Writing the Heroine's Journey with Catherine Connors

Welcome to Sacred Paras, the podcast where we uncover the hidden, the holy, and the deeply sacred in the city of light. I'm Patricia Russo, your host. I'm a mystic, a spiritual teacher, and a lover of the sacred in all things. From the quiet chapels of Moumacht to the serene gardens tucked away from the bustling streets, join me as we journey into the heart of Paris, exploring its spiritual treasures and timeless wisdom. Together we will find moments of stillness, stories of inspiration, and ways to bring a little more sacredness into our daily lives. I fell in love with my guest today on the path, literally, in Saint-Bombe last year. We found each other by way of Megan Waterson's House of Mary, and it was during one of our hikes to Mary's cave that our love for story, writing, and holding space came together in a desire that we shared. And this desire came to fruition in May of this year, as we co-created and hosted, our first writing the heroine's journey pilgrimage in Saint-Bombe. For me, it was a delight to spend time with Catherine again to be sitting at the table with other real writers and a celebrity one guiding the magical journey of story in a place that I feel is the most sacred of all. It was and still is a pinch me moment in time. Today's conversation is a selfish endeavor. I've asked Catherine to join me here so that we can share a bit of alchemical magic, and so that you can feel into her wisdom, craft, and wild imagination. And the hope is that all of this will inspire you in some way, and that you might even feel a little or big tingle to join us on our next adventure. Catherine Connors is a passionate believer in the deep magic of storytelling. A longtime scholar of story, she blends academic expertise in folklore and mythology with a legacy of leadership across entertainment and digital media. As a former head of content and editor-in-chief at the Walt Disney Company, Catherine has championed transformative narratives across some of the most important story spaces of our time. The award-winning author of the feminine revolution and a dedicated advocate for women and girls, she is a modern fairy godmother of story whose deepest passion is helping women and others unlock their inner storytellers and unleash their magic. I am delighted to share any space with you, Catherine, and it's an absolute joy to have this conversation with you today and for it to live here for others to hear and possibly be inspired by. Thank you for being here with me today. It's so, so mutual. So mutual. I love that you have the word fairy godmother in your bio and that you have a history with Disney. I'd love to begin with how story found you and where did this love affair with words and imagination and writing begin for you. Oh gosh. I honestly, it goes way, way back. It goes back to childhood. I had the deep divine fortune of being raised by parents who were lovers of story to say that they were lovers of stories and understate things and my mom in particular was just a dedicated fabulous and amateur folk lourist and amateur and the deepest sense of she loved fairy tale. She loved, she loved making up stories and so my childhood was filled with all of her creations, right. We would go for a walk. I was raised in the Pacific Northwest in Canada. We go through walk through deeply wooded forests and she would tell all these stories about the fairies that live there and the animal councils and all of the worlds and doings of these creatures of the forest and the stories of the trees themselves. It really infused in me. This is like really not just passion, but sort of deep sense of home in story that evolved. Of course, you know, as teenagers, we go through sort of different permutations of our relationships to these things. But by this time I was in university and then when I was deciding to pursue advanced degrees, it was my passion sort of took me down the rabbit holes of the philosophy of storytelling and in particular political philosophy of storytelling, understanding how story shape, how we understand how we move about in the world and how we live together in the world. So yeah, it's like it goes way back and extends a long way and it's just been, you know, one of the honors of my life to have it be a defining focus of my entire life. Right. You've shared this mother with me in various ways and I feel like she's with us when we're on these adventures and I can only imagine, I mean, I think that living, like growing up as a little girl with a mother with an imagination like that is an impression of it. It's like it has an impression on you that can possible not to look at the world through that lens. Yeah, it's the deepest impression. It's the deepest. I mean, our trusted adults, whoever our trusted adults are, you know, the humans in our lives that shape our world views and our experience of the world. It's a deep gift to have those being, especially in the form of my amazing mother, be story makers, not just storytellers, but story makers, human beings deeply committed to seeing the world through the lens of story and seeing the magic and divine in the world through the prism of the imagination. Yeah, it left the deepest impression on me. I don't know if any of you listening know someone or have someone in your life who's a good storyteller, but it's really a remarkable craft to have somebody who looks at the world that way. Is this something that you pass down to your children? I imagine. Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, my son in particular, like his singular obsession and ambition is to be a storyteller in the traditional sense. I was currently working on a fantasy series, and I'm so proud of him. He's 17 years old and so deep into the world of storytelling. And my daughter is a good deeply social storyteller, like has tremendous gifts of around connecting people and going beyond the word to the image gifted photographer sees the world through that lens. I'm really proud of that. Yeah, and probably most proud of creating space for them to understand that they have a space on a landscape of story. I mean, you and I talk about this a lot, especially in the context of having decided last year to create this experience that story is absolutely a craft and a practice, but it's also accessible to anyone. And I think that the human experience and our most human technology and the ancient Greek sense of the word as a practice to be story makers to communicate to want to make meaning together and to give my children or anyone the experience and permission of defining for themselves what that looks like is really an honor. And I think that's beautiful. Well, this is a great segue to the next question and just it's a little bit of a leap because we're talking about story and how everyone seeing the world through the lens of story being a story teller and maker. And now I want to just leap to this place of writing it because this is really what we focus on and I think that yeah, I want to talk about whether you feel the same way about writing as you do story can anyone be a writer and I know this has happened to me so many times in my life where for myself to step into the idea of being a writer has been a journey. I think maybe every writer kind of has their own way with kind of acknowledging that they are a writer with all that the world tells us that is or isn't. And people say to me all the time, well, I like to journal, but I don't know if I'm a writer, you know, and so it's like we like to make it something or not. But can anyone be a writer, Catherine and what makes a writer and how does story make its way to the surface in everyday life for the average person. I just want to kind of bring this thread of writing in because this is really what we focus on we're living in the story and we're going to share a lot more about that in the rest of this episode about the actual lived story that we're experiencing in some bomb together. But I first want to talk about and get your wisdom on this around the idea of being a writer and how accessible that is and how the story comes to the surface. So it's kind of a lot, but if you could just share a little bit about that. Now, of course, absolutely anyone can be a writer, not everyone is going to be a New York Times bestselling author, not everyone is going to have an essay in the New Yorker, but everyone can be a writer, everyone is a writer. We all write all the time. I hear this most frequently from women, the example that you shared about the I journal, but is it writing? Of course it's writing. You're transmuting and alchemizing