The Romanian fairytale of Little Wild Rose, that weaves through the entire book, begins with an old man and an old woman, as old as the goddess Venus, who refused to die because they had no child. The Goddess Venus is old, but The Great Mother, who had been worshipped for thousands of years as the source of renewal and fertility,  of birth, death and regeneration,  was far older, and forgotten.  One day, the old man went out into the world alone to find a child. Having searched the entire known world, with no luck, he arrived at the edge of a forest darker than the dark of night and was overcome with fear. 

Chapter two begins with the old man at the edge of the dark forest. It would be easy to rush over words to get to the next event. But, a story is alive with significance. If we pay attention, it reveals hidden  instructions for us; how to find the missing child and repair the infertility of our lives. Our engagement is efficacious. The capacity to uncover a fundamental knowledge of the interdependence of our every day life with the natural world is restored through the dynamic  experience of the unfolding fairytale. Hence, it is important to listen to the details. 

I pause to imagine and feel a frightened old man stopping  at the threshold of a dark woods alone and afraid. A fear arises in my body as I imagine him. It is my old man that stands unable to go further. A forest in a fairy tale is more fraught with unknowable dangers than any forest on earth. Anything imagined or unimaginable can occur. I recognize my fear. I am  afraid of getting lost, of disappearing,  of dying because I do not know  how to be in the dark. I  am stunned by how meaningful this moment in the story is. My feet are like concrete. I am standing  on  a hard paved road. But, breathing into the fear, the road transforms. I find myself on malleable soil. 

It is the function and ceremony of fairytales to take us barefoot into forgotten territory; to recall the restorative fertility of the natural world. The story is beckoning us to imagine. Without  reciprocity and visceral response of visualization, association and feeling, we cannot discover something within our own minds: the intelligence of the heart that  is in relationship with fear and reality. 

In the natural world, if a stem is torn from the soil there are no future flowers. There will be no pollen for bees. We will be left in a world barren of beauty and fruit. The old man’s last chance to find a child provides our opportunity to revive the inherent experience of our relationship to reality; to remember  we are part of the earth. This moment is a portal through which we shift  from relying on streets of ideas  to being in and of the  soil of our being, that which is knowable and that which can never be understood but exists.    

Not a single event of the old man’s quest is mentioned, until he arrives at the threshold of the forest. The content offered manifests what is needed for the listener,  more than what is needed by the characters in the story who only exist because  we bring them to life  moment by moment. Just as we forget soil, we forget that the story only takes place within us. Acknowledging the old man’s fear is a gift.

My first recollection of  fear comes to mind. I was six years old. My family rented a cottage near a woods in the Catskills. During the days, my father and I walked on a dirt road through the trees, chatting about the blueberries we would pick, and the horse named Brownie we would visit in a meadow beyond the forest. Some days, I played by myself at the edge of the trees in the sunlight. My mother, however, warned me never to go in the forest at night alone, “It is dangerous. You can get hurt or lost.” 

One evening, I decided to risk entering the woods. As long as there was light, I was not afraid. As it grew darker, I felt cautious, and excited. Then, all of a sudden,  the woods turned completely black. It was a moonless night. Fear rushed through my body. I froze. Everything that I knew during the day became ominous. The birds were quiet. The air was still. The trees transformed into scary monsters. My heart was beating. My entire body was an ear listening. The occasional sounds of branches and wind heightened my dread. They were the cries of banshees, witches and ghosts. I pushed my feet against the soil seeking strength. I breathed deeply  and was able to move. But I could not bear the fear that crowded my mind. I gathered all my energy and raced back to the lit porch where I would be safe. 

From the kitchen my mother called out, “Are you all right?” I lied and answered,  “I am fine.” I was in fact, exhilarated; alive in a vivid way. I had escaped, but the woods and the dark were under my skin.  The beings in the trees looked out of my eyes. Of course, I knew the cottage was nearby and my mother was in the kitchen.  But, something had changed. I had met fear, felt the strength of the dark,  the  earth, and the power of trees. When my beating heart stilled, I asked myself, “What if I ran back and found that the cottage had disappeared? What if my mother was no longer there?” I knew it was possible. 

Fear had deepened my suspicion that there was more to the world than I had been taught. I was unable to speak about what happened.  Standing, feeling, at the entrance to the woods with the old man, brings back the intensity and richness of the memory.  

