Music and Magic from the Heart of Our Nature
I’ve been a student of the Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) for the past half year. Recently I viewed a workshop they hosted, in which comic artist David Lasky taught us how to make haiku comics . We were to write a haiku having to do with the feeling of cold or heat, and this I did, using as inspiration an experience a friend had shared with me.
This week I dug up my notes and drew and painted the comic. Here it is. Enjoy!
How many of you have read the book, CROW and WEASEL by Barry Lopez? Such a wise, wonderful book, beautifully illustrated, and so worth reading. When mainstream narrative would have us believe that we are powerless and pointless, needing to be dictated, stories like this one show the way back to what is true about each one of us: that we each carry and are a unique and much needed medicine for our community and our times. The mythic and imaginative, and the expansive, complex beauty that is the vital force and the natural world is absolutely woven into each one of us.
What stories do you carry? Which stories inspire you most, or inspire you particularly right now? There is medicine in a good tale. Stories nourish our spirit and soul, and we can share this good medicine with others, so that we all grow in courage, strength, wisdom, and imagination.
As Badger says in CROW and WEASEL (and I relate in the video): “Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.”
We are so much more than the barrage of fear would have us believe.
This short video that I made (just over a minute long) features a quote from Badger about the nature of story, and a little musing from me.
Hello, Wild Ones!
Enter the Wildwood and feast your senses in the magic, mischief, and flowering spirit of Beltane by way of the Forest Halls Celtic streaming radio program. Airing today from 12-2pm PST, Show 49 and a re-airing of Show 3 “Green Man and May Queen” will be on demand for the next two weeks. Enjoy greenwood music, folklore, poetry, a tale, flights of fancy, and, as always, harp.
Experience the enchantment here
In Show 49 – Find harp in the music of Christina Tourin, Miranda Brown (in the band Jaiya), Alison Kinnaird (in the music of Eilidh MacKenzie). Enjoy bardic poetry with Halo Quin and Kevan Manwaring, a poem by Charles Stanley Causley, and a tale and prose by Jane Valencia
In Show 3: Harp with Anne Roos, Christina Tourin, Shelley Phillips, Debra Knodel and Jane Valencia (Spookytree). Read extensive notes here.
01:27 Jackie Oates / Hail! Hail! The First of May
03:55 Shira Kammen and Pam Swan / Lord May’s Set
08:55 Goitse / Transformed
18:06 Mes Aïeux / J’Entends Le Loup, Le Renard Et La Belette (La Jument de Michao)
22:12 Jane Valencia / Story: I Hear the Wolf and the Fox and the Weasel
31:50 Christina Tourin / Oak
38:03 Jaiya / Beltane Night
43:30 Halo Quin / Poem: Headless at Beltane
46:12 Kevan Manwaring / Poem: Heartwood – from his book The Silver Branch: Bardic Poems and Letters to a Young Bard.
47:51 Telynor – John Peekstok and Anna Clemenger / Sprig of Thyme
51:28 Molly Pinto Madigan / Willowwood
57:55 Eilidh MacKenzie / Thig am bàta (The Boat Will Come)