what's inside into the written word. And sometimes I tell you know some of the folks that I work with sometimes it's like if it feels easier to narrate it into a voice app and then transcribe it and play with that. It's also writing. You do not need to be sitting down in a beautiful library with a quill, right, composing perfect sentences to be a writer. And in fact, you know, it's one of these deep truths that is usually on the screen. spoken that pretty much every writer, even the most successful ones, even your favorite writer, has more moments of doubting themselves as a writer than they do feeling confident as a writer. And it's because it's such a vulnerable thing to do. It is a really, really vulnerable thing to take all the stuff that's inside and put it on the outside and make your real intimate. Yeah, it's so intimate. It is like one of the most into it's like making yourself naked, right? And there's no version of writing that does not involve that when you are actually doing the writing. It's always vulnerable. It's always intimate, even if you are making your writing like hard boiled private investigator mysteries, you're bringing something from the inside and you're putting it outside. Now writing is also a craft and you can get better at writing. You can get more confident at writing. It is something that in some ways it's like writing a bicycle. We would never say somebody is bad at writing bicycles or even with like preparing meals. We have the sense that some people are world-class Michelin chefs and we know that we all have, you know, usually a female figure in our lives who's an extraordinary cook and has served delicious family meals. But we all know it's within our capacity to get good at feeding ourselves and like working with the food in our lives. Writing is a lot like that. It has a lot to do with encouragement and permission being reminded, being encouraged, being invited to really explore your stories in a tangible felt way to get them out from the inside and to the outside. It requires creating practices of thinking about it the way we might feel about our yoga practices or meditation practices or going to the gym or what have you. The more you do it, the more part of your life it becomes and the more comfortable you get and the better you get. And so even if your only ambition is to create a memoir that you pass down to your family or if your ambition is to create that New Yorker essay or to write that novel or to write that screenplay, it's all on the same spectrum of practice and permission. Right. I love that you just mentioned voice recordings and there was a time actually when I went through that transition of actually physically writing to like writing on the computer and it sounds silly to say now because we're so far beyond that with the tech that's available now. But I think it's important to say this especially now with all the tools that are available. That writing is writing is writing is writing and I love what you just said where it's like taking the insight and making it available to others to see and read and experience and feel and to remove whatever obstacles there are. So I often say whoever gets my phone after I die to like the notes to have access to the notes of my phone because that's often where I drop an idea or I share a few lines of something that I want to take in another way or I actually will even get just an idea and it'll come to me and I'll put it in the notes of my phone first sometimes in an audio message and sometimes. But I'm also writing almost everything that I write now is on the computer. And so I think it's important to say that it is about this idea of taking it from the outside and putting it out there and first for yourself perhaps and then beyond that great. But yeah, it can happen in all of these different ways and I like the idea. I firmly believe that everyone has the capacity to be a writer and that everyone is writing to some degree and so I love that. Absolutely. It's a form of manifestation. It's literally, as I said before, taking something from the inside out and giving it form. And whether you give it form through a pen or a pencil, which fewer and fewer people do or typing fingers, right, or recording your voice, whatever it looks like, having somebody transcribe it, some of the greatest writers in history did not do the actual writing themselves. They have like, they have people transcribed. They usually wouldn't write well, we're going to get to that because one of those, you know, exactly. She wasn't writing her own things, you know? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'd love to point this out that we talk about spelling, like spelling things out, but it's also the same route as spells to cast spells, right? The term abracadabra literally means as I speak, I create, right? To tell a story, to make a story, to craft a story, to write a story in whatever form you're doing, it is simply a matter of bringing something into being in the outside world that wasn't there before. Yeah, I love that. I love that so much. Let's talk about the power of place for inspiring story to be felt, experienced or lived or shared because this is really what inspired us to co-create our writing pilgrimage. Can you share more about this in a general sense about how place informs story or inspire story? And then can you talk more about some bomb in particular with regard to the power of place and inspiring story? Yeah, gosh, I can go on and on and on about this. I mentioned the example of my mom taking me on walks, you know, through the forest and telling stories about the forest. And one of the reasons that was so influential through Storylands is not just that I was hearing stories and receiving stories as we walked, but she was teaching me that story happens in place and space. And this is as true in a virtual environment as it is in a real one, but we're talking about the real one. When you are in space, like when you are in place and when you are attentive and attuned to that place, you are gathering what I call fabbling. I won't go into the origins of the term, but this already for me connected to the word word, fable that you are in deep relationship to the world. And when you're in deep relationship to the world, you can be more actively in relationship to that sense-making part of yourself, to that creative part of yourself, to that part of yourself that connects imagination to the real world and wants to capture it. When we walk anywhere, if I leave my house right now and I go on a walk with my dog, there's a form of story-making that I'm doing because I am creating a path as I go and I'm imagining where that path goes as I walk it. And the connection of that to what we do when we are creating is very, very, very, very close. It's none accident that some of the greatest storytelling artists of recorded human history were pilgrims and walkers and explorers and journeyers. I actually just learned this wonderful story. I gave a talk in Central Asia this fall and I met this really extraordinary Muslim man who approached me after the talk to talk about story and imagination and he told me about this Arabic 15th century navigator who the lore has it taught Vasco to gamma navigation, but this navigator, I'm going to get his name wrong, so I won't try to say. Amit Ibn Mahid, I believe. This navigator captured all of his navigation learnings in poetry. He captured navigation through poetry and he recorded it in poetry and he shared it in poetry and it was a reminder, those was such a gift, it was such a gift, because it was a reminder that the journey, whatever the journey looks like, whether it's feet on the ground, boat on the sea, whatever it looks like, is so deeply connected to our sense of movement. And movement is what story is, right? It's a manifestation of story. It's the unfolding of a journey in the written form or visual form. And so when we put ourselves in connection to space and place, we unlock all sorts of opportunity to explore that story. You know, on the less mythic and poetic end of things, we can also just say this, right? This thing that we all know intuitively, that we get inspired when we're in place. An insane bomb in particular, which is two things. It's both a site of the journey of Mary Magdalene and the lore of Mary Magdalene and also the pre-Christian history of druids and there's just such deep mythology in this place. But it is also a place that holds the story of a pilgrim, a spiritual pilgrim, a spiritual explorer, Mary Magdalene, also holds all the stories of the pilgrims that came looking for her story and wanting to be inspired