philosophy behind these utterly feral vessels. It's the concept of wabi-sabi, one of those terms so overused and yet so generally misinterpreted that I at first balked and didn't even want to read about it. But my local library had a copy of Leonard Koren's classic Wabi-Sabi for Artist, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, and I read it in one sitting. Lucky for me. I'm not going to get into all the details here, as it's even harder to write about than the innerness of good stories. 

In very brief, wabi-sabi is an aesthetic and spiritual system based on the impermanence, imperfection, and yet astonishing, deep, melancholic beauty found in nature, not so much in its glorious blossomings and epic mountain peaks, but in "the minor and the hidden, the tentative and the ephemeral, things so subtle and evanescent they are invisible to vulgar eyes," in the "moments of inception and subsiding" (page 50). Wabi-sabi honors the imperfect, the earthen, the processes of growth and decay and rebirth, the fluidity and also impermanence of all things. And, just a little bit more (it's delicious, isn't it?)-- "Wabi-sabi suggests the subtlest realms and all the mechanics and dynmaics of existence, way beyond what our ordinary sense can perceive. The primordial forces are evoked in everything wabi-sabi" (page 57).

Akira Satake

Tea bowls made in this style, and sipped from with presence and stillness and attention to the here and now, are meant to create and evoke a unity of self and nature in all of its imperfect beauty. I wonder what a story built like this would look like. What kind of innerness, shaped to hold the tea properly but also the wild shapes of decay and unfurling both, might translate into story-making? How does a story shape itself around impermanence? And at the same time, how does a story grow like a natural thing, like a piece of granite in the earth or a head of kelp in the sea? How does it speak with authenticity, right up from the ground of the ground and of the soul, both in its words and in its structure, its innerness? 

How might we leave space for stories in the world, stories that can be temples where stones sing, stories that have nothing to do with our own egos? Stories that are our gifts and our leavings, life offering vessels at the edge of the wood?

These are open-ended questions, a delicious exploration inspired by Ursula Le Guin and the pottery traditions of Japan. At first glance, I found this connection a bit unexpected. At second, I remembered that Le Guin has translated the Tao Te Ching and is a great student of Taoism, from which concepts of Wabi-sabi, tea ceremonies and chawan clay techniques have arisen. To fulfill that which is naturally so. A story and a vessel should feel like this: that they have grown up from the ground of themselves. That they could not be any other way. That there is always a crack left open for mystery.

Dreaming On Dartmoor

There are stories on Dartmoor that come up singing through the stones. There is a silence underneath the wind on the tops of the granite tors that is ancient with human song. I could feel it, just underneath the skin of green. The wind and the stones and the pulse of story came in like a hallowing, and I was changed.

What I mean is, I felt seen by some Dreaming underneath the moor. Like that Dreaming wanted to be known. It was new to me, but not to the many dreaming artists who live in and near Chagford, on Dartmoor. Their work is in conversation with it; with the stone crones and the rooty doors, the elven folk and the Bronze Age queens, with the bones of primordial horses and the ghosts of the Wild Hunt, with the long dead Bear and the scream of the kestrel, who has been screaming and diving here for hundreds of thousands of years. I have never visited a place like this before. Where you can see the land Dreaming through so many of the humans who live there— in their painting, in their weaving, their story-telling, their singing, and their dancing, in their sculpting, their metalwork, their felted textiles, their clay.

I came because of Rima Staines, and because of Tatterdemalion. (You know this already, those of you who read my last post.) To meet the woman and the land with whom my stories and therefore a part of my soul had been in long conversation. In many ways our meeting was like the gathering up and dusting-off of an old friendship newly discovered again. Something you might sift from out the stones at Grimspound; a gleaming, flint-dark kind of kinship.   

