Wendy K. Laidlaw

And so eventually what I had to understand was there was something in me that was connected to something much bigger than me.

And the fact that people around me not only didn't see it, but were like defended against it.

really didn't count that much.

I had to find that kind of connection.

And then I wound up kept falling back to story.

When I was defeated by the world, I'd go back to a certain story.

And then eventually I realized, oh, I'm guided by stories.

And I want to say one other thing about this, because I think it has feminine qualities that are typically denied in the modern Western world.

And eventually I found out by studying that those things you could call lunar wisdom.

So we are in, generally speaking, masculine-toned, solar-oriented, like the sun is the...

the ruler and everybody's trying to get high and be seen in the light well in ancient cultures they used to think or imagine or say that the moon was more powerful than the sun and a person could say how can that be the sun comes out every day and brings the light and without the suns the plants won't grow but what they were thinking about was that the most powerful thing in the world is change

And change is the only constant in the world.

And what is the symbol of change?

The moon.

Because every time you see it, it's changed.

And not only that, it completely disappears and then comes back and becomes full again.

And that's what life is really about.

That's what's happening in the forest and that's what's happening in nature.

And so lunar knowledge, they called it, which was connected to intuition and fluidity because...

the stages of the moon are causing the tides in the oceans.