(W)rites of Passage

We need rites of passage. We cross thresholds throughout our lives—loss and emergence, uncertainty and longing, grief and creativity. Sometimes we know exactly what is changing. Other times we only know that something is no longer as it was.

A creative (W)rite of Passage begins with a simple act. We say yes. We cross the threshold and enter the path of Story. We only have thirteen weeks. We won't have time to write EVERYTHING. But we can ritualize the container and trust that what we generate is also, somehow, re-generating us.

Over thirteen weeks, we enter fairy tales and myths. We write what we are longing to write, and we write what the old stories evoke in us. We braid psyche and memory, mythos and marrow. We hear stories told aloud and allow ourselves to live with them rather than rushing to explain what they mean. We write from inside them. We follow images, memories, questions, sensations, places, characters, and unexpected threads.

We generate a lot of writing.

Along the way, we may grapple with the creative process, with our own material, or with a particular story that is churning. Every (w)rite has its ordeal: the place where we have to stay with the work, wrestle with what we find, or enter more deeply before something can take new form. A story may resist us. An old interpretation may no longer hold. We may encounter a story we inherited, a story we have lived inside, or one we are tired of telling. We may find ourselves writing toward something we cannot yet see clearly.

We work the material. The material works us. We turn it over. Churn it. Question it. Write into it and around it. Take it apart. Sort seeds. Preserve what still has life. Face the dark. Compost what does not. Sometimes an old story finds an entirely new form in our hands. Sometimes words distill into seeds. This is not about fixing ourselves or manufacturing a better story. It is about getting real, truthful, and unmasked, and staying with the creative process long enough for something we could not have planned to emerge.

Story meets body, memory, imagination, place, movement, sensation, and lived experience. We discover bridges and metaphors. A memory can change subtly—or dramatically—when placed inside a fairy tale. The imaginal and embodied begin working together, shaping new words and possibilities.

StoryBody® is the practice of bringing these ways of knowing into relationship through writing.

Some of what we write will remain raw and private. Some will be process writing. Some will surprise us by wanting another form: poetry, memoir, vignette, prose, or something we haven't named yet.

As we move through the process, we shape. Cut. Listen. Revise. Play with our words. A fragment may become a poem. A memory may become a vignette. Process writing may become prose or memoir.

We begin to discover the difference between writing something out and making something from it.

We craft. We curate. We preserve.

Slowly, we gather what we have found into a creative elixir: words, images, poems, stories, fragments, questions, discoveries—what has been retrieved, made, reimagined, or brought into form through the journey.

This may become your written apothecary of Becoming. Becoming has many seasons. You may discover that you are in a fallow phase, or a season of decomposition, ripening, gathering, shedding, or simply not knowing. The writing does not need to tell a story of transformation or arrive neatly on the other side. Part of the creative process will be discovering what you have made—and what you want to call it.

Perhaps it is an Apothecary of Becoming.
A Fallow Book.
A Hag's Womanifesto.
A De-composition Journal.
A Story Cemetery.
A Book of Ripenings.
A Seed Archive.
A Book of Remains.
A Field Guide to the Unknown.

Or something we haven't named yet.

You may name what you have made. And sometimes, what you have made names something in you.

The point is you do not have to arrive blooming. But you can! The deeper journey is to discover where you actually are, what season you are in, gather what the journey has given you, and give it creative form. Naming is part of that process.

As we approach the return of the light at the Winter Solstice, we too prepare to return. Our final gathering is a celebration and creative rite of passage. We bring something from the journey back to the circle. We share. We witness. We are witnessed. We give creative form to the crossing and honor what has been made.

We return with something tangible in our hands. And we return with something stirring in our bellies. Huzzah!

We follow one of the oldest movements of Story: we answer the call, enter what we do not yet know, grapple with what we find there, and return carrying something that did not exist before.

We may leave something
or some story
behind.

We honor it.

And we carry new stories forward.