Perhaps I was able to hear whispers of the moor dreaming, to feel the weight of its myriad and ancient eyes (granite, heather, moss, hawk, mouse, root, ghost, bone, tin-vein, thorn) because it was Rima and Tom (and the Boy, the truest little shouter and moor-whisperer of them all) who introduced me. Surely, this made a difference. The vast difference between meeting someone cold on the street, and being introduced by a dear friend by the warmth of the fire.  

For Rima and Tom, in their painting, their story-making, their performances, and also the daily rhythms of their lives (close to the quick, to the fire, of the soul's hearth)—they are dancing with the moor. They are letting its Dreaming through in any way they can—out their brushes, their pens, their words, their bones, their (soon-to-be) wheels. And so being brought by them across hill and dale and down among the stones and Bronze Age circles of Dartmoor was a sacred kind of introduction. 

At Grimspound, a Bronze Age fort (named thus by Viking settlers much later), I felt the stories come singing up especially strong. I saw them; glimpses of a skirt-hem, a leather shoe. Did women once come walking down those hills through the old stone gate with sheep at their heels, bells clattering, talking about the old wolf someone saw down at the river; the long labor of someone else's sister; the ripening of the sloes? Did they go down to the river valley, to the damp and forested places to gather berries in well-woven baskets? Hawthorn, blackberry, wild rosehip, sloe. Did the brown bears forage for sloes nearby, and did the women take care to never speak badly of them while in their hearing?

Did they gather yarrow from the meadows and the sides of pathways in summer, to give to their daughters in childbirth, their sons with wounds from hunting or battle?

What did they murmur to the heather when they gathered it for tea, for ale?

On the muddy paths, what pawprints did they encounter, and how did they tell the tales of them back home, around the hearth? What did they say of Badger, heading home to her sett at dawn? 

Some say these smaller circles of stones within Grimpound's wall are the foundations of granaries; others believe they were little houses. The stones are laid in such a way at the entrance—a sharp turn on your way in—that whatever was inside would have been protected from the elements, from wind and rain. Their shape and size is reminiscent of the clochán huts (the beehive shaped stone buildings) on the Irish coast used by monks and priests as religious hermitages. What was it like, to sit by the fire in here while the wind blew hard; or alternately, to duck inside for a bushel of grain? 

A little leat wound along the outskirts of the ruin, dug by Bronze Age arms to convey water to the settlement. It had a sweet voice like copper bells, all hung with bracken and heather. It is still here, these thousands of years later, like the stones ringing Grimspound, and like the stones it holds whispers, threads of human story, scraps of Dreaming come up from the underground, where the groundwater swells, where the heather roots, where the badger sleeps. Whispers that found their way right in, and rooted, so that I couldn't seem to stop thinking about story, and how it is held in a landscape, and how it arises through the people who live there. 

At night, I slept in Rima and Tom's arctic bell tent in a cow pasture, in the deep dark of that round and heavy canvas. Strange birds sometimes called in the small hours, and everything smelled green though I could hardly see until poking my head out the flaps at dawn. 

My sleep was sound, and round, and soothed by the damp ground below my bedroll and skins, by the creature-dark, by the smoke from my fire (and a lot of smoke it was at first, for this California girl used to dry kindling, and not the ever-damp of England!) At first, I didn't dream, or nothing that I could recall very well. Perhaps it takes a few days to settle in, to let the stories waft up from the underground and into your sleep. 

For suddenly, there they were, vivid and strange. Dreams that I can remember still. In one, I ran through an apocalyptic city with an old childhood friend, chased by gunfire, but everywhere underfoot there were hawthorn berries, and we were slipping on them as we fled. 

In another, I hoisted myself up bareback onto a paint mare, wrapped my hands up in her mane, and galloped like I have never galloped before, knowing that the horse would not stop until she felt like it,  not minding at all, feeling that for once I was completely unafraid. 

In another, I found a hazelnut with the distinctive chew marks of a dormouse, a little treasure on the floor of a silvery hazel grove. This dream must have come from an overheard conversation about the endangered English dormouse, and how its presence can be tracked by examining hazelnuts for a certain pattern of toothmarks—a perfect hole made in the nut, like the opening of an owl den, with a smooth inner rim and tooth-marks at a particular angle.

