Hello again my lovelies! Come and take a walk with me! A little bit of a difference from our cozy corner, we will be wandering a little bit this time around. 

As a Trickster Storyteller I have said my role and my goal is to be an archive of stories, a sanctuary and safe place for those seeking wisdom and nourishment, and as a steward of the seeds of change and growth.

As i have shown through story and examples of my own self-tricking, we are not infallible, all-knowing deities - as we all should be aware that those beings do not actually exist (and any claiming to be are not!)- We are spirits who take on roles, intentionally or serendipitously as such to further our role and goal...

In that light, i thought myself to have almost lost my own plot in my last storytime… as the deeper i dove into and questioned my own reality, the deeper I wandered in my forest of memories and stories, and into the question of how to truly compost the dis-ease of Hierarchal thought, my own limits seemed be both boundless and... suffocatingly tiny..
 This last week I took some time for brief wanderings in other's forests and along the threads of nostalgia, as well as some serious ponderings- and release of feral rage- on the limitations of certain beings that consider themself human...  I eventually came across the serendipitous spark that I wasn’t aware I was seeking…
 A memory of a story that not only will serve as an integral bridge of sorts but will also be well.. the ember… that we will used to ignite many of our future storytimes together. 

 I have a certain fondness and affinity for flames and forests (as if the second wasn’t abundantly clear yet), and many of the first stories in my memory forest are those that relate to the acquisition, theft or otherwise borrowings of and dealings with fire and/or the sun. Raven, Coyote, Hare, Spider, Fox, Serpent, Lion, Eagle, and a many others form what I will call my core grove of Divine Spark and Warmth.
 And with all my time growing alongside this grove and nurturing these stories, I have come to understand that the way I see these stories is quite different than what I can gather of how a majority of the world understands them. 

To me these stories about light and warmth and heat bear the seed of what I was trying to get at in the previous storytime. Both literally and figuratively these stories carry the divine spark, the very definitive root of what it means to be human – and possibly what I am trying to untangle when it comes to what a story with heart and root looks like. 

 Let’s pause here and say in no uncertain terms, the general consensus of the human world is  that the ONLY thing about humans that is decidedly unique to being them is that they COOK THEIR FOOD… and within that transformation into, humans have become somewhat good at harnessing the flame and the energy that that represents.  So when I say that fire is at the heart and hearth and wellspring of what a human is, it goes to reason those stories contain the original spark of “humanness” – the original tale of their transformation into “human.” 

In a bit of a twist, it would be good to let you in on more of the Trickster secret of shapeshifting. In all tellings, when I speak of Raven, of Coyote, of Fox and Hare… these beings are both the animal and the human… and not. Shapeshifting in form and function and role and goal doesn’t necessarily apply to just humans, but I am speaking human languages currently, so our tales take our audience into consideration. 

Back to the Flames! The story that rose out the depths of my memory to re-spark my joy was one in which explains how fire came to rest in the wood of trees and how it was first contained … combining two of my favorites into one of the simplest teaching tales that I loved at my beginnings. Since then, I have taken in many different forms of this story and now I share one of my retellings – 

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In the beginning of the world, before humans came into being, before the sun and moon and stars were stolen for the first time, the world became cold when the seasons shortened and the sun took less time in the sky. The life in the forests and savannahs was bleak and miserable in the short-day moons - and the only respite came when the Thunders dropped bolts on the trees, giving threes the temporary – and terrible- gift of fire. (There were other places in which mountains of fire belched smoke and liquid rock, and fire rocks fell from the sky, but I am unsure if these were common tales at the time.) The animals who were friends with the trees asked them to share the burden of her gift when it came, but neither the trees nor the animals could quite figure out how to contain and harness the flames until they all pooled their knowledge at once. 

Raven Flew to the top of the tree to investigate and her white feathers became black (although this happens many times over in the rescue of fire and sun, so who know when her feathers STAYED black) but brought a burning branch to the forest floor for the others to observe. Sister Owls flew through the smoke in the middle of the tree, to be left with wide, dark ringed, unblinking eyes – but knowledge of what makes the tree’s wood make more smoke and how to safely avoid and direct it. Snake went to investigate the hollow of the tree, to be left with burns scars and a side sliding behavior, but added her observation of the ember’s behavior in low wind and how one can make them hotter or cooler.  With all of the other animal’s attempts, spider fashioned a bag of sort, moistened it with water, and took a ember from Raven’s burning stick to taming and protecting it in within her satchel – and the other animals took to help building a fire with the shed branches of tree in the protection of a mouth of a cave some distance away. 

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To be honest this story went from it’s original (where a team of animals steal fire from the fire keepers above and accidently loose it or purposely give it to tree to safeguard), to heavily leaning on a Cherokee tale of the animals somewhat competing to discover how to take the gift of fire from the sycamore tree struck by lightning, to a tale where the discovery of fire was a joint effort of many different beings and possibly even generations of observations.  There are so many tales that point to the “Theft” of fire (and the sun and moon and stars) from “higher” beings, almost all are written as if those are the beginning of the world as whole, but as future storytimes will unravel with more detail, I feel that these are times when resources and knowledge itself was kept away from the general population as a whole… and this “theft” was either the reclaiming of knowledge – or even the theft of said knowledge from other groups of humans. (There is some evidence that Denisovans, a species parallel to homo sapiens were possibly the first to harness fire… so humans could have actually stolen it from them!) 

But there is so many -more recent- stories that indicate that human’s knowledge of things was stolen or hoarded by others in power, and I think it is important to draw parallels to these stories of intrinsic humanness with that of knowledge – and the stories themselves – with the need to re-steal them. 

It is getting late, and as usual I am questioning what of my story made sense and what will need to revisited later. I wish you all Faire Faren.