WISE COUNCIL
Although the understanding of the village and tending to the hearth as the center of a community or home has been part of many cultures for thousands of years, including my own lineages, it was devouring Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen in high school that awoken the power of a collective voice in circle within me. At the time, I hadn't experienced anything as powerful as that. The sharing of stories, the reflections, wisdom and insights from those stories and finding myself on pages with people whose path had never crossed mine affirmed for me that we were deeply connected, even while living out our individuality. In my early adulthood, I was having a moment of reflecting on my life (as I tend to do during the Winter season especially) as well as trying to find the missing links in my ancestry. I had a deep and sudden urge to connect with them because I felt that if I knew more about them, maybe all of my quirks would make more sense. In my search for them, I found myself, and little did I know it then, but my life started to become more organized in "circles" as opposed to the separatist, hierarchal lines I had been programmed to operate in.
19