Lost in the Land of Oz [antikvár]

Introduction This is a book about surviving as a spiritual orphan. Most of us discover, as life goes on, that we are ophaned in many ways: by our family of origin, by the gendei; class, and culture in which we are socialized, by systems and institutions, sometimes by our work, by traditional belief structures, and by those who are closest to us. We spend a good deal of time and energy in denying, compensating for, silencing and bribing our inner orphan. This book is about knowing and accepting that inner orphan and giving it the power to make our lives and our world creative, harmonious, and whole. We discover our inner orphan through the myths we live by. Myths are the most powerful forces in the universe. We can be imprisoned by them, crippled by them; we can also be liberated and empowered by them. Myths tell us truths about our own experience; they mirror our personal story. But they are also revelations of a larger story that is evolving: the story of the earth-community and all its creatures, the Gaia. Myths are timeless, boundaryless. This is a book that allows myths to play before our consciousness, like dolphins in the sea of time. It is written from the point of view of a North American woman, but it speaks through the medium of myth for many others. America itself was a myth long before it was a place, a people. It was imagined as a New World, a new beginning where orphans and refugees could build a new way of belonging to each other and to the world. Likewise the future of the world will be mythologized out of the shards of the past, long before it becomes a reaUty. America was and is a great laboratory for social experiment. Pieces of our story have a way of becoming part of the story of people everywhere. For some people today the most urgent questions concern hunger and homelessness, staying alive. These are truly the abandoned ones of the earth. But many of us who are more privileged also experience a sense of abandonment and aloneness. Why?