by the path of her story. And it's happening on a landscape that is just, you know, this better than anyone. -Failed with the story. Still with the story. Right? It's just, it's like story is a live and burbling in every corner. And so it's one of those precious places in the world where when you walk on the landscape, you feel deeply connected to something deeper and bigger than you and you feel your own sense of participation in a story. And for that reason, there's no better place for us to have inaugurated already the hero's journey, heroine's journey because you can't help but feel who you are as a heroine on that landscape and you cannot help but feel what it could and will look like to begin crafting your own mythology and your own story in that space. -I love so much of this. I thought that I was walking in some bomb deeply before I met you. And now that we walk together, and certainly these weeks that we spend there together, it's just a completely different. Yeah, it's so true that when you go into the depth and I want to go into this idea of Fabula next, so I love that you mentioned it. I love that word so much. Yeah, I think it's impossible to be there with you with this heightened sense and this deeper way of being because you are there really, I don't know, it maybe it's just intention. Maybe it's just connecting the two things where they're writing a story or where they're in the story, just naming it. It's so powerful and it has created just an extra layer of depth for me just by association and just by this experience with you. I really felt like I was already being there in a deep way, but I think when you're there to experience the story and you're aware that you're a part of the story that's unfolding, you start seeing it differently and it's almost like Narnia, it's like something opens, like a portal opens or a layer opens or yeah, it's almost as if the land comes alive in a different way and you have access to this Fabula that I want to bring in now, which is I feel like for me, you say that Fabula is really all the stuff of story making. I think and I'm pleased to tell me if that's not, I mean, I'm a student of Catherine's because I just said I get to sit at the table and I'm so like I'm so happy to be sitting at the table when you're there and teaching and when these conversations, these beautiful conversations between writers are happening, which I absolutely love. Fabula is in your teaching the stuff of story making and so during this week when you're guiding kind of the unfolding story, the invitation is to look for and collect the Fabula and for me, what happens in that experience is it sort of connects us, reconnects us if there's a possibility of us not being connected to it and that I want to talk about this to this idea of imagination because you take the Fabula and it may inspire something and then you have to go to this place which I think we call in part imagination. One of the things that I love so much about you is your imagination, Catherine and I want to know like from you like what is imagination exactly and I feel like we lose this sense of imagination as we get older, sadly. And you're shaking your head, the listeners can't see you but Catherine's agreeing with me as she's shaking her head, we do lose this sense of imagination as we get older, this is so sad. If you're feeling like you've lost your imagination and you're aching to have your imagination back, please come join us for this week because this is for sure undoubtedly one thing that will absolutely happen. But I'd love to invite you to riff on this topic of imagination for a few minutes because I feel like I've been watching you travel the world and you're recently sharing a lot about imagination. And so I would just love to hear from you what is imagination exactly and you already mentioned this idea of Fabula and the stuff of story making and I think we really do need to be connected to our imagination in order to be in the story deeply and then beyond the story deeply and then certainly connected to telling the story deeply. Yeah, so I'd love to hear you share a little bit more about this. Yeah, imagination, I want to be poetic about it and say imagination is heart imagination is curiosity imagination is spirit imagination is vision imagination. Sometimes if I'm feeling you know sort of fantastical about it, I'll describe it in terms of being a kind of place that we can go to. Right. It's not a place that we have to travel to. It's a place that we're already living in. Right. It's a way of seeing the world and when we can tap into our imagination, this is a thing as you know that we really really really pay attention to in the experience and sound bomb of like pulling down that layer that screen that veil or the scales on our eyes that prevent us from seeing this extraordinarily enchanted world around us or enchanted worlds plural. That's there that's all around us and this inside us, but to your excellent point about losing it. It's something that we lose very young. I spent some time at this one. I was at the Walt Disney company and looking at what I call they're the dream gap. The point at which kids, especially girls lose their sense of possibility. Go from being in their childlike experience, right, which we all have and we can all remember this. There are any possible anything is possible. Right. It's like if we can dream it, it's possible. If we can dream it, it's real. But we all and girls, especially in separate conversation, hit a point in our socialization at our adolescence. When we really begin to internalize the messages of the adult world that tell us that that's childlike, that that's silly, that that's fantasy and that we have to become rational. We have to become practical. Again, this is more intense for girls and it's for boys, but boys experience it as well. We get told that our imaginations are this sort of nice to have thing or they're a thing for our spare time. They're a thing for the weekends or if we watch a Marvel movie or we read a book or if we have a hobby. But that really the imagination in sort of that bigger sense, it might be accessible to an imagineer at the Walt Disney company, for example, or somebody who we see is having special access to that realm because they are gifted or gene. Yes, or super richer, what have you, but for ordinary quote unquote ordinary human beings, we're not just taught, but deeply, deeply socialized and acculturated into this idea that imagination is for children is something distracting and silly. We can get lost there. We will become practical. Like it's maybe a little bit dangerous because we will get too absorbed with silly things and that shuts down that part of ourselves that has the capacity to see all the extraordinaryness in the world and to see that the horizon of possibilities in front of us is infinite. That in fact, and I mean this, you know that I mean this and I say this is a recovering political scientist. So I've got some academic rigor behind this. There is so much magic in the world. There is literally nothing that is impossible at least on the realm of story, at least on the realm of our sense of what there is to be discovered quantum physicists. I was in New York last week and met a couple of extraordinary quantum scientists. And I was like, this is a fantastic conversation about creativity because they were like, you know, kind of scientists unlock their creativity. I'm like, my God, you guys are quantum physicists, your quantum engineers, you are playing in the space. You're already using your imagination. You just don't call it that. And it's when you don't call it that and give yourself the permission that all this other magical possibility shuts down. For me, this is a thing that I go around the world talking about and like, bang in the drum. Right? Is that all right? Imagination is our superpower. It's a superpower that we all share. It's also a spiritual power, a secret power. It's the thing that connects us to, you know, for people who have a faith. It's the thing that connects us to the divine for scientists. It's the thing that connects them to the unknown thing that they have yet to discover. It's a thing that if we unlock it and it's so unlockable, anything becomes possible. And so just in the context of our retreat and for the experience that we take people through and Sam bomb, it's really this matter of like I love that you brought us back to Fabula of getting ourselves into deep intention and attention. To the world that we're walking upon. And this is why again, it's so important to the experience that you and I have created that there's