The Red Thread

I grew up in an isolated snuggle of land in Upper Michigan near Lake Superior. My coming-of-age was swallowed by the Big Bad Wolf of Little Red Riding Hood's forest - alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, an abortion at 16. I buried those stories deep. I was ashamed of where I had come from and what my adolescent years held.

Miraculously, I got out - only to find myself inside an even bigger story.

At 19, I went to Moscow, Russia to study abroad during the collapse of the Soviet Union. The entire society was dissolving politically - chaos everywhere. I was swallowed again, back in the belly of the wolf with Baba Yaga churning me into bones or butter. I lost my bearings, my voice. I was a girl becoming a woman, and everything - my identity, the society around me, my sense of ground - was dissolving.

I returned home only to experience anxiety and panic attacks. I didn't know how to digest the story. Eventually, I buried it too.

For years, I carried these buried stories - unprocessed, unspoken, unwitnessed rites of passage with no container.

The Transformation

In my early 30s, I entered graduate school at Goddard College for a self designed Master's in Transformative Language Arts. The poet Muriel Rukeyser said, "The universe is made up of stories, not atoms." I set out to experience the transformative power of story - all kinds of stories -my stories, ancestral stories, dead stories, conditioned stories, mythos, fairytale, stories of place, stories of culture and more.

This became a self-designed rites of passage journey that would span over a decade.

I moved back to Upper Michigan deliberately - first -to my adolescent home and then 45 minutes from my childhood home, living in a cabin on the edge of Lake Superior during 30-below winter. Distance and proximity.

Write. Haul wood. Chop water. Dance. Gather firewood. Write. Dance. Listen to owls. Make a collage. Haul water.

I dove deeply into my buried stories through embodied creative writes of passage - my father's unexpected death in prison when I was ten, the coming-of-age years, the Russia dissolution, the spiritual awakening I'd let grow dusty. I navigated the intersection between mythos and personal life story, rooted in embodiment and Five Rhythms dance.

I learned to track story through sensation, image, and movement. I wrote from my body, not just my thoughts.

This wasn't about getting out of my past old stories. It was more about changing my relationship with ALL of my stories - the ones I'd been hiding, denying, bypassing. Moving from hating certain stories and favoring others, to seeing myself anew. Claiming myself. Loving myself. Becoming more wild, more whole, more free.

Through nature, through solitude, through encounters with strangers, through the writing itself - the terrain of story became alive. I began to see the interconnected threads everywhere, the magical and strange salty ways mythos gleans in the least expected cracks.

I realized the power of story-making. Re-StoryingThe importance of entering into right relationship with Story. The power of Mythos and Story.

Eventually, I came out of the belly - changed, witnessed by creative circles. My stories intact. Me, more whole.

When the story is done with you, it spits you out. The hunter inside the self - the one who is finally ready to see you clearly - has the tools to free you. You claw your way out. You are reborn.

Red. Fire. Creativity. Life force. Passion. Courage. Boldness.

I became Red, rewilded.

Now I am careful about which stories I give power to, which stories I feed, and which stories I write eulogies to.

I am continually in awe of how stories move women through their personal life passages. I've witnessed countless transformations and emergences - through the courage to change their relationship with story, to rewrite and reStory themselves through embodied, creative writes of passage.

And I've been guiding women through their own passages ever since.