But also I think that dream drifted up from some longing to meet the quiet and ancient ones of this land more intimately, to follow the wise old mouse through the hazel grove, and into the place of Dreaming, where the Salmon of Knowledge swims under the hazel trees and eats the Nuts of Poetry as they fall into that Well.

The land here, from Dartmoor west and south into Cornwall, was a Celtic holdout, a place where the old ways and the old stories were safe and harbored for a little bit longer than elsewhere in England. Where the stone circles got sung and danced, where people kept their ears to their earth and listened, and perhaps whispered the things they heard back to the stones for safe-keeping, so that when the time was right, another soul, ear pressed to granite, might hear them, and keep the fire lit.

In his book of essays, The Voice That Thunders, the intensely wonderful English writer Alan Garner (turn to him if you want to know how a human being can listen to a place his whole life, and shape those listenings into words) says that even if no one speaks them anymore, and even if no one writes them down, myths are never lost. Not in the Eternal Time of stones and moors and bones and dreams. Only in linear time can they be lost, for a little while anyway.

They can always be recovered again, in some form. Not by "scavenging" them by tooth and nail, as Garner writes, but by earning their trust again. By sitting for hours, for days, for years, by the river that has carried the souls of moor-creatures for millennia (horse, vole, kestrel, ancient bear).

By wading through leaf-mold and the silence of trees to the edge of the amber river, and asking for nothing but to walk by its side....

....and while walking to dream on ancient acorn harvests and why it is that the river gleams like bronze, and all the things that it has seen.  

Trust is earned again by leaning on the stones, and waiting for the faint murmuring of their mica-voices, and the things they have been protecting there. 

By going out in misty weather to listen to the wind. By introducing your children to that wind, that mist, that granite, that river-gleam, as Rima and Tom and so many of the wonderful folk of this community seem to do. 

This is the work of a lifetime, not a single visit, and so my glimpses and my musings of the Dreams of Dartmoor are only that; threads gathered up in a traveler's pockets. A little wooden box of rememberings, like compass points: a string of hawthorn berries, a chip of granite, a sprig of heather, a shard of pottery, a pouch of dreams full of dormouse-chewed hazelnuts. More to the point though is the shape of this place, and this journey, and what it is we bring home. As I wrote in my journal after our afternoon at Grimspound, "There's something I'm trying to work out around story and myth here; how this is to be carried; why this land so cultivates mythic thinking and dreaming; what to do about it in my own life."

How, in other words, to care for the stories of my own place, this bit of coast on the edge of California, near the Golden Gate, where I am from.

How to listen for the stories in the blood, the ash-house tales just beyond the gates of memory, back in the bones where my ancestors sing.

How to hitch the oak trees of my bloodline, the oak trees of old England, old Ireland, old Russia, old Austria, old Hungary, old Germany, to the oak trees of this homeland I love with all my heart, this California of coast live oaks, black oaks, tanoaks, valley oaks, the memories of grizzly bears coming to feast beneath the trees in autumn, the thousand thousand generations of Coast Miwok and Ohlone people singing for the acorns as they fell, and eating thousands of generations of bowls of acorn porridge.

How, most importantly, to do this not just for myself, but together, here in the Bay Area, in Point Reyes, in California, on the edge of the continent, on all the lands we love; excavating our own myriad ancestries at the same time as we are out by the trees and rivers and stones, listening for theirs, and honoring the people who were here before us: that fraught and tender terrain. 

After only eight nights with my head to the sweet earth in a dark round tent in a village nestled on the great hill-rounded moor, a week driving and walking the tall, close hedgerows of Devon with Rima and Tom and the Boy, I felt as though time had closed into a circle, and that I had been there always. That I had always slept in a tent in a field and spent evenings in a round yurt by the fire with new-old friends talking of things ancient and close to the heart. That I had always felt the snug arms of the hedgerows, and the old voices of the stones, and the big winds of the moor where ravens flip and croak their velvet words. 