that walking element that sense of place. Because part of the exercise is to unlock that creative imagination to unlock that creative attention that can experience the world is deeply enchanted and deeply magical and not just in the sense of what's outside us, but the sense of what's inside us that's connecting to the outside. So we're connecting to our own magic. Fabula again, it comes from the word for fable like the deeply sort of nerdy side quests that anyone could go on and they want to as it comes from the work of some Russian literary theorists in the academic territory of studying fairytale and folklore and actually being able to categorize and make a science at a fairytale and folklore. They distinguish between the structure of a story, the sujette of a story of a fairy tale of a piece of folklore and the Fabula, the stuff, right? And I'll spare the academic lesson to just say I completely appropriated because I fell in love with this idea of the stuff being the driver of story and not just the stuff of plot, right or the stuff of character, but the stuff that's around us all the time and in us all the time that if we pay attention to will emerge. The fairies will come out from underneath the toadstool, right? The tree will tell us her story Mary will speak to us the druids will speak to us if we put ourselves into that experience of deep creative attention and think of Fabula as something that we can gather and play with and use in our cauldrons, right? a storymaking for ourselves, for our internal creative, imaginative, spiritual work, and then also for our external storymaking work. Again, whether it's a screenplay or a novel or a memoir, or just a beautiful collection of stories that we want to share with our community. When we get into that mode of creative attention, we unlock our imaginations, we expand our sense of what's possible, and we immediately begin to see all the glittering things within us and outside of us that can inform the stories. It's really, I mean, I have no other word to use but magic how it happens and how it happened this May with one of the writers, both writers that joined us, but one of the writers in particular who was out on a morning walk and twice this happened where literally a torn journal piece of paper that was speaking directly to what she was feeling, her story was kind of unfolding just literally on her path like the magic of that fabulous. Just I'm in awe of it. It's the magic of the unfolding when you're deeply in it. Really beautiful. We use the archetype of Mary Magdalene, the legend of Sambam and the sacred land and sites to hold us as the framework for our pilgrimage. Can you share a little bit more about this? How this has the potential to inspire awareness or inspiration for writing the heroine's journey? We've talked a lot about place and this is really just a follow-up, but now we're moving into kind of what Catherine's, what we're really doing here and what we're the invitation here is to think about yourself as a heroine and perhaps we could take a moment to just dive into what a heroine's journey is not fully, but maybe just to tap into that a little bit. But yeah, how does all of this have the potential to inspire us to think of ourselves as heroines and to kind of drop us into this idea of writing about this journey? Yeah, we'll talk some more about Mary herself. Yeah, we will. That's my not heroine. Yeah, I mean, we're all familiar with heroes' journeys, right? And there's a lot that's been written and said, you know, especially over the last handful of decades, right? Since Carl Young really dove into archetypes in Joseph Campbell did a lot with this obviously in the Robert Blie and others about how we can look at archetypes to understand a certain kind of story that we call the hero's journey. The hero's journey is a beautiful framework for story, but the hero's journey misses some nuances around what women's experience, women and girls experience usually is. And we can spare the lecture on heroes' journeys for another time, but it misses a number of elements that, without you were just speaking about, the ways in which women and girls' stories get really compressed and contained, the ways in which we get uniquely discouraged from seeing ourselves as having an authorship and authority in the world, the ways in which we're discouraged from seeing ourselves as having a journey, right? There's a reason why most fairy tales and the fairy tales with female protagonists, the princess stories about which I know a little bit, are all stories about female characters liberating themselves from the constraints of an oppressive family. They're not about going on world-saving journeys. They're about getting free of oppressive circumstances. And there's something that's really important in that because a lot of us, even though we are sort of in this moment, the culture where there's a lot that we can say about women having sort of unlocked their storytelling capacity and telling their stories more and more, there's still a hangover of that sense of, like, we still have to sort of free ourselves from identity constraints and that sort of thing. The other is that we need more permission to really understand ourselves as characters in our own stories who have a bigger arc. There's a story for us beyond the castle beyond the tower. There's a story for us that is its own version of a hero's journey, but that is uniquely ours, that is uniquely our own exploration of ourselves as central figures in really important mythic arcs. And unlocking that for ourselves becomes this really powerful catalyst for unlocking our creative powers, for catalyzing and supercharging our creative work, but also understanding our sense of agency in that work. So it can become a very powerful way of informing and influencing and inspiring the creative work that we're already doing, whatever it is, you know, the novel, the screenplay, the memoir, would have you. It's also a way of getting ourselves in touch with our agency and authority and our power as storytelling heroines in our own right. Yeah. I guide this pilgrimage on its own without the story layer and the pilgrimage on its own has the potential to be its own kind of underlying heroines journey without all of that, the overlayer of that. But when you're adding the story and the writing to it and this wisdom and this invitation, this real intentional invitation to be the heroine or to consider yourself a heroine in a story, there really is an added depth to it. And there's also the potential for just in the experience itself for there to be great transformation as you look at yourself and it really speaks to what you're saying, the permission and the agency and the voice, just having a voice to share the story, can be powerful and really transformative for women in addition to being on the land and experiencing the pilgrimage. And so it's really been a beautiful pairing, I think, and really perfect. Let's bring Mary in now because I love that you and I share our views on Mary Magdalene. And I almost didn't want to share this question and this thought in this episode because as you know, Catherine, the way that I guide is that I kind of keep my thoughts on Mary close. And I do that very much on purpose because I really want to hold space for all women and all views and all stories and all the things. And as I do this more and more and this was, I just finished my fifth year of guiding this pilgrimage, I feel like I'm being called really to kind of anchor myself in something that feels true for me. And it's happening in little ways where, for example, this year, several women directly asked me, "What do you think?" And it always feels good when someone asks me what I think. And I don't take that lightly. So I just want to share here boldly that you and I have the same views on this aspect of Mary Magdalene that I think is so important. And it's also important to say that there's so much in the collective right now about her. Someone just recently asked me on a podcast interview like, "Why do I think that is?" And that's a really, that's a curiosity that I don't have an answer to. But there's a swell for sure right now about Mary Magdalene. And we can speculate and kind of have another conversation about why that is. However you and I find her story the most interesting. And this is really where you and I kind of came together literally on the path. And why I think this works so much. You write in your substack and by this I mean our co-creation and coming together in the way that we have in this invitation. You write in your substack, the basic and most historically