Stories are medicine.

Stories do not require that we do, be, act anything–we need only listen.

Stories are embedded with instructions which guide us about the complexities of life. 

Stories are far older than the art and science of psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes. 

Most old collections of fairy tales and mythos existent today have been scoured clean of the scatological, the sexual, the perverse, the pre-Christian, the feminine, the Goddess, and initiatory, the medicines for various psychological malaises, and the directions for spiritual raptures. 

Fairy tales in books have somehow been starched and ironed flat until much of their vigor is depleted.

But they are not lost forever.

(Sentences snipped from the introduction of Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, pages 14-20.)

Dear Readers: 

This is indeed a special edition. Somehow I managed to be in the right mindset, with the right soul space, with the right number of solitary hours at my writing desk, and this story came to me. Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls this “trance telling” and says it is “one of the oldest ways of telling.” 

I found a story-seed, planted it in my mind, watered it with written words, and watched it grow, then climb, then blossom right before my eyes in a matter of days. While writing, when I reached for a detail to include, El Duende, the wind messenger, sat on my shoulder and whispered it to me. This is one instance “where a story is ‘attracted’ to the trance-teller and told through her.” 

I offer this tale to you as fresh and definite as a drifting snowflake or as fresh and fragrant as hot bread from the oven, because this story came how it is and it is how it came. Academia taught me to polish, polish, polish my prose to a high-shine, but polishing a snowflake or a loaf of bread is ridiculous and ruinous. I know enough to let it be. 

I offer this story as some “soul vitamins, some observations, some map fragments, some little pieces of pine pitch for fastening feathers to trees to show us the way, and some flattened underbrush to guide the way back to el mundo subterráneo, the underground world, our psychic home.” 

I offer this story to you as “soul-making.”

May the wind messenger blow your way and bless you, too, my friend. 

Kate