When I was a little girl, I dreamed that I would one day live in a stone cottage in England. I have since developed too much of a love for the land I was born to, its mountain lions and coast live oaks, its coyotes and buckeyes and bay nuts and wild irises, to uproot myself in such a way, but I believe that I have discovered the root of this dream. That I found it when I first beheld Rima's artwork. That I found it when I stood at Grimspound, and put my hands to the old granite, and wondered what stories the First People told here. If the leat or the amber River Dart still remember them.

That here is a community carrying the stories of the land as best they can, and with much beauty and care and heart (think of the incredible folkloric work of Terri Windling, of the mythic art of Alan Lee, of Brian and Wendy Froud, the magnificent story-telling and myth-carrying of Martin Shaw,  not to mention of course the truly transformative and deep-rooted painting of Rima Staines and the powerful storytelling and poetry of Tom Hirons, to name just a very few!). That here is a seed of inspiration to bring home again. 

  

And of course, it is our Tatterdemalion which did the threading, which brought me to England, to Dartmoor, to the stones. This book born out of many years'-worth of Rima's paintings, each one a conversation between her heart and the world around her in all of its storied and sad-strung glory, and what happened when I walked through their doorways into my own place here in California, and saw it all anew. (And dear friends, if you would like to be part of our novel's birth, to have your name in its back pages and a hand in its blossoming, you can do so here. We are now over three-quarters of the way there; come race with us across the final hillsides!)

To finish these musings properly, and not on a parenthesesed note, I will  leave you with the words of Alan Garner, from his essay, "The Voice in the Shadow."

By reciting a myth, the storyteller remembers a creation and, by remembering, is part of that creating. It is best understood in that dreadful solecism 'walkabout.' In walking, the Australians speak the land. Their feet make it new, now, and in its beginning, by step and breath that meet in its dance, so that land and people sing as one. It is a symbiosis of multiple times. 

Seeding the New Moon Heart (And Introducing Two New Story Projects!)

A small revolution has been recently taking place in my heart. A humble upheaval of an old order. Perhaps it is better to say that the revolution has taken place in my mind; my heart (all of our hearts) always knows, always has known, and has been doing its work despite certain aspects of my mind for many years. The revelation is really quite simple, but its effects on me have been rather profound.

Over the past few months it came to light in me that for a very long time--since I was a little girl, in fact--I've been using urgency and high stress to motivate myself to get things done. This is hardly news to any of us I'm sure, because this is the story of our culture. This IS the story of Western Capitalism, no doubt about it. A story of urgency, fight or flight panic, even competition over who is the most stressed out, the most burnt out, who gets the least sleep and never takes a weekend, etc. For some people, this model may work well enough; for others, like myself, it's actually quietly devastating. I'm a very stress-sensitive person; I've struggled with anxiety and panic since I was small. For a long time I've seen them as the other side of the coin of devoted creativity; two sides of one whole. As richly as I can spin a story onto paper, I can also spin off into obsessive panic about any number of worst case scenarios.

But recently, I've come to see that by following the story of the over-culture, I am helping to create conditions in which this kind of mindset can thrive. By using urgent stress to motivate, I create a landscape in which anxiousness and fear thrive. (Sound familiar? Sound like the world we see on the news?) It is not an inevitable state, nor is it even native to me. I don't have to claim stress as a birthright. I can see it as a product of the power of storytelling. It's funny, because I make my living, and feed my own spirit, by writing stories that grow taproots through the cement, that offer wild windows, old valleys and firesides full of hope, that attempt to give voice to the more-than-human world, to offer another set of narratives in which to view this place, this life, the problems at hand.