supported story about Mary is this, that she began following Jesus of her own accord, leaving her family and home in Magdalene to attend and support his ministry, emerging as a key figure in his inner circle of apostles and students before famously becoming the only person to whom he appeared after his death. You've written a lot about this and I strongly suggest and I'll put this in the notes for the episode. Catherine has two substacks, one that's like a little bit older, which I love. It's called Holy Doodle. What is it? The other one? Ligital bug. Holy Doodle bug. And then the most recent one that has come out in the last year called Sacred-ish, which I absolutely adore. So I strongly suggest that if you're feeling inspired to learn more about Catherine's story and what she shares. And it's a substack that I suggest or refer people to on my own substacks. You can easily find it if you're following mine. I suggest that you look because what you share about Mary is really beautiful and it's the Mary, I say, God only as you know, God, I want to say Mary as only you know Mary because there are so many ways in which you can find her and be connected to her and relate to her and write about her and live with her and breathe with her and pray with her and all the things. Can you talk a little bit about Mary? And I know this could be an episode on its own, Catherine's, but about the fascination, the resonance, the swell even as it pertains to story and pilgrimage and writing. Yeah, I mean, there's a million things to say. About Mary, but here are some things too that I think are important to this particular conversation. One is my own relationship to her, which as you said, you and I share this for you that there's a story that we've been told about her that is tethered to the story of Jesus that has its very interesting movements over the course of the history of Christianity and the Catholic Church in particular and one that has evolved as human culture has evolved and as things have come to the surface, right? And so on the core of it, the basics for my post that you shared, is It's already a fascinating story. It's already a fascinating story full stop, but it's a fascinating story for women because here is a rare female protagonist, I'll call her a protagonist in the New Testament story, who emerges as significant even through all of the patriarchal frames, right? Even in the church's worst versions of this, they could not overwrite the fact that Mary was really important, right? That her story was really important. And the parts that they did overwrite, right? That most because she is so much part of the culture now in some beautiful ways that she was a prostitute, that she might have been crazy, that she had to have demons exercised out of her. All of these things once the more detail about her story and certainly once, you know, the Gospels were found were revealed that no, she was truly, truly important. And all of the elements of her story that we're creeping in from the margins about her influence on Jesus, not just the fact that she was a trusted listener, right? But that he held her closer than all others. And there are ways of looking that obviously and the Da Vinci code goes into this and there's a whole legacy of storytelling around sacred marriage and their relationship. But the thing that has always been this thread, even in the overwritten versions of the story was that she mattered to that ministry and that she mattered to the legacy of the ministry. And so there's this fascinating story. And I think this is part of why the question you were asked about why is she resonating in the culture so much. I mean, one is that like some amazing writers like Megan Waterson have like, have really done some beautiful-- Lifted her up. Yeah. And done some beautiful public storytelling about her. But I think also because we're at a moment for not just women, for all of us to look for those stories that are not just the hidden like the mysterious like, oh, we're discovering something stories. But the stories of human beings of influence who we forgot, especially or whose stories were overwritten like Mary's, who had so much to do with the advancement of something that was civilizational. Like if you look at the lore of Mary that we know more about, certainly post-Nostocospels. But certainly the lore of France, it's one of the reasons why St. Baum and the South of France is so fascinating in this regard, is that like these stories have been told from millennia, right? Like a couple of thousand years of storytelling about the story fact, the piece of Fabula, that Mary escaped Jerusalem, facing persecution for having been like the soul and primary witness to Jesus' resurrection. She flees to Jerusalem, she lands in France in Gaulle. And begins her own ministry effectively, becomes before Peter, the first storyteller of the faith that emerged from the ministry of Jesus. So this is kind of an extraordinary thing when you think about it, how few women we see narratives about. And certainly in the context of Christianity, like-- - Strardo stories. - It's extraordinary that like when you actually look at Stanbach and look at the story and say like, "Oh, it was a woman who planted the seeds of Christianity in what we now call Europe." It was a woman who landed on the shore and created this whole myth loss around what we now understand is like Catholicism and modern Christianity. It was a woman who found the connection to the land, who found the connection to space, who created this extraordinary, like it maps to so many tropes of the hero's journey, right? There are caves, there are mountains. - Nice for me. (laughing) - There are boats, there are all those things. And so it's this extraordinary story of a woman on a cultural landscape in which we do not have enough stories of women exercising spiritual agency. It's there in the story of her leaving Magdala to join this guy who's like preaching this new story, but what it means to be human and to be in relationship to the divine, and then to carry that on on her own. She's such an extraordinary heroine, and she's won with this unique, beautiful self-authority, self-agency. I think that both for the thing that you and I collaborate on, of like taking people through this experience where they can use that and all the other mythos that's on that land to tap into their own heroines' journeys, it's also this like unique lens of inspiration, and this unique opportunity to really see that there are always new mythologies to uncover and to create, there can be our own. And I think it's that longing in the culture, right? We were talking about imagination and me beating the drum and imagination that we're so hungry for right now. We want to feel permission and inspiration to create our own stories, but I think we also want permission and inspiration to really see ourselves as having a place in an emergent mythology, right? That there are bigger things, there are bigger possibilities, there is so much to hope for in a world that sometimes feels really dark, that when we connect ourselves to that, and look at the Mary Magdalens of history, and say, "Ah!" We've seen this before, we've forgotten it, or we've erased it, but we can go back to it and we can rewrite it and we can write new versions of it and we can find our own place in it. Like that's magical. - Right, and I think that's what's happening right now in the collective, it's happening so much in the collective, it's really beautiful to see it unfold, and there's space for all of it. So I love that. It is so magical co-creating the space with you, and what you reflect back to me is the power of leaning back and trusting the magic to flow when hearts are aligned. We really live the story first as writers, which can be difficult sometimes. It's a magic, it's sort of a magic that neither one of us could have ever imagined, like when we first spoke this kind of into a desire last year and then having it come forward, it like came forward in so much and a bigger, more magical way than I think we could have ever imagined or that we could have ever thought that we would guide or create without this deep trust that you and I have. What is your favorite aspect of guiding this journey, Catherine? - Oh my gosh. (laughing) - I know it's like I've got to ask a tough question. - A tough question. - A tough question. - Exactly. - Oh gosh, oh. But we should have such a hard question. I mean, seeing everyone's divine imagination come to life, it's such a beautiful, powerful, sacred experience to be in a story space with human beings who are expanding it. - It's like