The Shapeshifter

I have been writing this class in my own bones for a very long time. I can't wait to bring it to you as a fully embodied archetype and container for our history and our future. 

Shapeshifters are adaptable, capable of a massive and entirely remaking kind of change. But shapeshifting comes with a wild willingness to be undone and to fully immerse in the unfamiliar, sometimes scary process of breaking bones, rewiring inner pathways, and stepping over thresholds as something entirely new. This is a powerful and necessary archetype for the world we are navigating together. 

We'll explore different mythologies and folklore around a variety of shapeshifters and we'll look directly at the words unchangeable people have used to describe them (lunactic, hysterical, etc). We'll mirror these stories with our own current moment in history and consider ways we, too, may be capable of shapeshifting. 

Someone has to lead the way into new worlds. It's likely always going to be the strange, the fluid, the bodies that move with tides and seasons and mystical gravitational pulls. It's likely always going to be people who have already faced the chrysalis and emerged bright-winged, wild, and new. 

Learning the ways of a shapeshifter may be exactly what enables us to press directly against the banks of our collective rivers and carve a new waterway straight through once dry ground. Let's go wandering weird and remade landscapes, rivers, and forests together. Let's see what wild creatures live there, waiting to teach us how to shed, terraform, shift, and fly.

"All that you touch
 You change.

All that you change
 Changes you.

The only lasting truth
 Is Change.

God
 Is Change."
 -Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower