Tracks & Texts: What Are You Reading?

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Comment by Judith-Kate Friedman on November 13, 2009 at 3:22pm

:-)

Comment by Aimee Ringle on November 13, 2009 at 8:48am

Currently I'm tending to a stew of books on my bedside shelf. I pull a different one out depending on how I want to fall asleep. And since living out in the woods this summer I haven't stopped reading by taper candlelight - blowing out the light when my eyes can't hold anymore.
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
The Golden Spruce - John Vaillant
Creative Storytelling - Jack Maguire
Dreamtime Heritage: Austrailian Aboriginal Myths (the illustrations are the best part) - Ainslie and Melva Jean Roberts
The Song of Hiawatha - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Comment by Tembo Chinook on October 27, 2009 at 11:34pm

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver . . . written from the point of view of a mother and her 4 daughters caught in the web of missionary fervor during an assignment to the Congo c.1960 and how the jungle and the local culture break down the false front which denies that the life of the body IS a spiritual path.

"Muntu is the Congolese word for man. Or people. But it means more than that. Here in the Congo I am pleased to announce there is no special difference between living people, dead people, children not yet born, and gods-these are all muntu. So says Nelson. All other things are kintu: animals, stones. bottles. A place or time is hantu, and a quality of being is kuntu: beautiful, hedeous, or lame, for example. . . . . . the principles of ntu are asleep, until they are touched by nommo. Nommo is the force that makes thinks live as what they are: man or tree or animal. Nommo means word. The rabbit has the life it has - not a rat life, or a mongooses life - because it is named rabbit, mvundla.

Comment by Michele Podesto on August 27, 2009 at 6:47am

"STORY HAS A WILL TO SURVIVE that seems almost independent of the storyteller, as though it has a life of it's own. Oral story is a singing bird: when we let it out of the cage of the mind, it loves freedom! The song of the self will light on our shoulder as long as we don't try to capture it. Then it will flutter away and fly places we cannot imagine. It will nest and mate and raise other versions of itself that take on the color and hue and dialect of new territory. And some spring morning when we most need to hear it, our story will return outside our window and sing us back into ourself.

quote from:
Storycatcher Making Sense of Our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story
by Christina Baldwin

Comment by Michele Podesto on August 15, 2009 at 8:02pm

Reading Storycatcher -Making sense of our lives through the power and practice of story.

Comment by Judith-Kate Friedman on July 2, 2009 at 2:30pm

Hi Everyone. Thanks Birch for your recommendation.
Above, in the discussion starts, I've posted Paul Hawken's recent speech:

It's a charge - not only to the graduating class he addressed but to all of us:
To be in our bodies, in the Living World....
Breathing in paradox: Grief, realism, action, '
Hawken says: "if you're not optimistic you don't have a pulse...."
Like Danny (Deardorff) says: "If it's not impossible, it's not worth doing!"

Thanks to Jonathan Toste for forwarding this speech, to Paul Hawken for being out there. And all of you who read - and care to add discussion or comment!

Love,
Judith-Kate

Comment by BIrch Gerke on July 2, 2009 at 1:52pm

I would like to recommend Hyemeyohsts Storm's ' Lightning Bolt'
Those of you that read Seven Arrows will be familiar with him and perhaps his other teaching story, Song of Heyoka.
Lightningbolt is the story of his learning and a more involved presentation of the Medicine Wheels and honoring of Life, the Creatress/Creator and being Self Honest.

Comment by Geoff Berry on June 10, 2009 at 6:45pm

Hi Tembo,
If you are still looking for the goods on divination, try Patrick Curry.co.uk
He is an academic with soul exploring divination in relation to astrology and the earth, including well researched work about the Greek historical contexts. I came across him through a mutual contact with Sean Kane.
Also just saw a new release through Spring Journal on Jung and the Sioux Traditions by Vine Deloria Jr. Think i'll give that one a look, as i'm always trying to sharpen the edge at which my worlds meet. What is shamanism today and how would it work in urban psyches/cultures? This is one of my big questions...
All the best, Geoff.

Comment by Judith-Kate Friedman on May 10, 2009 at 6:55am

This morning I'm in California perched high with a view of dawn over Oakland. Grateful for long sleep, integration, between the journey of my past week and the one beginning today. Full of reflections from seven days of training songwriter-facilitators who will compose songs with groups of elders including those with dementia. Now preparing to co-teach at a conference (Midrashandmedicine.com) with Rabbi Sheldon Marder on songwriting based upon the Psalms with elders using text study and reflection to invite, express, and enter new collective journeys and creative territory.

One theme I'm tracking - that is threading through - is awareness of living on the cognitive continuum.

Another is the power of words, sounds and no sounds, the thread given us by the oral tradition.

I'm thinking about the connection between Tracks and Texts. Texts which are not only 'what am I reading' through my eyes or senses - but also 'what's in my ears?' - at what springs of oral tradition and that kind of listening have I been sipping, and which have been burbling nearby calling and whispering and singing to me?

It seems this may be the right place on the consortium to occassionally post these musings.

Reading and Living in this tradition, following threads through our own sharing of stories (and smells too, if we're aware of the tracks part).

Here are some words from poet David Mason from his poem "The Inland Sea" describing his view of people with dementia:

"Their dignity another universe
might honor more than we do, seeing souls
where we see bodies failing into death....
Their beauty terrifies us, so we think
it like no beauty we have ever known

and leave them for the ordinary shore.

--Thanks to Shelly Marder for introducing me to this poem and this poet's way of seeing.

Looking forward to our continuing conversations.....

Judith-Kate

Comment by Windsong on April 17, 2009 at 3:02pm

"She had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy with leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap."
-Mary Webb, Gone to Earth (1917)

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