
The magic of Story with
Spider's Daughter
Feeding the Stories
I believe the old, ancestral big stories need to be fed, in that we remember them, tell them, and invite them into our hearts. They are the memories of our Ancestors, the echoes of the original instructions for being human. They are the living lands where we come from and our intimate knowledge of how to live in reciprocity with the Holy in the Wild. Perhaps one of these stories will stir you, and you will bring her out onto the land and speak her, or you will bring her into your dream world or deep imaginal life... each time we speak these stories, we remember, and we are Re-Membered back into the Web of Life. We might even open the ears of our hearts to Earth's Dreaming of an unknown future, filled with feral creatures, monsters and magicians and begin to co-story a new world with Earth Community.
Below, you can hear some of my stories (I apologize that the quality of some of them is not great) and continue on to read about my magical Monthly Online Storytelling gathering - a Place for Myth and Music - where I tell SoulStories, the Big Stories that help us to remember how to be Human within the Web of Earth Community and awaken to our exquisite uniqueness as a Soul. You can join me on Patreon for a reserved seat and other benefits and to support my work of virtual storytelling as well as film making.
A Place for Myth and Music
a virtual clearing in the forest
Greetings Story lovers and bards of Soul,
Imagine, we are in the forest together, and there is a stone-wall enclosure with no roof but the trees and sky above us. The stars sparkle overhead and there is a fire burning. On one side of the enclosure, there is a small tower with a box office on the first floor and stage lights shining from the parapet. There are benches with sheepskins for warmth, and an open area at the front for the musicians and singers, bards and storytellers. The village gathers here for stories - the Big Stories that feed life, that arise out of the forests and hills and creatures of this place - to guide them through their personal journeys and to renew the culture.
When I was out on a vision quest, I received a vision of this place, and the instruction to make a place for Myth and Music and to call the people to gather there. Whether this becomes an actual place or not, whenever I tell stories, in my heart, this is the place we gather at. Gratitude to the forest, the wild ones, that which feeds life, the Holy in the Wild, and to each of you for coming to my stories and inhabiting this imaginal place. May we re-member ourselves into Earth Community, may each story and song be a Dream of Earth, co-creating a new Story in these times. Each word we speak, each song, is a spell, a courting of the New Story that wants to emerge from Earth through each of us... Gather close to the fire and listen to the SoulStories, we will travel through the portal of
Once Upon a Time ...

