Literary Birthday – 17 September – Deena Metzger

Happy Birthday, Deena Metzger, born 17 September 1936.

Nine Quotes

1. There are mythic patterns under all of our lives. Each one of us, often unbeknownst to ourselves, is engaged in a drama of soul that is not reserved only for gods, heroes, and saints. Story is one bridge between the human realm and the divine.
2. Beauty appears when something is completely and absolutely and openly itself.
3. Without compassion, we will never know anyone or anything, not even our own story. Too much judgement, too many ideas and attitudes will stand in the way of the fundamental principle that we are similar to, connected with, and part of everything else.
4. Write against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie. Validate what you don’t validate. Indulge what you don’t like. Wallow in it. Write the opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the grain!
5. Understanding the Way of Story as a sacred pattern and a living event. Story can reveal a spiritual path and or the way to healing. Stories become the foundation of health, peacebuilding and vision. Learning to listen, to recognise, to understand and attend the teachings and revelations of the Stories we have been given to live guides us toward the 5th world. Our individual stories, when carefully attended, can reveal each person’s particular path of healing and transformation. Even illness is a story that can lead us to our own and to community healing. Learning to recognise the Story that we or another is living can be a worthy life work.
6. Creating art and creating ourselves are the same act; art, world, ourselves – these are continuous with one another.
7. Stories move in circle. They don’t move in straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles. There are stories inside stories and stories between stories and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. And part of the finding is the getting lost. And when you’re lost you start to look around and to listen.
8. Stories heal us because we become whole through them. In the process of writing, of discovering our story, we restore those parts of ourselves that have been scattered, hidden, suppressed, denied, distorted, forbidden, and we come to understand that stories heal.
9. The world of public discourse – political, social, diplomatic, commercial – has so corrupted language that we are rightly more suspicious of the meaning of words than we are convinced of their veracity. Language has been turned on its head.

Deena Metzger is an American writer, healer, and teacher. Her work spans multiple genres including the novel, poetry, non-fiction, and plays. She is the author of Writing For Your Life,  A Rain of Night Birds, and Feral.

Source for image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deena_outside_by_gate,_smiling.jpg

A hungate, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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