Step off the pavement and let the forest have a look at you.
Walk far enough to start to doubt the way back.
Hush--
and listen.
The old bones have stories you must learn.
It is a good time, I think, to think about the bigger picture - longer timelines, forces above and beyond the daily grind. And what better way to access the bigger picture than to look at our own current, micro circumstances. The personal giving us a lens to the timeless and archetypal, which in turn guides us through our day-to-day.
Themes of fear, grief, chaos, confusion, illness, and death are at once timeless and timely for us all. Coming face to face with any one of these can be lonely and painful.
How can we bear it without running away into quick-fixes of distraction and avoidance? How might we unify in the universality of these forces?
Likewise, how can we dip a spoon into the juicy honeypot of seasonal renewal, divine love, or trickster play? How can we access cosmic doses of joy and peace to support our own healing and well-being?
What can we learn from sex, death, and folklore that could help us navigate modern life?
These are exactly the kind of big, daunting, and uncomfortable topics that pushed me to create the Bone + Branch project. To pick up the tools left for us by our ancestors, to think critically about modern life ways, to look askance at what seems inevitable.
Sign up now so you don’t miss the first issue.
We have been here before, looking out through their eyes, cautiously stepping in their feet, pumping faithfully through their veins, warming our skin under the same older-than-ancient sun.
Photo by Annie Spratt.
I believe the old ones left us well-equipped for our times.
Our inherited toolbox contains things like:
Stories for understanding how we should live in community
Myths for delving our own psychological depths
Emotions for processing the outer world
A microbiome to support our bodily system
Instincts for navigating danger
Biophilia to keep us in love with the plant people
Anthropomorphism to remind us to protect non-human people
Pattern recognition to keep us humble yet secure of our role in the universe
And so many more gifts large and small.
I started Bone + Branch because I realized that our modern world, micro and macro, individually and system-wide, is dangerously out of balance because we are disconnected. What we call Western Civilization began with a slow but steadily accelerating undermining of our birthright: intimate relationship with our places and each other.
Over time it became a full assault on both our sophisticated, detailed understanding of our role in the world - usually nurtured and disseminated by women - and on the finely balanced systems of the earth itself. The project of “civilization” - capitalism, patriarchy, industrialization, dematerialization - has been a reckless rager that has left us in grave danger of approaching the point of no return.
We’re like the cosmic adolescents who ignored the warnings of the grown-ups. Every culture has a Daedalus who thought he knew better and paid the price.
The grown-ups are our ancestors, and they can’t step in and send us all home to cool down and come to our senses. We have to remember what they taught us. The stakes are cultural death, and only we can bring us back to balance by acting as we ought - knowing exactly what our elders expect of us, what we ourselves know is right if we slow down and listen to our own body of knowledge, our own sense of right and wrong.
So what I want to do with Bone + Branch is place current events and issues of modern life in the context of ancient cultural knowledge, place-based wisdom, what we could academically call indigenous ways of knowing.
For now, that will look like these rambling letters, drawing in lots of different references from European history and culture, and later will bring in lots more original media. And I hope you’ll tell me your stories and ask questions so we can explore these ideas together.
Please Comment or Reply to let me know what you’re thinking, what questions are on your mind, what existential stuff are you struggling with. And/or tell me a story about your people, please.
If you know someone who might be into this project, please forward this to them and invite them to subscribe.
Be good, be bad, be yourself,
x
Allie
Was this forwarded to you by a friend? Subscribe to gather round the fire and make sure you see each letter.
In the meantime, you can share this with likeminded seekers.