ALEX NOBLE - WRITING JOURNAL-2015

How Coyote Got His Wisdom

 

Our Vision: Rediscovering Humanity's Niche

It is time to create new stories, and rediscover our place in the global web of life!

Come visit A New Story Foundation:  www.anewstory.org

 

Envision the earth's life-sustaining processes as a beautiful and diverse web of interrelationships--a kaleidoscope of patterns, rhythms, and connections whose very complexity and multitude of possibilities remind us that cooperation, sharing, honesty, humility, and love should be the guidelines for our behavior toward one another and the earth. -- Ecosustainability student   Our Vision - Rediscovering Humanity's Niche: Following the lead of author Daniel Quinn, we believe that modern society has lost its way.  Humans have abandoned the tried and true survival mechanisms established over thousands of millennia, forgetting that they were once a fully-integrated member of the global ecosystem.  We believe that the tired old story modern society tells itself has seen its last days, and that the global self-deception is about to be exposed for what it is.  We believe it is time for new stories, stories that tell of the rediscovery of humanity's place in the global web of life.  We envision a time when these new stories depicting humans within nature, and not separate from it, will be the human story.

Why the Arthurian Legend of the Fisher King is Important Now...

 

 

 

From Yahoo Answers:

Before I answer the question directly, I have to comment that some of the same basic spiritual issues that we face today have been faced by seekers many thousands of years ago. So, in a way, our sense that we are at the crest of modernism and breaking new ground for the continuing enlightenment is only partially true. In many ways we may also be so advanced in some areas (such as our scientific and technical understanding of the world around us), that we have become morons on the spiritual plane. A good example of this is that western thinking barely acknowledges the reality of reincarnation. And all of those spiritual influences from the past (and perhaps the future) are at the core of who we are. This mindset (not shared by billons of non-Christian people around the world) thus shuts a major portal to self-knowledge.

So there were cultures and subcultures and people throughout history who really understood some fundamentals much better than we do even in our post-modern existence (and granted they may also have been clueless in other areas). And I have my own personal spin on the Percival legend that I haven't heard from other sources.

The Handless Maiden: A Story for Difficult Times

 

In Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a Jungian analyst and storyteller, retells a story about a handless maiden. It's a story that seems to me a kind of ideal story for a month in which I'm writing about ways in which a person can sometimes get stuck--hit obstacles--get bewildered. The story is one that I've found beneficial at crucial junctures in my own life, and it’s a story I have at times told in turn to patients or students when it seems that the labor that began so well—the first giddy success of creativity and vitality—has come to a grinding halt.

The story begins when a maiden loses her hands. She really does lose them—her entire hands. They’re cut off. It’s a moment of initiation. A loss of innocence. Her first serious loss. She has these stumps where she used to have hands, and she wanders, grieving, for many years.