The dark wood is an archetypal forest of myth and dream. I can die there and come back to life again. Fall down a deep abyss and see an underground mound of gems. There is no time or direction. It is a place where  witches dwell in houses made of bone, and dwarves emerge from subterranean realms. Trees have eyes and arms. Monsters and  talking animals make surprise appearances. They offer gifts. Armies of thieves hide behind rocks, ready to capture me. My ears hear a thousand invisible creatures whisper and show we that there are immeasurable pools of water as fresh as the first waters at the beginning of time to be found.

The old man stopped outside the forest, afraid, remembered a proverb: “In the dark, there is light.” It produced courage and he entered the woods. What is a proverb? It is a condensed container of cultural wisdom, a penetrating  image stored in the marrow of our bones if we  heard stories and slogans as a child. It is different from a lesson. It is visceral and visual. A child growing up in a culture who hears stories, proverbs, riddles and songs, holds lived meaning, and  images, in  listening veins. The words of the proverb lie in the same territory where learned fears and habits lurk.  But the proverb, a medicinal arrow  of knowledge,  cuts through the learned fears.  The image knowledge speaks to us directly of  how to be a human being.  Rather than shutting down our bodies or suppressing fear when it arises,  words of a proverb, rising up in times of crisis or need,  remind us that within  fear itself there is energy and intelligence. Within the dark there is illumination. Within the day, night can be known. The memory of the proverb slips into consciousness. For those of us who have  lost touch with proverbs, the narrator  of a story can speak to us from inside the vitality of the story to  infuse us with images emerging from our own imagination,  that  shakes us  loose from personal projections and beliefs on the spot. We befriend the fear  and meet the darker than the dark of night, directly. In essence, we stand on the soil that has been there within us, and on the earth, longer than the Goddess Venus. Tennessee Williams words arise like a proverb, “The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.”

Soil covers the entire planet. Everything depends on soil.  It takes 1000 years for an inch of soil to form. It supports trees, mountains, cities, plants and flowers.  Holding us, feeding us  and even highways and houses. Soil is survival, food, and medicine. Our bodies return to soil at death. Horizon upon horizon of layers of soil beneath the surface of the soil are home to myriads of insects, fungi, invisible beings, energy, and minerals without which we could not live, nor could anything endure.  In the same way we forget soil, we ignore the insight and intelligence that is our natural  capacity for  knowing. We  remember  the truth of inter-being. We remember we are part of all things. Regenerating this capacity for knowing is how we transform the edge of the forest into a liminal path. 

This moment in the story  where the narrator   offers us a forgotten proverb, renews our inner eyes to trust the magic of the world. It is the most potent function of a story, far more powerful than the content. Arising direct perception  is the means by which we engage in something too complex to be completely understood or analyzed.  Another way of being is renewed. The energy of  fear felt lets us  walk into the dark, – heart, mind, body  – alert. Imagination is soil. We shapeshift from one image to the next with response, emotion, association and visualization.  Through the vehicle of the old man’s recollection of the proverb, allows us a access to a self-existing state of mind –  a pre thought awareness that is older than the Goddess Venus.  Children know this way of being in play.  They observe animals, and become animals, flowers, pieces of dreams.   As children we were  navigators of the unknowable aspects of our lives and the earth. It is why listeners so often say to me after a story, “I felt like I did when I was a child.”

I have a very early  recollection. It is not really a recollection. An occurrence that happened when I was an infant. I was left in a pram on the back porch in the dark, to sleep in the cool night air of summer. I awoke out of my baby trance. Eyes opened and baby me saw a black ocean of sky and white stars, inseparable and separate.  Then, eyes lowered, baby saw dark buildings and light in windows. A realization of connection between earth and sky,  of inside and outside; a  primary seeing. The event can only be related through images as a story. It gives me a way to communicate the astonishing event. The experience itself was  without and beyond words. It is as vivid now as it was 75 years ago. Ever since then I have been seeking that awareness,  the profound capacity to see relationally, then forgetting it. Until something happens and it comes to me again. Pausing, feeling fear in the liminal space between the ordinary world and wild world, the known and the unknown, with the old man, brings it back with renewed significance.

A story is ocular and oracular.  We imagine, hear and see the old man, and the forest. We visualize  the  proverb  instantly arousing  light in dark space. We dream with our eyes open. As Native American poet Simon Ortiz said, words “are not just words. When you realize the significance of what something means to you, then they are very tangible.” 