you're in a lab and you're actually watching the, like what you propose or what the potential could be and then you're in the lab and you're actually watching it come alive. - Yeah, exactly. - It's so validating, right? I love to say that it's just true for me that things come to life in these experiences in magical, important ways to the point where I can sit here with you and we could say to anyone who's listening who's thinking about this, it's like guarantee you, absolutely guarantee you that magical, powerful things are going to get unlocked and we can say that because we've seen it. - Right. - But we can also say that because when we see it in these experiences, it's a kind of magic in itself, right? It's like seeing the atom. (laughing) It's like seeing a great fusion come to life. And it's like we knew it was gonna happen but it's never not its own kind of magic, right? - It's absolute delight. - It's an absolute, absolute delight and absolute delight. And for me, it's catalyzing for my own creative imagination and to see the way that magic and the divine work, like you were saying with one of our guests this past spring of the way in which the world has started dropping, literally dropping in front of her. And also seeing how that became this like where it unlocked for everyone else, right? That it's, you cannot fail to be catalyzed and inspired and that includes you and me in the experience. And there's just nothing that compares to that. - Yeah, I love that's a segue to my next thing that I wanted to talk about because I think it's also important to name, to share that both of us have had our way with this experience. It's so important for me and the way that I do things to embody the wisdom and the place and the experience. And they live in us. Now, you know, this experience lives in us. These places live in us, this land lives in us, this story lives in each one of us. And it's often times hard earned embodiment, Catherine, because in May you literally fell off of a cliff literally looking for the cave of eggs. Catherine writes about this in her sub-stack sacred-ish. And even though I wasn't laughing at the time when you returned to us without your glasses, which are still on the mountain and the forest in your hair, I found myself filled with joy reading about your account. that you write about because you are such a beautiful storyteller. Can you take us back to that moment because I think it was a powerful one for you within the experience that we were curating? It's impossible and this is selfishly one of the reasons why I absolutely love guiding women because I actually need lots of time to integrate my own experience within the experience because there's always something for each one of us. You insisted on this day that you leave the group and not return home early. We were all on our way back after a big day on the mountain to have a moment of rest before dinner and you insisted that you stay behind and I had a tinge like a tiny little like is this okay? But you insisted and you went and you were determined to find the cave of eggs on your own. Now I know that it was such a big important moment for you to prove to yourself and that you did it and that you felt so proud of yourself. Can you take us back to that moment because I think it's important to take just a moment of this conversation to share with listeners that how important it is to Catherine and to me that we really have had our way on the mountain for ourselves that we really have taken the time. You know Catherine came last year as a pilgrim feeling called to be on this land for herself. She came with her with her friend and you had the experience for yourself and then even within the experience you created a moment to have your own experience and that's so important. I would love to just like have a moment where you can take us back to that decision and to that cliff and to the yeah into your proud moment of finding the cave of eggs on your own and yeah can you share? Yeah spoiler alert it was successful and obviously I'm still here talking about it so falling off or cliff did not damage me in any permanent way. You know you're so right I mean that it's such an important part of the story to ground for both you and I knew and I together you know you and I had a couple of even this past May there are a couple of amazing story experiences that you and I had together on that mountain before I guess arrived right. Right. Which are just such again more just rich evidence of how much story gets unlocked but I think it was our last day on the moon and everybody was going back for a break you know there are a few hours that that were free and as you said I said I'm gonna stick around I'll find my own way back down and my mission was to find my way to the cave of eggs by myself via the goats route right across the mountain so those of you that yeah for though I was gonna say tell them Catherine because I really want everyone to understand how dangerous this one is and how this was uncharted territory. Yeah so this is not the usual way and just for anyone who's thinking about joining us this is not a dangerous mountain at all right and there's like when we go to the cave of eggs together there's an adventurous but direct route but I knew that there was a quote-unquote goats path called the way of the goats that that you could get across sort of the sort of below the topmost cliffs of the Masif the mountain of Saint-Bombe to get to the cave of eggs and yeah I could go deep on sort of be if you read my post you'll get a little bit about this about this it just felt personally important to me to see if I could find my way there myself and you know one of the things you didn't say Patricia when I was there the year before last year I like the cave of eggs is one of my favorite parts of this journey for a whole lot of reasons but like I just felt a very deep deep deep deep personal connection to that cave I overcome some fear some fears of the lasifobia going into the cave but I really wanted to find the path myself and this moment opened up when there was gonna be a few hours of a break and I thought I'm gonna do it now right and felt like I would just be guided to this cave right so where Catherine's getting into a deep blue and I'm gonna be guided I'm gonna find this path I'm gonna be guided and I set off across the skinny little goats trail of the mountain and it is a skinny little trail it's a little bit of a nail bider which is why it's not the regular route and it's spectacularly beautiful like expansive beautiful views over the valley and I'm just like you know the divine is speaking to me and of course I'm in to do this and I'm just trusting that I'm gonna find it and at one point I got into a moment of self-doubt right and this is important again if you read the piece you'll you'll get the polish narrative of this but I had this moment of self-doubt and this is important because there's an analog here to our creative journeys and our spiritual journeys that I had this moment of do I follow the path the way I think I'm supposed to go am I gonna follow my intuition or am I going to like use my rational mind because there was this little branch off that went up and I thought rationally I should be going up I thought like the way that the orientering hiker would do it would be to think about it this way so instead of staying on what I later understood to actually be the goats path I went up up up up across onto a cliff of about eight-ish feet high and realized as I got up there like oh I've made the wrong call like I got too much into my head I stopped trusting the path and started overthinking things and at that moment I'm thinking do I have to go back down do I have to raise my steps what am I gonna do and I grab onto a branch and I like lean over this cliff I do not recommend this to see if there's another way down because there's the other thing I'm doing I'm looking for the shortcut I just want to like I don't want to have to retrace my steps I don't want to have to think I've made a mistake I want to know that there's another way down so again Catherine's in her brain she's leaning over this edge with this branch and the branch breaks and off I go literally feeling and you know this moment I talk about it in the piece I wrote of the French call it lapel de vide a call of the void we all many of us have had this experience of imagining what it would feel like to fall from a height right and it felt exactly like that it feels like slow motion I did a bit of a summer salt it was high enough for me to like turnover which turned out to be a gift because I landed on my