Online & In Your Body
Starts February 23
~ A Free Live Web Series ~
Old Stories Still Speak
Mythology, Land & Ancestry
As Guides in Modern Times
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Join us for this FREE, three-part online series exploring mythology, connection to land and place, ancestry, and the ways old stories offer guidance in our modern lives and changing world.
Together, we will listen for what these stories still carry about grief and belonging, change and continuity, and how we find our way through life’s thresholds.
We hold the intention of cultivating community, cultural understanding, healing, reconciliation, and an openness to what the stories themselves may reveal and stir in each of us.
~ See full description & storyteller bio's below ~
Session 1 (Mon, Feb 23) - Kakisimow Iskwew /Natalie Pepin (Meeting My Ancestors)
Story: A Deeper Look at Sleeping Beauty
Session 2 (Mon, Mar 2) - Dougie MacKay (The Story Connection)
Story: The Coming of Finn & the Salmon of Wisdom
Session 3 - (Mon, Mar 9) - Stephanie MacKay (Mythology & Culture Remembered)
Story: The Birth of Oisín
Session 4 - (Mon, Mar 23) - Tom Langhorne
(Fandabi Dozi YouTube Channel & TomLanghorne.com)
Walking the Old Highland Ways: Learning Through Embodied Story
Featuring the live and recorded music & of special guest singers:
Hanna Leigh
Founder of Weaving Remembrance & Hanna Leigh on Bandcamp
And, Carly Joynt of Wilder Connections
Meet the Story Tellers
( All replays will be made available after the session )
Your Host: Chris Gilmour
Chris will be hosting the series and offering a connective thread between sessions, helping to bridge the stories into lived relationship with land, season, and everyday life.
Drawing on decades of work in nature connection, land based skills, and resilience education, Chris supports participants in carrying the stories beyond the screen and into direct experience.
Between sessions, he will offer simple reflections and practices that invite listening through the body and the land, allowing myth to become something walked with, rather than only thought about.
His role is not to interpret the stories for participants, but to help create the conditions where each person can meet them in their own way, in their own place.
HOST: CHRIS GILMOUR
WITH NATALIE PEPIN
A Deeper Look at Sleeping Beauty
Date: Monday, February 23 @ 8pm EDT / 5pm PDT / 1am UK (GMT)
Storyteller: Kakisimow Iskwew / Natalie Pepin
From: Meeting My Ancestors
We live in a time when many people of European descent are waking up to but feel cut off from their land based, folk ancestry that suffered waves of colonization from Rome to the Holy Roman Empire, famine, disease, war upon war before washing up on the shores of what would become known as North America.
There seems to be no way back to the forgotten wisdom those people held and so the only place to find it seems to be in the traditions and practices of other still intact (or more intact) indigenous peoples.
In this session, join Natalie Pepin as she makes the case that more memory survived than we’ve been led to believe - much of it in the form of common folk and fairy tales you likely heard as a child or watched as Disney movies.
If you are willing to look at fairy tales as memory, not just metaphor, we can begin to unpack those ancestral teachings, and instructions for how to live today.
In this session, we’ll be coming to a small portion of that cultural memory via the old Grimm’s tale Briar Rose - a version of the Sleeping Beauty story that exists in many versions around the world.
The Coming of Finn & the Salmon of Knowledge
Dougie introduces us to the world of the fabled Fianna, the hunter gatherer warrior poets of Ancient Ireland and Scotland.
Through a keystone myth we meet a keystone species, the salmon, wondering at its poetic and practical importance.
We glean insights through old story, passed down through oral tradition, about the culture and attitudes of the ancient gaels.
At the heart of this story is a gift of 'seeing', the sort of quality essential for good leadership. This tale steeps us in landscape, mythos and echoes of the old culture of the isles.
As a professional Scottish storyteller, with an ear tuned to the mythopoetic and a background in nature education, Dougie brings his own distinct flavour to this tale.
WITH DOUGIE MACKAY
WITH STEPHANIE MACKAY
The Birth of Oisín
Date: Monday, March 9 @ 8pm EDT / 5pm PDT / 1am UK (GMT)
Storyteller: Stephanie MacKay
Stephanie will be carrying us into the story, that we now know as Oisín's Mother or The Birth of Oisín.
This offering explores the ancient ceremony of marriage to the land as a sacred union that shapes both soul and culture. Entering into this relationship brings a profound gift to the people, not as something owned, but as something entrusted.
