an interview with Deena Metzger
Sonya: You say that story is the bintu point from which the universe is created. What is the meaning of "bintu"? How have you arrived at this understanding? Deena: The bintu point is defined as the point, the essential spark, of fundamental energy. It is from Sanskrit. It is similar to the point that cosmologists or physicists or astrophysicists identify as the point from which the Big Bang occurred. So there is, in science and philosophy, a constant of the concentration of possibility. I have been thinking about the phenomenon of story for about thirty years, and over that time, it has become increasingly clear that story is a concentration of interrelated events. These events are in a dynamic equilibrium, and are unified across many dimensions. All possibility for our life, as well as the direction of an authentic path, can be seen as the story unfolding. Sonya: Did you receive that understanding through the practice of your life? Deena: Through the scrutiny and observation of my own life, and through working with thousands of people, listening attentively to their stories and how they unfold. Also through observing stories cohering before my eyes. Let me give you an example. I did a workshop in Montana with the organization Hawk, I’m Your Sister. On the way to the hotel, we passed a little prairie dog city and the prairie dogs came out and sat on their houses like sentinels, and we heard their song, or sound, and stopped to listen and watch. When we got to the place where we were staying, Beverly Antaeus, who runs Hawk, I’m Your Sister, greeted me with tremendous excitement and concern. She barely said hello, then pulled me over to see what had been put in her hand. What it turned out to be was a prairie dog. The story was this: A man was canoeing down the river and he saw something, and as he went toward it, he saw that it was a prairie dog that had almost drowned. He brought it back to the hotel. He didn’t know what to do, since he was immediately getting on the plane and going home. Beverly was standing there, so he just put the prairie dog in her hand. So, now we have the question of what to do with the prairie dog. We sat in council with it. It was the first thing we did in the workshop. A lot of the women were moved by it; some were irritated by starting the workshop in this manner, and they just said, "Let it go." But if we let it go, an owl or a cat would surely have taken it. If we returned it to where it came from, it would be forty miles upriver, and we still weren’t sure where it had come from. We didn’t know how it would fare. Or we could take it to the prairie dog city. What makes this an incredible story is that Beverly had spent the last year and a half trying to save the prairie dogs in the area where they were being dislodged by developers. So, here is the configuration of events. We stopped to hear the prairie dog’s chirp, which was louder than the driver had ever heard. Someone put the prairie dog in Beverly’s hands as if they knew that she was the one who could care for it. And then we started a workshop where it is quite obvious that we have to attend this as a sacred story that is unfolding. How we responded to this animal was as challenging as it is in any fairytale when the hero or heroine goes on the path and is confronted by an animal who asks for help. Those stories teach us that the decision that we make, and the way it is made, is going to shape the rest of the story. It is the story, as we have read in myths, of encounters in the physical world that signal an event occurring simultaneously in the mythic and spiritual realm. How we treat this most ordinary prairie dog will have consequences for us. Sonya: Individually and as a community? Deena: Certainly. Sonya: So, what did you end up doing? Deena: Finally, because she had been so active on behalf of prairie dogs, we asked that it be primarily Beverly’s decision. We pulled several cards, and the first card was for the question, "Who was the prairie dog?" That card was the hanged man, the sacrificed one. In this particular deck, the symbol used was Prometheus. The story was, this creature had sacrificed himself for the sake of a higher principle, so it was clear that we needed to treat it as a sacred being, with great respect. We concluded that we should bring the creature to the prairie dog city, the one we had passed, with the hope that we understood the call that had stopped us there, giving us an option that we might not have otherwise had. We might have gone by those hills and not known there was a prairie dog city there. We did a lot of prayer, and the next morning we did ritual. We took the prairie dog to the city, let it out 300 yards away, so that it had a choice of what it would do, and drummed and chanted as it got out of the box, went toward the hills, stopped on one little rise, got up on its haunches and looked at us, and then ran toward the community. We heard a song that we decided to interpret as a greeting, a welcoming home. Sonya: It makes me wonder what stories the prairie dogs are telling about us. For those people who are not writers, what would you have to say about how story bridges those dimensions? How can an imaginary story bridge dimensions, and the ways we understand the "other"? Deena: As we look at the story, we see that it bridges dimensions. There is more to the story than we thought was there. Yesterday, at our workshop, a woman wrote a very sweet and simple piece that she called "Praising the Dirt of Heaven." She was exulting in her childhood memories of being outside with her fingers in the dirt. The next morning, another woman dreamed that she was trapped in a house surrounded by mud and she couldn’t keep her little boy out of the mud. This little boy was quite a charmer, but also an escape artist. As we talked about it, we realized it was her creativity. She realized that it was referring to the fact that she had put aside being a potter twenty years ago because a boyfriend was trying to limit her life at that time. She had told herself all this time that she did not like getting her hands dirty, but that wasn’t the truth of it. It was a way to justify not doing what she loved. Suddenly in the room, there was a bridge being made between one woman’s exuberant remembering of getting her hands dirty and this dream that brought another woman to remember that she had given up something that she had loved. She had set creativity aside, and spent twenty years trying to make it all right with herself. She left the workshop in her own exuberance, waiting to get the clay, the mud, back under her fingernails. In the process of doing the creative work and sharing stories, we came to a place where one person’s dreams were beginning to merge with others’ dreams, and a larger story was being built that spoke to and encouraged everyone’s creativity. Very often, when people are struggling with serious illness, one of the factors in healing is returning to what is authentic craft or denied creativity. We go back and listen to the life story and try to find out if there is a place where a natural path has been repressed, or has had to go underground, or has been twisted off in the wrong direction. Healing asks us to step back onto the authentic path. Sonya: You spent 13 years writing your novel The Other Hand. You had a sense, I’m sure, of what that was about in your personal story. Now that it has been released into the world, do you know what its place or meaning is for others? Deena: I just wrote an inscription in the book to be mailed to Cardinal Lustigier [The real, living cardinal of Paris to whom the novel is addressed], in which I said, "Perhaps this entire labor was only so that I could ask you to say kaddish with me for our dead." It occurs to me that that is one of the consequences of the book. Whether it is ever acknowledged explicitly or implicitly or not, the book has created a bond, and, I think, healing and reconciliation. On an energetic level, healing manifests in the book. People read it and say that it affects them in ways that novels usually don’t; they feel that it has a palpable healing energy. Perhaps that is because it was my intent from the beginning not to tell a story of outrage, but to investigate the nature of innocence and the nature of evil and their relationship to each other. I did this for the sake of all of us who suffer. One of the things I have understood in writing The Other Hand is how profound Peter Schmidt, the Nazi character, suffered. His fate was awful! He was, to a great extent, an innocent victim of this demon that tortured his life in such a terrible way, as it did for people who suffered the consequences of his behavior. Every moment that I spent with this book, I was often overwhelmed with nausea with what I knew and learned. I kept asking, "What are the causes, and how can we heal this? How can we understand it?" Deena Metzger’s recently released novel, The Other Hand, is already appearing on bestseller lists. Deena will be at the Women of Wisdom Conference in Seattle February 17-19, where she is leading a two-and-a-half-day writing intensive and offering a keynote speech. For information and to register, call (206) 782-3363. |
Deena Metzger is a poet, novelist, and healer. She developed a therapy model called Healing Stories that creatively addresses life-threatening diseases, spiritual and emotional crises, and community and political disintegration. In recent years, she has included the members of the natural world in her definition of community, both political and spiritual.