backpack which is full of flowers and holy water which is an analogy of itself right there's so much to this there's so much to it my glasses flew off my face I'm very near-sighted so this is not something you want to have happened to yourself on a hike late afternoon even if you haven't fallen off a cliff I land and I like landed literally right back on the correct path right it was like spirit directed by the druids the fairies Mary like gave me a kick in the literal butt and propelled me back down onto the path I was winded I was fine I had twigs in my hair there were some scrapes I looked like a forest which coming out of it no glasses and I thought my first thought was like oh shit I can't tell Patricia about this right I can't tell my husband about this but then I was like I'm back on the path I'm right where I am supposed to be I looked around for my glasses realized that the forest had reclaimed them and they were in the hands of the druids the angels Mary the trees whoever I thought now I'm gonna find the cave and so off I went without my glasses late afternoon and I found it it was right around the bend on the path that I should have been trusting and that spirit kicked me back onto when I lost my faith for a minute and had just the most beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful experience I did not go in the cave by myself not that alone and then found my way back and it was such a beautiful example and I'm glad that you asked me about it because it's a beautiful example of how that space inspires both of us right it's a space that has we develop our own relationship to it anyone who has been there is going to tell you a different story about their relationship to it but the connective tissue is going to be this that there's something deeply sacred divine and magical about our connection to it and that it does if we're paying attention if we're in that mode of spiritual creative attention of activated imagination then we'll find those stories we will find those paths and we will be invited to trust those paths and we will be invited to pay attention to those paths and we'll be course corrected right right if we don't but that out of it will come beautiful magical narratively rich things yeah the story comes to you the story comes to you yeah and I don't know if you remember this but I on my very first time to some bomb it was before I'd read Megan's book and before I was kind of in all of that I'm in now and I was looking for the cave of eggs on that path and intuitively I kept going up and up and up and up and so I ended up on the top of the mountain and so similarly to and this is why I love and why I absolutely wanted to include this piece because it speaks to our embodiment of the experience for ourselves first before we're guiding which I think is so important really part of the ethos of what I do but also the fact that when you place yourself on the land the story comes to you in the most divine ways you know you're on sacred land and the story comes to you I was supposed to be a on the top of the mountain, not at the cave of eggs, at that divine moment for the feast of eight angels, which was a whole divine mystical moment that I write about actually in my sub-stack. And so I love that we have this in common that we are both on that path and redirected in very deliberate and divine ways to find the story that was meant for us. And that's really what you and I are inviting women to come and experience. And we are students of our own teachings. And so I think it's important for everyone who's reading or listening to this to know that. For the listeners at home who feel inspired to write more, to begin writing, this is the last question because we're going to wrap up after this. You mentioned this at the beginning of the conversation that this is like a muscle that you can really hone or this is like you doing a yoga practice or like the more you practice it, the more it comes and the better you get. But are there certain practices or how can listeners hone this practice or craft this practice or better this practice or even just step into this practice on their own? Are there a few little nuggets you can give us? Yeah, the first and simplest one, the kind of advice that nobody should pay for, right, is to make time and space for it. And that can be very little. I mean, anyone who's followed the artist's way knows about morning pages and that sort of thing. But it's really about looking at this as something to take as seriously as any practice that you would implement for anything else that's a value to you. If you have a meditation practice, it's like that, a yoga practice going to the gym. It's saying to yourself, I really want to be in deep relationship with my inner creative, my inner storyteller. And I'm going to make it a priority in my life. And that doesn't have to mean, right? All respect to the artist's way that you sit down and with a pen and paper and write every day. What it means is that you make the solemn intention to be in creative relationship with yourself every day and that you're very deliberate about it, that you create time for it. And that can be, that can be a walk, right? And just listening and attuning and paying attention to the natural fabla of the world, it can be daydreaming. It can be doodling. It can be writing. It can be recording stream of consciousness into your voice app. The intention there is to give yourself the glorious, beautiful, sacred space to let your inner creative emerge, to unlock your imagination, to let dreams come to life and to treat it as deliberately as you would any other regular practice. The other is to give yourself permission to do that in any form that you decide, right? So this is tied into what I just said. It does not have to be pen on paper, right? And there are a lot of people that will tell you and they're not wrong that there's something really special about pen on paper, right? About having the embodied experience of writing. But the point to unlock this relationship and this creative practice is not just to be lifting weights, right? Everyone will tell you the best way to be in a practice of going to the gym is just get yourself to the gym. Whatever that looks like. Do whatever feels right. Don't worry about the trainer. Don't worry about the regimen. Get in a relationship to it. The best way to start doing a couch to 5k to be running is like get from the couch entire shoelaces, right? Into relationship with your intention first and whatever that looks like for you, remind yourself like this is my magic. This is how I am unlocking my magic. And it's not only worthy. It's powerful. And from that you will find that the other elements will unlock that you'll realize, Oh, I want to sit down and I want to write something long hand or I want to record myself or I want to move on to the next step. You're building a habit, right? You're building muscle. And it's the thing that happens on the retreat, right? Which is why you and I both say this is great for somebody who has a creative project, right? Who has something that they're working on and they want to get to the next level or they need to go deeper or they need to unlock something or somebody who just wants to connect to that story making wizard, witch magician, shaman priestess inside them is to kickstart the practice in this way of discover yourself on the landscape of your imagination and say, Oh, wow, I want to come here every single day of my life in whatever way that looks like and explore what's here for me and really have my hiking boots on right and all the things and pilgrim in my own story, right? It just starts with the walking. Yeah, I love that. I end each episode of this podcast with the same three questions for guests. The first one is what does sacred or the sacred mean for you? Well, you know that my second newsletter is called sacred ish. For good reason, because the sacred for me is in some ways just another word for imagination. It's another word for curiosity. It's another word for that deeply human capacity for believing in the things that are beyond us, believing in forces that we might not understand, believing in the enchantment of the natural world and the enchantment of the things that we can consider to be divine. So what it means to me is taking very seriously all of those things. I mean, I've used the word sacred, I think many times, right? In this podcast and you know how much I love your work on sacred Paris of putting the name of sacred onto a city that has so much to reveal. Sacred, I think we both share a view that what is sacred are the things that we're looking