My heart is well versed in this way, devoted to it, and fiercely loving. When I am writing a story, I am deep in the heart of the pulse of things. Everything else falls away, and there is only this, the flow of words which is a flow of blood and wildwater and light through me. And yet crowding in around the work, when I step away from notebook and writing desk, are the tensions and conflicts of the overculture. I run my own business and make my own days and yet I find that the stories I am trying to subvert in my writing are still there in the narrative I tell myself as I work—a narrative of urgency, of stress, of strain. I've bought into the scarcity mentality our economic system feeds us, despite my every effort! This is rather funny, all of it, when I step back and look at it. Quite hilarious, and humbling too.

I know I am sharing more personal details than I normally do here, but I am doing so because I have a feeling that a lot of you out there know exactly what I mean; because I hope that sharing something of this struggle and the ways in which I am moving through it may be helpful, or galvanizing, to others, in addition to the hope that some of you may have wisdom or stories in this regard to share in the comments with all of us!

So, back to my revelation. It came while I was on my moon cycle last week. I think this is an important detail to share here in part because I will admit that it makes me slightly uncomfortable to do so, despite the passion I have around the deep feminine power of menstruation, the rage I feel at all the subtle and not so subtle stories we're told from a young age that make us feel shame and shyness and embarrassment around this most sacred of cycles. My slight discomfort is another example of an over-culture story that has deep roots in me, in so many of us.

Anyway, the revelation was really a synthesis of thoughts that had been stirring in me for a while, and amounts to this—let the heart, not the mind, be in charge. The heart is its own mind; let the brain-mind bow down before the way of the heart. Let beauty motivate you. Let the absolute astounding beauty of this life motivate everything you do. 

None of this, I daresay, sounds like news. In fact when I look at it, it sounds very obvious, like I've heard it five million times. But sometimes something shifts subtly in the way of the telling, and everything becomes clearer. In part this shift in perspective came from an interview I'd listened to earlier in the week, on Unlearn and Rewild, with Charles Eisenstein. In it, he discussed the "sickness" our culture has around time and efficiency. That it's an obsession with being efficient that makes us get things done (aka urgent stress). He suggested this alternative, to ask yourself--how can I create something in the most beautiful possible way? And this just astounded me. When the hostess, Ayana Young, asked him--well what about those environmental concerns which are really quite urgent, shouldn't we be efficient there?—his reply was: and how well has that been working for you so far?

And I just had to laugh, and laugh! Not well at all, of course! Not well at all on the cultural, global scale, nor on the individual level either! The mind balks at the idea of doing things with beauty alone as a motivation, fearing that nothing will get done. The mind balks at the idea of letting the heart really and truly lead the way. But perhaps what's really balking is an old story, hearing its death-knell. For there is a great, deep relief in the body at this idea too—what if I let beauty and heart lead me, truly? What if I trusted this wholly, every step of the way, not just with pen in hand? What if we all did? What would this world look like? Oh my.

The radio program Unlearn and Rewild describes the revelation occurring inside my mind rather well. Commitment to really unlearning the stories we are fed, not just the stories I see outside myself, but also the stories hiding within me despite my best efforts. Commitment to rewilding the body and the mind by letting the heart lead. Herbal healer and writer Stephen Harrod Buhner has written extensively on the neural networks that exist within the heart, and between the heart and brain; I think we all instinctively know that the heart "thinks," the heart knows things, before even the mind. It is the heart the speaks with the plants, animals and stones. Indigenous and pre-modern peoples the world over located the self not in the head but in the heart. If you think about it, the heart is a far, far more ancient organ than the human brain. The human brain, beautiful thing, is a troubled brain. The heart is the wilder of the two in the sense that it isn't very different from the heart of a rabbit or a doe or a fox. So by letting it have full rein—well, who knows what might come?

I would add that it's all well and good to come up with this kind of decision, to say oh yes of course, my heart is in charge, Let the Beauty You Love Be What You Do, etc. I've come to this decision many times before. What has changed this time is the realization that in order to change a story you have to tell yourself the new one all the time. Just as obsessively as you told yourself the old one. You have to practice telling it. You have to bow down to the heart, take the leap, putting your hand over your chest every time you forget, starting again each moment.

