Dear Friend,

For the last few months, I've shared about the importance of Origin Stories for shifting identities and cultures at personal, familial, and collective levels. Too often, the stories we tell replicate dominant cultural values. Crafting regenerative cultures of interdependence and interbeing requires us to craft different (origin) stories. Last fall/winter, I also offered a webinar series showing how Origin Stories are part of our calendars (in the United States public calendar, which especially includes Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, and Fourth of July).

There are many ways we tell, enact, and honor Origins… I've also shared about how, in times of political, social, and ecological change, re-telling (including erasing) different origin stories is one of the many ways that the struggle for present and future identities forms. This year, that includes the origins of the United States (as it is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence).

And in the last few weeks, I've shared about this Origin Stories course - which welcomes storycrafters of all styles, is designed to support your writing/story-crafting practice, and incorporates embodied exercises for engaging with ancestors (including 'landcestors'). It's 8 sessions over 10 weeks - so it's a short course. A LOT can happen in a short time! This is about your story-crafting process, and you can bring to our circle that which feels right to you. It’s creative, soul-full, lightly engaged with ritual, and is, if you like these kinds of things, fun. Previous participants say it is one of the most powerful and unique courses - for writing, storytelling, and ancestral engagement that they have taken.

We start this week on Thursday at 6 pm EST!

I also got some new films completed about Origin Stories (including some from my mother's side of the family, which I have not shared before) up on the website, and you might enjoy watching them. One of the students in this current cohort said they are really good. I’m not a good judge of that at all….I'm still new to being in front of the camera - it is definitely a growth edge for me! I give a lot of credit to the camera-woman, Kimberly Fox, for her support in filming... and her general encouragement of me sharing more on film.

If this course is calling you, please go ahead and register here.

There is no pre-work before the course begins.

Finally, I thought I’d share a story that’s been bouncing around in my mind for the last few days, over this past Easter weekend, over some of many origin stories and varieties of sacred stories, and a story from the Nag Hammadi library, associated with Gnosticism, keeps coming to me. As you may know, the Gnostic tradition was a sect of early Christians, and most of the texts were written 200 years later than the four Gospels that are part of the Christian Canon. They include the Gospel of Mary and one of my favorite mystical poems: Thunder, Perfect Mind.

They include the Gospel of Peter, which includes a story about the resurrection of Jesus that I had never heard before. In this version, Jesus leaves the tomb, carried/flanked by two very tall angels.... and the trio is followed by the talking, walking cross, who subsequently gives a small speech about resurrection.

I first learned of this story when I was at seminary, in a course taught by Hal Taussig, a New Testament scholar. What I remember most was something one of my fellow students said upon hearing this story: The cross had something to say.

In my many years of hearing the Easter story, I had never wondered, does the cross have a story?

It reminds me that there are many stories about what has happened, and many perspectives, animate and otherwise, that witness our life journeys and who have their versions of our stories. In the context of inter-being, what stories emerge from one another? How do we incorporate 'the other' into our own story? These are some of the dynamic questions that guide much of our work.

How we answer that question, including how we engage with what is "real" vs "not real", shapes how we see one another and what becomes possible.

Blessings on your week, and all the fullness therein!

- Sara Jolena

ps- some folks couldn’t access the article I shared this past Saturday on time and the goddess of Easter. Here it is again.

Pps - we might have an additional cohort at an earlier time of day; please let me know if that interests you.