Weaving Stories, Making Trouble: Why folklore at the end of the world?
Inside: An excerpt from my upcoming course Grief Magic, which is enrolling for 3 more days!
"I think that oral storytelling is a really, really good way of saving the things that you love—it’s the most durable form of knowledge, there are 37,000 year old Aboriginal stories that are our oldest scientific data about climatological events. Stories are a way of saving what you love. So we can also really, really simplify it, we can take off this temporal frame, and say that, in a moment when things are shifting socially, culturally, climatologically, you can plant what you love in a good myth, in a good story. And you can learn to tell it really well so that you can give it to someone else someday, and maybe it will last."
- Sophie Strand, Empires & Myths, Rot & Extinction, and Queer Ecology
"A story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And 'making sense' must be here understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one's felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are.”
― David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
“Have you heard? We live in a world of shapeshifters. The forces of nature, the old gods themselves are shapeshifters… When we understand how prevalent shapeshifting is, that the felt experience of our ancestors teems with shapeshifting gods and shapeshifting spirits, and shapeshifting people, and people as plants, people as tigers, people as water and water as people, we get a very different vision of this world. Things that once seemed fixed maybe aren’t as fixed as we make them out to be. The supposedly immutable boundaries between self and world start to dissolve a bit, and we come to feel that perhaps a self is not an isolated body in a static backdrop of a world… but rather a very permeable, porous thing whose natural state is the dance of change. The world is a shapeshifter.”
- Joshua Shrei, Neck Hairs of the Shapeshifter
"Every story I create, creates me."
- Octavia Butler
In many ways, stories are technologies that humans have used to weave a capacity for awe, imagination, and recognition of the sentient and intelligent world around us, into everyday life. What does it mean to dialogue with the living (and dying) world around us through this lens?
Like many herbal folk practices show us, stories are shared orally, but they are also actively embodied - through ritual, through song and dance, through taste and smell, through the way we move through the world, through the ways we adorn ourselves.
And yet, so much of myth and folklore is not just about telling stories, but developing a capacity to recognize and join the many stories happening around us that we live inside already- the ways we as humans are not, perhaps even at all, the only narrators, or even necessarily the protagonists, but rather side characters in an epic made up of millions (if not more) of other species (Strand).
Through seeing these stories, we see how we are woven together with the world around us. Through this, our lives are given context. The word ‘context’ can be broken down to con- from the Latin prefix for ‘together’, and ‘text’, from texere, meaning woven. To be given or to make context, is to weave and be woven together.
Weaving stories can also be a way, as Sophie Strand (and much indigenous wisdom) shares, of "saving what we love."
We can think of this in terms of how stories help us remember our dead, but we can also think of how, in an era of ecological collapse, recognizing the ways we are woven together is truly a matter of life and death. But recognizing how woven together we are when we live in a society that disenchants us from ourselves and the world at the same time, can often lead us to sorrow, despair, and spirals of activation. But to anaesthetize ourselves from the pain of the world is to reject our own place in the tapestry of the world.
So a good story doesn't just weave us together, it enchants us to the ways we are woven together even as we are falling apart, helps us co-regulate, and makes us feel not only capable of call and response with the world - but the impossibility of anything but that.
A good story should remind us that grief and joy are not a binary, or even opposite ends of a spectrum, but rather, a landscape, or perhaps, a fault line.
Bayo Akomolafe reminds us: "Do not pray exclusively to the ancestors of the land, make room also for the spirits of the fault line, the new gods that scream through the cracks with the first musical notes of worlds to come.”
These fault lines, sites of movement, demonstrate a possibility for coming alive as we come apart, weaving something else as we unravel without necessarily being in control of what that something else is, without the promise of arrival or ever being finished.
Ancient cosmologies often reveal a world that is always both coming apart and coming together, never a finished product. To be finished would mean an end of the world, an end to cycles of birth and life and death and becoming something else.
Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery share in Joyful Militancy, "Joy is the capacity to do and feel more. As such, it is connected to creativity and the embrace of uncertainty...Joy is a process of coming alive and coming apart... It is aesthetic, in its older meaning, before thinking and feeling were separate: the increase in our capacity to perceive with our senses."
Like joy, I'm thinking of enchantment not as a way to escape grief, but as something grief can bring us into. Something that grows our capacities to sense ourselves, one another, and the world around us; to hold complexity, to make meaning, and to respond creatively to activation and heartbreak. Enchantment reminds us of our power to be with and to transform. To tell powerful stories about ourselves and what's possible.
Queer Nature describes awe as nervous system nourishment, as well as "a non-binary emotion that can be felt when we are ecstatic or when we are terrified," making "us feel small but at the same time fills us with the very ‘big’ emotions of wonder and amazement... Pinar refers to the practice of letting oneself be enchanted by the more-than-human in these times as ‘guerilla mysticism’" (Queer Nature).
When we sense ourselves and the more-than-human world as full of magic, we nourish our nervous systems while troubling the systems that depend on our alienation from our senses and one another, and from the webs of life that sustain us.
I'm using trouble the way Donna Harraway uses it: "Trouble ...derives from a thirteenth-century French verb meaning “to stir up,” “to make cloudy,” “to disturb.” We—all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response...to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places" (Staying with the Trouble).
Rather than bypassing grief, leaning into enchantment increases our capacity for traversing the full landscape of our experience, and responding to the loss of our times.
I look forward to weaving stories and making trouble with you.
Grief Magic Cohort Registration ends 4/15
If you are looking for a learning community to feel, dream, create, think, attune to ourselves and our ecosystems, wonder at the magic of being alive in these times, grieve and ride the winds of change as they come this year, registration is open for a few more days for Grief Magic 2025-2026.
A cohort of magicians, dreamers, creators, and grievers awaits.
Grief Magic: Time-bending, Shapeshifting, and Becoming Multitudes
Meet our Guest Instructors/Magicians✨ Each of these beings has contributed so much to my own understandings and practices of grief magic, and I’m so deeply grateful that they will be holding this container with us.
A Grief Welcoming Wheel-of-the-Year Course
This class emerges from a desire to sense ourselves in these times differently, to sense time and place themselves differently—to find ways of living that are more attuned to our bodies, our ecosystems, and our communities—while simultaneously allowing us to access something beyond urgency that actually enables us to continue showing up.
Think of it as a grief welcoming - wheel of the year - course.
Or a wheel of the year course that seeks to disrupt the ways that colonialism has tried to repress/deny grief as it attempts to flatten our sense of ourselves and the world.
Grief Magic seeks to remember grief as a part of our every day lives—rather than something that is somehow separate from lives steeped in loss.
In addition to exploring the above themes, we will also be exploring the following:
Ancestral Stories, Myths, and Timekeeping: Myths, Magic, and Folklore connected to the seasons and grief*
Tarot’s Major Arcana as guides for grief and creative process
Imagination Spells: Envisioning and Practicing Living Futures
Art, imagination, and grief as collaborators and ecological processes
Grief as Time Travel: Exploring constructions and experiences of space and time
Grief, Shapeshifting, De/Constructions of the self: becoming multitudes
The Politics of Enchantment: Mundane Magic, Care, and Enchantment in the Everyday
*While I’ll be drawing largely on European myth, folklore, and magic, students are encouraged to explore their own ancestral stories and practices.
Not interested in a cohort but want access to the course materials and guest workshops?
There is also a self paced study version of this course for those not interested in the cohort model! Learn more here.
40% off scholarship spots available
There are STILL three unclaimed 40% off scholarships for low income and BIPOC students are available for the Grief Magic Cohort. DM me or email me at info@motherwortandrose.com to claim yours. 💖