Lenore manages to find frozen rawhide even in the snow and ice covered yard.

March 4, 2008 – Ice, sleet, frozen rain. Off to meet with the writers of Granville High this morning, weather permitting. Lenore and Izzy are going with me, as we all have to go to a Hospice call afterwards, and the patient is a dog lover who wants to see both dogs.
  Hopefully we can start firming up the stories from the Granville High writers. This winter has disrupted the classes, but if the ice isn’t too bad, and I can get some coffee, we’ll start rolling. I need some quiet days, and hopefully will get some. I realize the animals have been living in snow and ice since Thanksgiving. We need Spring.

March 4, 2008 – Clarissa Pinkola Estes is an analyst and writer and student of mythic tales. She is a post-trauma specialist and, she writes, that with the goal of helping to repair torn spirits, she listens to many life dramas and dream narratives.
  “From repeatedly seeing how the psyche yearns when it is inspired, confused, injured or bereft, I find that, above all, the soul wants stories.” If courage and bravery are the muscles of the spiritual drive that help a person to become whole, then stories are the bones. Together, they move the episodes of the life myth – what many people call journeys – forward.
  Why stories?
  Because the soul’s way of communicating is to teach. And its language is symbols and themes, all of which have been found throughout human history in stories. Stories are the radiant center we call soul, she believes, an enormous aspect of our psyche which is invisible, but which can be palpably felt.
  This begins in the infantile unconscious. We carry it within ourselves forever, writes mythologist Joseph Campbell. “All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of ourself, are there; for such golden seeds do not die.” If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up, brought into the life of day, we might experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life.
   It’s fascinating to me to see how analysts, spiritualists and mythologists all seem to come to the same place. Stories shape and inform us, liberate us,  define us.
   This is, I believe, the power of myth the drama of stories, the radiant light – the soul – that Estes and Campbell and Merton and so many others write about. This awakening may mark a religious illumination, as happens to many people, or for others, an awakening of the self. Either way, the hero is undertaking a seminal spiritual experience.
   Whether small or large, and no matter what the stage of life, the call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration, a rite, or moment, of spiritual passage, which when complete, amounts to a dying and birth – the passing of a threshold.
   This process of renewal – of finding our own stories, and awakening ourselves, freeing that inner presence, daring to follow its call – is familiar to almost anyone who has imagined or undertaken change, growth, or self-awareness. It almost always involves loss and gain, as Campbell suggests.  There is pain, joy, fiasco, bliss. The mythologists and analysts, philosophers, rabbis and priests almost all agree – a part of us has to die in order to be reborn.
   This, I think, is one of the oldest stories in the world. If you think about it, it crops up again and again, in religion, music, movies and literature. Countless torn spirits and ordinary souls seem to need stories like this, to find them and experience them.
    “When in relationship with the soul,” writes Estes, “we sense our highest aspirations, our most uncanny knowings, our mystical understandings, and our spontaneous inspirations and unleashing of creative ideas.”
   I love this notion of stories and torn spirits. None of us can live in this world without our spirits being battered, bruised, torn, sometimes broken.
  What better medicine for our torn spirits than our souls infusing them with the humane, creative and sacred qualities of life? Do we dare?