Words imagined, suffused with feeling, cuts through the thick bramble of  thoughts to open the eyes of the heart. A story is also oracular.  Images  are  messengers  reaching us from a depth in earth, an under the soil informant, an oracle speaking through fumes and sounds rising up from deep caves. It is meaning. The image is not only seen but felt uncovering our natural sense of connection to all things in the moment. The engagement is where it takes place.  The narrative events do not exist outside the words. But as they move from heart to tongue to lips to other, the space between, an invisible ephemeral stage, comes alive with the  immediacy of my baby awareness seeing sky and stars. The instruction is a transmission. It is how we find what we have lost touch with. It is a fertile possibility of instant repair.

The old man’s fear is a door way. Buddhist teachers have said that being with fear before we turn it into a thought or story about something, is a means of harvesting the inherent energy in the fear. The trembling feeling of fear felt is where we also find fearlessness – a sense of being alive without having to grasp onto  explanation or interpretation. It is the exhilaration I felt on the lit porch in the Catskills.  

For the old man to possibly find a child, we are told by the experience of this moment in the story, he must feel the fear and not suppress it or be paralyzed by it.  In this way he walks into the dark.  This is the function of stories. What happens to us is  more significant then what is taking place in the story. We are being transformed by imaginative response, by reciprocity, be knowing the soil of our own heart mind. Stephen Karcher, in his book on the I Ching praised images as a revelations of spirit. “It shows the symbols and spirits through which all transformation occurs. By every Change we actively participate in the creative process rather than being it passive and willing victim.” Such journeys he intimates are necessary because “they focus on the idea of a person who is committed to realizing themselves as a true individual as the only way to elect change in the world.”

Restoration is the action of embodied imagination. It is how we dissolve our thought separateness from the world and partake of a reciprocity with the natural world, visible and invisible. Listening to a story remembers us into the complex and indefinable self existing connection with earth, spirit, nature, ancestors, and each other. The fear that we may lose touch with our intelligence of the heart is more terrifying to me than the fear of death or nonexistence. The horror of being thoroughly removed from soil horrifies me. An earth covered by concrete, polluted top soil, and human beings disassociated from their heart and connection with all things, is more barren than the old man and his old wife. Separation produces wars, bias, endless disease and dissociation.

Many times I have known the reparative magic of the world but quickly forgotten it. Pausing at the threshold, being in the old man’s presence and feeling fear of  the darkness,  penetrates me. I contemplate and am awakened by the proverb: Light is found in the dark.

One of the most powerful occurrences of my life happened several months after my mother’s stroke, when I was eleven years old. I rushed home from school. Something remarkable, that I no longer remember, had taken place. I wanted to tell my mother. She was resting on a couch in the living room beside the grand piano that she could only play with one hand.  When I saw her, I forgot that she had had a stroke. I called out excitedly, “Mommy, are you awake?”  She turned her head and smiled. I think she too forgot about the stroke. Sunlight streamed through the mustard colored curtains filling the room. In that moment, with ease, she stood up. Then, we both remembered. She fell to the ground. My father ran into the room and lifted her back onto the couch. He pushed me out of the way to help her. I wanted to tell him what had occurred; that there might be a way to heal her. But I remained silent. I knew something unusual had happened, but I had no instructions.

Shortly after that incident I had a dream.  I was about to enter a forest. I saw two roads a crossroads in the forest. One opened into a distant sun suffused meadow, and the other narrowed into  a dangerous dark place. I had to make a choice. I chose the dark road. I would take the other road later. I awoke wondering if I would find my way back to illumined place. The proverb reminds me that by taking the dark road I found the light.

The kindness of a symbolic story gives us access to the awareness needed to cross into the woods. I say the word “forest” and it comes into being, Everyone will enter their own tree-darkened vision. Having imagined, we will be embraced by soil. We proceed — hearing the unheard language of the natural world. The old man will be known by the trees and creatures. Soil will support him. Wind will listen to his footsteps. An unseen flower blossoming ceaselessly will bloom. A mysterious path will guide. Knowing the energy of fear brings my old man beyond the familiar. I prepare to enter the forest. Soil does not betray us. Something will be found. Mark Ryan, one of the authors of The Wild Wood Tarot wrote, “We need all the guile, strength, and courage of our inner warriors and guardians. Without them we lack the will to endure and defend ourselves on the journey.”

The moment in the story is the great turning point. We can now begin  an actual journey that restores our capacity for reconnection. All that can be done to find a ceaseless source of fertility, and restore our interdependent relationship with  the natural world  depends on our dissolving  the separation between ourselves and the magic of the world. It is what makes discovery possible.

For the flower to bloom it cannot lose connection to replenishing soil.  For us to survive, we cannot lose connection to the earth. With the old man, we cross the threshold into the living forest, breathing the fragrance of soil.