Bearskin and the Princess
We gather for SoulStories once a month, Sundays 7-8:30pm CET
(1-2:30pm EST)
10 Dollars / 10 Euros
To reserve your seat and to buy a ticket (PayPal): sara@wholenessinwilderness.com
Please include your email address in the message and I will send you the zoom link...
Next Event: March 26, 2023
Dates and Info for each event on my FaceBook Page - like my page to receive my event postings and short story videos on your feed:A Place for Myth and Music
Patreon
What I'm up to:
I created my patreon site in order to have a place to offer my storytelling each month and gather with a group of people who are as passionate as I am about Myth and Story for personal, cultural and planetary transformation. My storytelling and my videos and audio stories and explorations, are trance tellings, in which the Stories themselves speak. Clarissa Pinkola Estes says of trance telling, "One of the oldest ways of telling, which intrigues me greatly, is the passionate trance state, wherein the teller "senses" the audience - be it an audience of one or many- and then enters a state in the world between the worlds, where story is "attracted" to the trance-teller and told through her. This is the storyteller furthering soul-making." I am most curious about how Mystery and the Dream of Earth move through us in the echoes of stories of our Ancestors. And how such stories might carry us, like a boat, through our own transformation and the transformatory times we are living in.
Support my work:
I spend time with the stories in deep meditative conversation, listening for which story wants to be told at this time of year, in this moment of time, and for the Patrons who are gathering with me. I sense into you and our heart connection and listen also through space and time, for what your heart is longing for. I spend time with the story itself, reading, learning, listening, deepening and speaking it with the forest. And I am excited to expand my work into other kinds of story offerings, like films that combine audio, visual and multimedia elements, as well as original soundtracks. Thisis a ritual of healing, an expression of my muse and magic and Earth's imagination, as well as a prayer and catalyst for transformation. Your support means that I am able to offer myself more and more to this work and listen ever more deeply to what Earth is longing for, through me, in service to Life. You are a part of the creation and a part of the dreaming that is a Place for Myth and Music.
Benefits:
$10 per month Earth Dreamers - A reserved seat for the evening each month and have access to all the recordings, plus weekly posts and occasional song sketches for my album, this
$25 per month Co-creators of the New Story - the above, plus you meet with me either monthly in a small group story council (for 90 minutes, up to 13 participants) to deepen into how Myth can be a guide in these times (utilizing the story from the previous month) or, you meet with me 3 times a year for an hour of 1:1 to deepen into your own Soul story, you choose which you prefer (changes can be made quarterly by sending me a message)!
Stories at the Edge of Collapse
This isn’t just another Storytelling event! At the crossroads of inner-led change, meet: the collapse that is upon us, the ancestral archetypal world and the other-than-human world. This meeting place isthe portal at which we gather for Starter Culture’s; Stories at the edge of Collapse. The transformation invited through this story-journeying seeks to directly affect who and how we are in the world and our way of showing up for cultural renewal as change agents and soulfully alive humans.
As we journey together through story, we metabolize and compost our power-over culture as it is embedded within our ways of thinking and relating with the world (human and other-than-human). When we actively listen, journeying along the storylines, we ourselves are transformed.
Next Event: April 5, 2023 at 7pm CET
Ritual Theater
Current project: Through the Hexenring
In February 2020, Through the Hexenring premiered in Frankfurt at the Winterwerft Theater Festival at the Antigon Theater with Sara McFarland and Katja Wehe. It was a journey into the story of Frau Holle or Mother Holle. This one is known as the story about the paleolithic Great Mother of what is now known as Western and Eastern Europe. There are sites sacred to Frau Holle all over Germany, Switzerland, Austria. Ponds where the souls pass between the worlds, caves where she is said to live, megaliths she is said to have placed. Much like the Cailleach in Scotland or the Baba Yaga from the slavic countries, she is a wild old crone who tends winter, stone, water, sex and fertility and the wild animals are her kin. She makes weather, guides and creates the seasons, teaches spinning and the growing and preparation of flax, lives in the underworld (her stars hang in the roots of our trees), has tusks, receives the spirits of the dead, gestates the new babies, and passes through the lands at winter solstice with the spirits of the children to be born and chooses the mother for the baby. In her modern representation, she is a grandmotherly figure that shakes out her bed to make it snow on earth and has apples and bread that need to be plucked and taken out of the oven (a metaphor for sexuality, fertility and delivering babies), which the maidens learn from her when they enter her realm through the village well, after pricking themselves while spinning (my reading is that this is the onset of menarche). If the girl "behaves" while she is with Frau Holle, meaning she works hard shaking out the duvet so it will snow on earth, picking apples and taking out the loaves of bread, is kind and sweet tempered, prepares the food and tends the fire in Frau Holle'S home, then she returns to her world covered in gold. If she is lazy, selfish, mean and impudent, she returns covered in pitch.
I understand this story to be a story of initiation, traveling to the realm of the Earth Goddess to learn the women's mysteries once a girl has begun to bleed. I also see in this story, the shift from the time of initiation to the "modern paradigm" having forgotten or been converted. As is strangely commonplace, the story is then twisted to represent the christian virtues of hard work, politeness and innocence and teach girls to not be lazy or rude or have their own thoughts. I am curious about this story for many reasons as a Soul Initiation Guide and Death Doula for the Great Dying, as well as an artist. I am one who has been in service to this wild great mother their whole life.
Currently, I am working on a film of the story using audio and video of my storytelling, a paper theater, images and paintings by Katja Wehe and an original soundtrack.
Below are photos from the performance and two clips of the soundtrack - Gerde is the young woman who descends to the underworld of Frau Holle and returns with gold...

Pre-show the Holle is waiting with the Raven for Gerde

Gerde is spinning at the well. Gerde gets blood on her wool and tries to wash it out in the water. Her spindle falls in and she jumps in to retrieve it.

Annalena lets go of her material success and decides to begin the search for true happiness and meaning in her life.

Pre-show the Holle is waiting with the Raven for Gerde
More Stories
Deep Imagination Drum Journeys
CONTACT ME
Sara McFarland
+49 178 6369403
Book me for a Soul Storytelling event, a storytelling keynote for your conference or a storytelling workshop!