Season 2 Episode 34: Remembering Stories to Weave the World Anew with Sylvia Linsteadt

“The divine loves you and the oak tree. Absolutely equally. not more and not less. “

Ever since Sylvia was a little girl, she’s always read and written stories and was very drawn to old myths and ancient cultures, almost wanting to embody them through her writing as her way into them. For the longest time, she considered her writing fantasy, separated from her sense of embodied participation with the Earth and with life along with a fear to connect these two worlds. However, her writing became her intuitive channel as it opened her process and molded her 20s slowly as she studied animal tracking, wanting to reflect the land around her from a more than human perspective. Animal tracking taught her this language to listen deeply into the land that she was in. As she continued her studies, things started to weave in intuitively as it does with creative work to a place that she couldn’t really articulate or speak to. Unfortunately (or rather fortunately), a painful experience called her to the island of Crete, opening her consciousness of her own relationship to her intuition, connecting something, and initiating her process of remembering.

Sylvia V. Linsteadt was born in San Francisco, California in 1989. She studied Literary Arts at Brown University. Her books include Our Lady of the Dark Country, the award-nominated middle grade fantasy duology The Wild Folk and The Wild Folk Rising, the novel Tatterdemalion with artist Rima Staines, and the award-winning collection of essays, Lost Worlds of the San Francisco Bay Area. You can listen to Sylvia read selections of her stories on her popular podcast, Kalliope’s Sanctum. She currently lives in Devon, England with her little black Cretan dog and a hive that is expecting bees.

What we discuss…

01:06 – Introducing Sylvia

02:18 – What the Time of the Feminine Means to Sylvia

07:48 – Process of Remembering

14:14 – Sylvia on the Greek Island of Crete

19:59 – Returning to Crete

26:07 – The Minotaur and the Labyrinth

31:26 – The Reclamation of the Feminine and Discovering Truths

39:04 – The Venus Year

47:16 – Marija Gimbutas and the Study of the Feminine

55:13 – Sylvia in Behalf of the Divine Mother

Learn more from Sylvia