Announcements - April 2025

Hi there, beloved subscribers.

I’ve got some announcements for you. First, an announcement about announcements.

From here on out, I’ll be sending out a newsletter, just like this one, on the first Monday of each month. This will include info on (1) upcoming educational and event offerings and other publications of my writing, (2) referrals to what I’ve been reading, and (3) my poem of the week.

On other Mondays, I’ll continue sending out poems of the week with musings, as I have in the past.

Here’s the updates for April:

1. A New Website.

   After years of allergic attitudes to social media and self-promotion, I’m getting real and consistent about cultivating my online presence. Within the next couple weeks I hope to have my author website live at JeffreeMorel.com (link coming soon), where you’ll be able to view a portfolio of my published writings and book educational offerings like guided meditations or foraging & forest bathing tours.

   
   

2. Scheduling Foraging Tours.

   Speaking of which, I’m beginning to schedule my foraging & forest bathing tours for the spring and summer for the Eugene area. I’ll be organizing at least two field outings each month beginning with the weekends of May 11 (Mother’s Day) and May 17. Secure your spot today by commenting or messaging me below.

   
   

3. Essay Published in Pensive. This month, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality & the Arts will be publishing my essay “Making Friends with Fire.” It’s a labor of love about ending fire suppression and reintegrating conscious landscape burning into cultures of the American West, informed by my experiences losing my childhood home to wildfire in 2008 and taking a social forestry class at Siskiyou Permaculture in winter of 2023. I’ll post the link here when it’s live.

What I’m Reading

1. The Hero with A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

   
   

   

   Joseph Campbell waxing poetic on The Power of Myth docu-series

   
   

“[E]very failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late… [T]he hero’s passage…shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale… The individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls.”

For three months traveling abroad, The Hero with a Thousand Faces was the book I carried with me the entire time. On the return flight, I finished annotating my favorite dogeared passages in my journal. It was one of those instances of perfect timing that feeds my faith in a legendary order amidst life’s chaos.

This act of timely completion in itself felt like a fitting illustration of The Hero With a Thousand Faces’ central theme of the cosmogonic cycle. Also referred to as the monomyth, this is the hero’s journey common to mythological stories laced throughout all human cultures as well as our individual psyches. In simplest terms, we experience the chapters of our lives and stories in three phases: separation from the known world, initiation into the unknown, and a return to synthesize the two. A beginning, middle, and end, with variations on the same symbolic representations and archetypal images along the way.

Source: YourHeroicJourney.com

One of the great teachers of the 20th century, Campbell provides tools not only for writers to craft enduring stories, but for anyone to seek a greater understanding of how the archetypes of the human unconscious manifest in their lives and spirituality. For me, this text served to help me understand my own life initiations as much as those of any characters I create.

By mapping my individual struggles to grow onto the overarching collective journey, I could notice and channel otherwise intangible experiences onto their symbolic representations. My clinging to safety became difficulty “leaving the mother-breast,” my fear of the future confrontation with a dreaded “ogre-father.”

These symbols are especially essential for us to contend with in periods of great transition, offering support for the individual passing from one phase of life or consciousness into another. Whereas today we often accomplish this in the privacy of a therapist’s office, historically, most cultures accomplished it publicly through rites of initiation. Instead of mere dream analysis, they practiced dream enactment, with shared rituals bringing the shadowy subconscious themes of our evolutions through different mindsets to light.

Despite the apparent differences of our roles and personalities, in our dreams and our waking lives, we each pass through common elements in our journeys from womb to tomb. Myths reground us in the shared mystery and wonder of our existence.

Where to Read It: Available online for free at Archive.org.

2. Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within by Kenny Werner

Effortless Mastery is a guide for jazz players to reconnect with the basic joy and divine expression of making music, but it can work just as well for writers or other artists. Through the rigors of education and professionalism, don’t we all tend to forget the wonder of why we started creating what we love to create? In the beginning, it wasn’t because we wanted to sound good, get paid, or gain adoration. In fact, in one of the artistic life’s endlessly frustrating paradoxes, the harder we try to sound good, the worse we perform!

In this book, acclaimed pianist Kenny Werner frees music from the desires of the mind for achievement and recognition, back to its basic spiritual function of connection and expression through vibration, the fundamental forces that make up the universe. Even rock, blues, and jazz can be traced back to the spiritual traditions of Africa, where instead of lusting for riches, women, or drugs, the players’ purpose was closeness with God.

Despite how revered a select few creators become in every era, making music or other art forms is not now and never has been much of a stable or lucrative way of life. Yet so many of us artists who try to make a living out of it wind up hoping for this, and pinning our self-worth on success. Even if one achieves success, it’s not stable, so neither is our sense of self. Creating to prove your own worth is a recipe for obsession and resentment — I know because I’ve veered toward that path, more than a few times.

In Effortless Mastery, Werner reminds artists to shed the pretentions of greatness and self-evaluation through one’s art, and reconnect with the wonder and joy that drove us to create in the first place. Then no matter what comes of it, the art will serve its purpose.

Where to Read It: Available for $9.99 on Kindle or free in audiobook format on Hoopla by connecting your local library account.

3. The Nettle Witch, MD on Substack

   
   

   

   
   

Last but not least, I want to shine my dim spotlight over to another Substack creator whose work I consistently enjoy, Amy Walsh of The Nettle Witch, MD. If you’re a plant geek like me, who loves being able to walk through a forest or garden and know what all these green beings are called and how they can be used, do yourself a favor and subscribe to her newsletter, which offers in-depth run downs on the uses, cultural significance, and other ethnobotanical tidbits on common North American herbs. To start, try her post on the beautiful, medicinal, spiritual, material water-loving shrub Red-Osier Dogwood.

Poem of the Week

Water Carved Geography

[Inspired by hiking the hills and swimming the rivers of Costa Rica’s Chirripo Valley]

Rivers are bridges from sky to sea.

That sculpt the Earth with rich features

It will take an eternity to explore

And still never touch the secret aquifer.

They invite trees to grow as pioneers

Whose leaves, roots, wood, flowers, fruit, and rot

All amplify the softened soils allure

Breaking dead bedrock into wriggling loam.

And these attract birds, butterflies, and bees

Sprung from eggs, ecstatic to spread seeds,

Intoxicating mates by patterns

Laced through aphrodisiac wings.

In lives like us, the salmon, frogs, dogs, and jaguar,

Water logs in flesh and rolls uphill.

In the ripples of dissipating passion,

We fall in trance and remember how it feels.

Home is the horizon.

The path there greens the more we go.

Every relative vein from the peaks above

Carves a tier in the valley below.

From headwaters to mouth, the notches make teeth

Riddled with rock candy cavities where saliva springs.

And cotton clouds slither and lodge between

Like smoke in the wind of wide bug eyes.

By our meals, plans, arts, and symbols,

We make our bed in the watershed a chrysalis.

Then at the breath between ridges,

Groom away the eroded sediments of experience

And wonder at the next network, what wings wait beyond.

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