All of this leads me, in a very wordy fashion, to two new projects which I'm very excited to share with all of you. Both of them are as much medicine for me as I hope they will be for you—for in the end isn't this how the cycles of nature work? The berries are as much fed by being picked as they are food for the eater? And the creation of them as necessary to the plant as their consumption?

The first is called Morningstory. Here is its description from Wild Talewort.

For twenty-eight days, the number of days in a moon cycle, receive an illustrated story-vignette (500 words) in your email box, a cup of story to wake you into the wildness of your own body, to help re-story your morning, your afternoon, your night, your month, with the voices of the wildly human and more-than-human worlds.

In the face of the social, ecological and spiritual starvations and destructions of our time, we cannot hope for true transformation without also transforming the stories we tell ourselves and each other about our own hearts and our relationship with the more-than-human world—our belonging (t)here, and also our necessary humility in the face of so much robust, miraculous, diverse life and all the ways that it cradles us, from birth to death. We become the stories we tell, for good or for ill. May Morningstory be a cup of embers to fill your morning with, to warm you through the day, to help your soles stay wild, stay on the path of dust and elk-hoof and beauty, despite all attempts to sway you.

Every day, the culture we live in will try to steal you from yourself, says the inimitable Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Every night, she says, you must steal yourself back. Every morning, come sunrise, full of a skein of star-thick dreams, you are your own once more. The night has made you wild. Your heart has moved the rivers of your blood through every bit of you as you dreamed quietly under a changing moon. The earth has turned on her axis in the great black ember-bed of the galaxy and the sun has climbed up over her rim to feed every last thing the warmth and light it needs.

May Morningstory help to keep you stolen back every morning, back inside the great, feral cup of your own heart.

I've written a full sample Morningstory vignette, and it's available for you to read over in my shop! The first cycle will begin on the new moon of July, the 16th.

The second is a long awaited and deeply treasured collaboration, called Kith & Kin Medicine, with the wondrous medicine maker, writer and dreamer, Asia Suler, of One Willow Apothecaries. Back around the solstice, a dream fell into my mind—Asia's medicine is always so full of story, so full of her own potent dreaming (truly, this woman is amazing), so full of threads and lands that resonate deeply in me. A vision came to me of a project in which Asia, in her wildwood witch way, would brew up a special medicine whose ingredients she kept secret from me. I would then take the medicine and write a story based on the visions, paths and beings that arose in my imagination through it.

We decided to call it Kith & Kin in honor of our own storied connection, in honor of the kinship between stories and plant medicine (stories, after all, are one of the oldest medicines we have), in honor of the lands and all their inhabitants which we both love and are devoted to, me in northern California, Asia in the mountains of North Carolina. Originally, the term Kith referred to the living land, the countryside upon which one lived, and so the phrase "kith and kin" meant family, friends, and all the wider relations in the more-than-human world. Asia puts it beautifully: "Named Kith & Kin Medicine for the wild lands that gave it life and the kinship (between medicine and makers and dreamers alike) that it arose from." This is a deeply co-created project that blurs the lines between story, stone, root, petal and word.

Today the collaboration officially began, under the dark moon of June. I sat down at my desk, cleared my heart and mind, took several drops upon my tongue, and let the sensations and images begin to flow in. For several days, I will make no attempts to grab at stories; I will simply sit with the medicine, and see what tidbits, seeds and feathers come in. I will get to know it. More than that I will not yet share, for it is a secret place, the early stirrings in the creative heart. As the project evolves and matures, we will be sharing little peaks into the journey, here, for you to follow and see. In the spirit of intuition and wild-heartedness, we have no set release date yet, though rest assured it will be within the summer season.

The end result will be a story in the mail and this vial of Asia's extraordinary, earth-moving medicine, for you to follow into your own heart of hearts.