Sara Wright

Sedna’s Tale by Sara Wright

The story of Sedna is yet another rendition of the Handmaid’s Tale. This one comes from the Arctic and the Inuit people. During this time when it seems as if patriarchy has a stranglehold on so many of us, I offer this Indigenous version of the story to remind feminists that tapping into mythical patterns strengthens us in ways that are impossible to articulate beyond stating that we can access that power when we align ourselves with it. As in all oral traditions there are many versions of the story but the roots of the myth are the same.

In one version of the story a young man comes to sleep with an entire family during a blizzard. By morning he is gone without having revealed his identity, but the father discovers large dog tracks in the snow and realizes his family has been deceived. The young man who slept with the family was a wild dog.

Winter Turns the Tide by Sara Wright

This winter has been most challenging on every level.

I am exhausted, emotionally and physically. Most of my hair has turned gray. I have become an old woman who needs to be in touch with her limitations.

On December 31st I broke my foot at three in the morning when a horrible crash awakened me to a blocked front door. I shoveled pure ice for an hour. Frantic with anxiety, I didn’t even realize that I had broken my foot until the crisis was over and the door could be opened again.

Mycelial Madness by Sara Wright

For those of us who are dedicated to feminism and to the sanctity of nature here is one more way to understand the earth as our goddess. Her mysterious veil is the source of all life. Immanence is sacred.

The last winter I spent in New Mexico I walked to the river every morning in the pre-dawn hour. No matter how much the wind would howl later on, at this time of the day nothing stirred besides the birds. Because I traveled the same path every morning circling round one wetland listening to river songs I would find myself slipping into a light trance as my feet hit the hard unforgiving ground. Every bush, cottonwood, russian olive, juniper was familiar, each was a friend. Although this wetland had been trimmed and paths mowed (parching open ground), the majority of trees, plants and grasses had been left intact and the river was nearby. During these light trance states I sensed that the ground beneath my feet was pulsing with some kind of light; that the earth was trying to communicate with me.

At that time I didn’t know that I was walking over of miles of mycelium, because I didn’t know whether these networks extended throughout the desert although I assumed they did. But I felt or sensed something. I knew from trying to garden in NM that the surface of most of the ground seemed quite barren except for the piles of decaying cottonwood bark that I used as mulch, so where was the rest of the mycelium?

‘A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing’ by Sara Wright

The Power of Dreams to Forecast Future Events

I have been a dreamer all my life and within the last six weeks I have had a number of dreams that both frightened and baffled me. How is it possible I ask myself that after 40 years of dream jounraling and being trained as analyst that I am still that stupid?

Part of the answer is that I don’t pay close enough attention to warnings when I can’t make sense of them. For example, when these dreams began someone I didn’t know had contacted me out of the blue and insinuated himself into my life by praising someone I love. The very next night I had a dream that told me that a man was coming to harm me.

Spruce at Dawn by Sara Wright

Spruce towers
over weeping hemlock
balsam and pine.
Pale peach clouds
paint the sky circling
fringed spires.
Trees
our first cathedrals…
Some still gather
under these boughs.
Her Voice
is being Silenced.
The Spirit of
the Forest
Departs…

Father Root by Sara Wright

My habit has been to hide

once I know he’s around,

to deny his presence, the fright that

springs from every cell,

my body on scream.

I harm myself forcing me

to do his will – ‘Keep going’

I screech cruelly, soundlessly,

‘so what if it hurts,

You cannot afford to feel’.

At 3 AM I shoveled ice

with strength I no longer have

driven by his demonic voice.

He’d already murdered the day before.

My grouse whose delicate spiral

footprints brought joy to

my heart became his first kill.

Passionflower: Women and Plants, and a Crown of Thorns by Sara Wright

I have always had a relationship with plants. All the women in my family were gardeners and I had my first garden when I was about four year old. But it wasn’t until mid-life that I began to sense that this woman-plant relationship might be more complicated than I realized. Blurred boundaries. Intimacy. Weavings underground. My dreams were full of vines that hugged the earth and spiraled like serpents sliding on bellies through deep green forests. I could grow plants that others could not. Was it the attention I gave plants? Love? I saw them as friends, as equals. I loved touching and caring for them.

When I saw my first passionflower blossom at a neighbor’s house I practically swooned. I fell in love with the flower and its scent. Not the generous type, I had to beg for a cutting for two whole years before this woman finally relented. Thrilled, I brought the cutting home. It was spring. I put it in water. To my joy it rooted in a few weeks warmed by the April sun, and within three months I was able to pot the cutting.

A New Year’s Story: La Bafena by Sara Wright

Ever since I was old enough to comprehend that New Year’s Eve represented the end of one year and the beginning of the next a holiday requiring NOISE, drunkenness, and joyful (?) merry making, I experienced a profound sense of alienation. This celebration seemed hollow and meaningless to me. As an adolescent even though I went on dates the night depressed me. As an adult I endured ignoring the whole thing.

Once I surrendered Christianity to the fire and began creating my own rituals based on the Celtic calendar I began to think of the Winter Solstice as the Turning of the Wheel into the new year, although powerful dreams that forecast the future usually came around Epiphany, the last day of the Christian/pre Christian twelve days of Christmas celebration. This celebration had roots in the deep past. This peculiar dream habit of mine baffled me and I resisted it because of its Christian overlay until this year when I finally surrendered to what my dreams had been reflecting all along. Epiphany was a day to glimpse the future. My new year begins on the night of January 6th, a day of Awakening. Apparently my dream life believes that an ancient script needs to play out with or without my cooperation.

A Christmas Grouse by Sara Wright

I left seed for you.

A pomegranate too.

Would you come

Christmas day?

The veil was thin

last night.

This morning

Madonna’ s

Feathered Body

Spoke.

When you ran across

the snow

I remembered

the song

from long ago…

A Christmas Story by Sara Wright

My deeply devout French- Italian Catholic Grandmother held my hand as we walked into the village at dusk. We were going to see the crèche. I recall feeling very excited. I loved the story that she had just told me about Mary birthing Jesus in a manger surrounded by animals and doves while Joseph looked on.

I was eight years old. Until this Christmas I had never spent any time with my paternal grandmother. This year things were different. My parents were in Europe for a year and I had also been separated from my little brother who was staying with my maternal grandparents while I attended school in the east. My grandparents had sent me back to stay with my great aunts because they didn’t want me to go to Catholic school in California. I missed my little brother so much it hurt. My grandmother’s sisters were kind to me, but I was in a state of perpetual longing… How I ended up staying with this unknown grandmother remains a mystery to this day.