Our initiatory journey is inseparable from grief, knowing that grief is the fertile ground that precedes new life and transformation.
The myth reminds us that our soul knows how to recognize the Holy when it appears, and that our role is not to possess it, but to become stewards of what is born through relationship - with the land, with loss, and with the sacred.
Walking the Old Highland Ways: Learning Through Embodied Story
Date: Monday, March 23 @ 12pm EDT/ 9am PDT / 5pm UK (GMT)
Storyteller: Tom Langhorne
Tom Langhorne is a filmmaker and wilderness guide based in the Scottish Highlands. He is best known for his 17th Century Highlander Survival series on his YouTube channel "Fandabi Dozi" (over 370,000 subscribers), where he explores the survival skills, kit and knowledge of the Highlanders around 300 years ago- through historically grounded reenactment and practical experimentation.
His work centres on embodied learning - using the body, landscape, and seasonal rhythms to understand old stories through lived experience rather than theory alone.
This approach also shapes his work as a co-founder of "Resilient Roots", an online survival school and learning community focused on individual, community, and ecological resilience. Across both projects, Tom explores how ancestral ways of living can still offer practical guidance in modern times.
WITH TOM LANGHORNE
SONGS BY
HANNA LEIGH
Featuring the music of special guest singer Hanna Leigh
Founder of Weaving Remembrance & Hanna Leigh on Bandcamp
Hannah is a voice doula, singer songwriter, and cultural practitioner who helps people reconnect with ancestral wisdom through traditional song, story, and earth rooted practices.
She will be weaving song into select sessions to help carry us deeper into the stories and their teachings.
All sessio
As we gather online from many places, with roots that reach across the sea.
Although we are working with stories of old European lineage, this series is open to people of all cultures, backgrounds, and faiths and no prior knowledge is required.
We hold the intention of cultivating community, deep connection to land and place, cultural understanding, healing, reconciliation, and an openness to what the stories themselves may reveal and stir in each of us.
One of our storytellers, Dougie MacKay, was born and raised in Scotland, joining us from the land several of these stories originate.
Natalie Pepin is Métis and helps Metis individual, parents, youth and children connect with their culture through her work at Meeting My Ancestors.
Stephanie MacKay lives on Turtle Island, with roots in the British Isles, and has gone deep in her own journey into myth, ancestry, and what it means to walk in right relation to the history and stories of the lands we live on.
And Chris Gilmour will be the host, offering a bridge between sessions and thoughts and practices on taking these stories to the land and connecting with seasonal rhythms.
Together, they will be sharing stories that have passed through time, and stories that pass through us.
Not only through the mouths that tell them, and the ears that hear them, but through the body and land itself.
Some stories do not simply entertain or explain.
They reverberate.
They meet us in the tender places,
And awaken what we cannot always reconcile with the mind alone.
Because life asks things of us.
Grief and change.
Longing and belonging.
The beautiful and the unbearable.
Moments where we do not have a map for what comes next.
Myth can offer orientation.
It carries images and characters that hold living patterns:
tricksters and guardians, deceit and devotion, death and birth, the hard turns of fate, and the quiet work of becoming.
When we listen this way, story is not separate from the living world.
It is often said that "story is the land and land is the story."
In this series, we will listen deeply and with all of our senses for what these old stories still know about walking through a modern and quickly changing world.
Below you will find the three sessions, along with details and short bios for each guest.
What to Expect...
Each session is approximately 1.5 hours and includes:
A grounding opening experience to help you arrive and connect with the seasonal rhythms of the natural world, calm the mind, open the senses, and help you to feel the story rather than analyze it
The telling of the myth, followed by reflections from each storyteller on how its themes show up in modern life
Shared discussion time to explore what the story stirred or revealed for you
Optional reflection prompts to help you carry the story back into your life and out onto the land between sessions
No prior experience with myth or storytelling is required.
All good hearted people are welcome regardless of ethnicity, gender or spiritual beliefs.
Values Statement
In this socially and politically divided world, we build community by being a welcoming space for people of all ethnic backgrounds, spiritual beliefs and genders.
We are an inclusive, politically-neutral space, focused on skills, connection, and resilience.
At the heart of our work is a reverence for nature, a respect for all peoples, a commitment to being good caretakers of the land and recognition of the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples on their native lands.
If these values do not align with you, this offering may not be the right fit.
Please feel free to contact us to discuss before joining.
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