Feral - Softcover

Deena Metzger

4.17

6 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0972071857 ISBN 13: 9780972071857

Publisher: Hand to Hand, 2011

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This novel, based on a true story, is one woman s journey out of the strictures of cultural mores and societal values of what is sane, judicious, and appropriate and into the world of the primal intelligences that churn within all of us. A girl is found in a tree, alone, seemingly frightened and unwilling to communicate with anyone. And yet she displays a certain intelligence that beckons to the woman, intrigues her with its innate and often hidden language. The woman finds herself drawn into a world of beauty and fear, intensity and passion, that eventually brings her to a new awareness of what is missing in the left-brain intelligence that so dominates our assumptions of reality. This brilliant work will bring you to the edge of what you know to be true, challenging the very tenets of your existence and opening the door to what is missing in all our lives: the awakened animal consciousness whose wild intelligence renews our passion for life, for nature, and completes our sensibilities so that we can live as equals in the web of all life as human animals, alive to the very core of our being.

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About the Author:

Deena Metzger is a writer and healer living at the end of the road in Topanga, California. Her books include the novels Doors: A Fiction for Jazz Horn, The Other Hand, What Dinah Thought, Skin: Shadows/Silence A Love Letter in the Form of a Novel and The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them - a novel in the form of a play. The latter is included Tree: Essays and Pieces, which features her celebrated Warrior Poster on its cover testifying to a woman s triumph over breast cancer. Ruin and Beauty: New and Collected Poems is her most recent book. Writing For Your Life: A Guide and Companion to the Inner Worlds is her classic text on writing and the imagination. She co-edited the anthology, Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals, one of the first testimonies to the reality and nature of animal intelligence. Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing; and From Grief into Vision: A Council examine the tragic failure of contemporary culture and provide guidance for personal, political, environmental and spiritual healing.

A radical thinker on behalf of the natural world and planetary survival, a teacher of writing and healing practices for 50 years, a writer and activist profoundly concerned with peacemaking, restoration and sanctuary for a beleagured world, she, with her husband, writer, Michael Ortiz Hill, introduced Dar� to North America. Dar� is a unique form of individual and community healing based on indigenous and contemporary medicine and wisdom traditions.

Review:

On a tightrope stretched between enlightenment and oneness with nature on the one hand and injury and madness on the other, Feral teeters wildly. Its central theme: what is healing and who needs it most the hunter or the hunted, the animal or humankind, the therapist or the patient? Our brains are said to contain three layers a reptilian base, layered by a mammalian ring, covered by a uniquely human neocortex. If you think the human cortex is really on top, Feral will set you straight. In a spark and glimmer of flash and transformation Metzger dips us into the primordial soup, spins us around counter-clockwise, back to the beginning of time. We are then stripped of clothes and ordinary comforts in order to seek the wisdom and self-knowledge locked into the pain that can t and shouldn t be taken away. Instead we must shimmy up the world tree fully naked in order to reconnect with our animal eyes, pis* and howl. --Terry Marks-Tarlow, author of Psyche s Veil:Psychotherapy, Fractals and Complexity

There aren't many people who could do what Deena Metzger did and then find the language to tell us about it. She tracks the healing process with unusual precision and insight. This is an extraordinary story of becoming whole from a wise healer and a humble seeker. --Ellen Bass, author of The Human Line

With tremendous insight and compassion, Deena Metzger's unique book leads us into the intuitive depths of a profound therapeutic relationship. In her breathtaking and poetic prose, Feral leads us on a truly remarkable and beautiful engagement with the wild journey that is healing. --Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD, author of Coyote Medicine

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