for, the things that are there to be revealed are there to be discovered and to light us up in the most magical ways. Right, I love that. What's your favorite sacred place to visit in Paris and why? The most good that this is going to be a little bit of a toss-up for me. I mean, one is saccharacur, but in the middle of the night, like on that experience that you took me on, the night of devotion, that particular experience. So it's a place at a moment in time, not when you need to line up with the crowds, but when you are in that sacred silence of saccharacur. And then the other is like the tip of Yulsa L'Ouy, right? And you know that where you know that part of my time in France earlier, this year, overlapped with the anniversary of my mom's death, and I wanted to do something very special for her. And you shared a ritual that you have done for your sister around putting pedals in the sun and finding a spot to put pedals in the sun. And I actually wrote about this as well that I'd like, I walked up and down the sun one after. I'm like, "Where are my pedals in my hands trying to figure out where to go?" And I wasn't even looking for this spot because I thought, like, this is going to be way too crowded. This point at the tip of the island, there's a big, beautiful, willow tree. It's magical, but it's crowded. Like so many people go there because it's so beautiful. And I just wanted to see it. And I went there and there's like this, like, merging band there and it's loud and there's all these people that's crowded. But when I arrived at that spot, all of a sudden a couple of people right at the tip just left, right? Just left. And all of a sudden there was a tip. The space opened up and it was just there. There I was with the space to myself. Again, with the tuba music going, but it was so perfectly aligned with how my mom would love things. That it needed a story that crowded little tip of Yulsa L'Ouy became in my heart just as deeply, deeply sacred place. Yeah, I love that so much. And that's really what I'm doing with sacred parrises that we're creating the spaces when the space opens up. A book that has made a deep impact on your life or one that you would recommend to others or one that you gift often. Okay. There are a couple, one that will sound silly, but that I think is actually one of the greatest examples. It's one that I give if you want to rethink storytelling. Here is the book for you to read. And it is a little golden book, a kid's book, Sesame Street book called The Monster at the end of this book. And it's a story featuring Grover and it is a masterpiece of postmodern storytelling and a masterpiece of story in its simplest, simplest form where all that is happening in the book is you wanting to get to the next page and to keep the story going. And to push past like I first read it as a very small child and it's like the thrill and excitement of is there what's coming. It's something I should be scared of because if you know it, you know like Grover throughout the story is like don't turn the page, don't turn the page, there's a monster somewhere in this book. We don't want to find the monster. But it's like you keep turning the page and it's like so few words. It's so simple. It's a children's book. But it is just this beautiful demonstration of how simple story can be and how powerful it can be when it speaks directly to a reader or a listener when it's in relationship with the reader and the listener. Megan's book of course The Nostek Gospels, The Gospel of Mary. But what the book that I've been gifting most frequently is a book called The Charlottes and the Blade that I think we've spoken about is book by an extraordinary scholar, Rianna Isler, who's now in her 90s. She's actually a friend now. I love her, I love her, her dearly, but the Charleston blade was published in the later 80s and was a sort of radical reframe of understanding sort of history through the lens of archaeology to understand that the influence of the feminine has always been there and the influence of partnership and humanity have always always been there. And so it's some decades old, it's been translated to a Gajillion languages, but I always tell people if you want like that intersection of like deep lore and story and some mysticism with extraordinary rigor. Reann is like extraordinary scholar than it's a really powerful book. I can't believe I haven't read it yet. I'm going to have that read before we see each other next because I'm getting I have so many books always on my list. I want to take this opportunity to personally invite our listeners to join us in Sambom. We're going to be there May 25th through the 30th and September first through the 6th of 2026 for our writing the heroine's journey pilgrimage. These are five day experiences on the land. We begin with the black Madonna at the abbey in Marseille and we are deeply on the land in Sambom for the week visiting Mary's cave, the mountain top chapel where the angels carried her, the basilica with her relic and of course the cave of eggs where I'm going to have Catherine Guaillieu because she's now she's a pro you get to choose your course of action. Which would you like to do? The cliff version or the direct route. We stay in an intimate bed and breakfast. We hire a wild forging chef who makes all of our meals with lots of love. We picnic in the most beautiful sacred locations with panoramic views of the valley. We practice each morning in front of our altar and Catherine guides us through the magic, the mystery and the love of story and storytelling. Spaces are limited. This is a very intimate experience and this is also something I'm incredibly proud of to have the two of us in an intimate space for five days is really a remarkable experience and invitation. I'm going to leave the direct link in the show notes for this episode and the applications are now open and I suspect that we will sell out again this coming year. Before we go, Catherine, will you tell us where we can find you in the coming days and months if the listeners wish to connect with you in person or to stay in touch with you from afar and I'll put all the links and everything also here for everyone to find. Sure, well, you've already mentioned my substack newsletters, Holy Doodlebug and Sacred-ish. As you said, Holy Doodlebug is a sort of broader spectrum exploration of the imagination through the lens of my own life. Sacred-ish goes a little bit more deeply into the realm of the mystical and the sacred, you know, with a little bit of my past as a scholar creeping in and some of the Disney experience creeping in. Most of my socials are at Herbadmother in all the usual places. I met Herbadmother.com and at HelloCatherin.com, you can find me in those places as well. Okay, thank you for walking with me. My dad is brighter because you're on it. I'm so, I'm just filled with so much joy and love and delight that we found each other through Megan. So I love that so many of us are connecting through Megan's space and I can't say that enough. Thank you for this conversation. Thank you for the co-creating, the opening to co-create. I'm so happy that it wasn't just a spoken desire. Oftentimes we have these spoken desires on paths that don't come to fruition, but you and I were determined to make it happen and it's been just like such a beautiful new experience for me to guide and to co-create with you. So thank you for that. And thank you for all that you do to bring the magic of story into the world, Catherine. You are like just such a bright light. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you. And in the spirit of speaking things into the world, I mean, it's worth sharing with everyone that we're looking forward to co-creating more in more spaces, right? And to bring more of that lived experience. Of stories. So everyone should continue to follow you to stay tuned on that. Yes, I forgot about that part that we were actually talking, we're teasing ourselves with other locations. And I think that will definitely come to fruition in the future. So yeah, I forgot. Let's revisit that, Catherine. Yeah, yeah, speaking it into the world, right? Exactly. Thank you for joining me on this sacred journey through Paris. I hope today's episode has inspired you to seek the sacred in your own life wherever you may be. If you loved what you heard, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review. It helps us to bring more light to this beautiful community. And remember, the sacred is always just a moment away, waiting to be discovered. Until next time, may your days be filled with grace, beauty, and the quiet magic of the sacred.