Old Mermaids School of Telling Tales & Finding Art: Second Night

We ate storytelling soup—I can't be sure, but I believe the original recipe for this soup came from Sister Ruby Rosarita Mermaid—and we talked about the Old Mermaids and where they came from. I said they came to me last winter, but I feel as though they've been around forever. I liked the way they solved problems, I told them. I liked the way they lived in beauty.

We lit the storytelling candle. This time is was a wax turkey made by our local beekeeper friend, Paul. Then we went on a journey to Water. Afterward, we each told a tale of water: about the sacred spring in Latvia that healed a leg swollen from a bug bite, about the flood of 1996, about rolling around on a wet sandy beach, about seeing stars in the water and feeling as though they could be scooped right out of the water, about floods and rapids and living foam. Later, the stories came. Each person had a different style. Some stories were long, some were funny, some moving. One story was the weft, the next one the warp. We were weaving, weaving, weaving our lives together. We were learning to tell stories, and we were learning to listen.

That is the Old Mermaid way.

Blessed sea!

Read the whole tale here...

Old Mermaid School of Telling Tales & Finding Art: First Night

The universe is made of stories, not atoms. —Muriel Rukeyser

We welcomed each other around the storytelling candle. A spider joined us, and she was welcome, too. We ate and then lit the candle, remembered Fire, and told stories of it. We wove our stories into the fabric of the night, creating community as we went, weaving the world into existence, perhaps, or into clarity, like a huge quilt made of thread and pieces of our lives.

Evine talked about being on her family’s homestead in Minnesota when she was very young. The house was only partially finished, her father was away, and her mother was left to tend to three children when a pack of timber wolves surrounded them. Her mother built a huge fire, sent two of her children up onto the roof of the house, and put Evine into the old potbellied stove in the yard. Evine watched the fire and the thin hungry wolves from her sanctuary in the belly of the stove. She remembered the red eyes of the wolves and the fear in her mother’s body as she kept building up the fire. When her father drove up in the truck, the wolves scattered. Ahhh. Relief that they were all saved. Wonder at what happened to the wolves. We listened for the crackle of the fire and looked at each other to find the red in our own eyes. Eight of us, each hitching a ride on Grandmother Spider's legs.

The Old Mermaids would have loved it.

Blessed sea!

Read the whole tale here...