Feral [Perfect Paperback]

Deena Metzger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 15, 2011

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

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 Daré to North America. Daré is a unique form of individual and community healing based on indigenous and contemporary medicine and wisdom traditions.

Product Details

• Perfect Paperback: 182 pages
• Publisher: Hand to Hand; First edition (February 15, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0972071857
• ISBN-13: 978-0972071857
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,056,365 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Deena Metzger is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, storyteller and healer. Story is her Medicine.
Her latest novels are Feral and La Negra y Blanca, both published by Hand to Hand, 2011. La Negra y Blanca won the 2012 Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.

The novels The Other Hand and Doors: A Fiction for Jazz Horn, and also Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems are published by Red Hen Press.

Other books:
Skin: Shadows/Silence A Love Letter in the Form of a Novel, and What Dinah Thought (Viking)
The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them and the cancer journal Tree, in the volume Tree: Essays and Pieces, (North Atlantic Books) that features the celebrated Warrior Poster on its cover. Tree testifies to a woman's triumph over breast cancer. It is an example of her many formal and spiritual explorations imagining a literature responsive to the complexities and necessities of our time, especially the value of actively respecting the numerous voices that constitute an ecology of mind attuned to a sacred universe.

Writing For Your Life: A Guide and Companion to the Inner Worlds is a classic text on writing and creatitivity that articulates these possibilities for fellow writers and as do her plays Not As Sleepwalkers and Dreams Against the State.

She co-edited the groundbreaking 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 almost 50 years, a writer and activist profoundly concerned with peacemaking, restoration and sanctuary for a beleagured world, she is basing her work now on the ideas outlined in the posting, "19 Ways to the 5th World." She also teaches a program, "A Training for the 5th World." She and writer, Michael Ortiz Hill, introduced Daré to North America in 1999. Daré is a unique form of individual and community healing based on indigenous medicine traditions and contemporary wisdom. There are other Darés in the U.S. and Canada. Daré occurs on the first Sunday after the new moon at her home in Topanga, Ca. It is open to the public.

Deena convenes ReVisioning Medicine, a unique collaboration in diagnosis and treatment between medical people and medicine people, physicians and healers. She is also Senior Advisor to the NGO, everyday gandhis that supports grassroots and indigenous peacebuilding activities in Liberia and West Africa.

As a spiritual practitioner, Deena is devoted to the Pathless Path and the No Enemy Way. She has taught and lectured widely, nationally and internationally.

Her website is www.deenametzger.com
Her Blogs are ToConsider.wordpress.com and Deenametzger.wordpress.com

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This book opens your mind March 20, 2011

By Stephen Larsen

Format:Perfect Paperback

This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. Each page invites its own kind of gnosis, its own kind of translucent dialing-in to the many menus of the self: social, psychological, spiritual. Feeling myself sweetly pulled into a succession of altered states, I also found myself reading it slowly and more slowly, seeping into colors, vistas, moments of existential confrontation and resolution. Deena Metzger, already an experienced psychotherapist, mythologist and genuine seeker after truth, by coaxing a wild girl out of a tree, goes on a shamanic quest, not just for knowledge, but for a new way of being. Experience confronts innocence, and finds it experienced in ways the "wise old woman" herself is innocent. She can only teach the girl through transparency, since the girl seems clairvoyant
The woman and the girl, Tecolote ("Owl Woman") and Azul ("Blue"), are strangers to begin with, but an invisible magnetism pulls them into a mutually gnostic enterprise. This involves indwelling the minds of animals (also plants and nature, places, and probably times, as the adventure seems to take place in kairos, sacred time, rather than chronos, clock time.) There is also mutual dreaming, and the curious act of walking or flying, through the others' dreamscape; sharing predicaments, running from the same dark nemesis: the "Hunter," or the predatory spirit of modern mankind (gender pronoun intended). In fact the shadow is never avoided in these pages, which gives it also a much greater access to the light, a more nuanced truthfulness--and ultimately an optimism about what it means to be alive.
Don't read this book unless you are prepared to add some new growth-rings beneath the bark.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A life changer June 2, 2011

By Steven Kent

Format:Perfect Paperback

This is a profound and touching and brilliant book. It is a stunningly brave and honest work about the difficult issues of the healer and the wounded. One feels one is a was a kind of invisible third party to this remarkable experience. Metzger always writes well but the writing is gorgeous and tough in this small but hugely insightful work. I am buying copies and sending them to friends.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Tree of Revelation December 21, 2011

By REGINA OMELVENY

Format:Perfect Paperback

This book is a tree, with limbs and leaves that span heaven and earth, human and animal, speech and speechlessness. The language of this tree is beauty and all the terror that goes with it. For beauty undoes us. Her words prickled the hair on the back of my neck the way wind in the pines does late at night when electricity fails and the house falls dark. Deena Metzger encourages us to journey to the very edge of mystery, to the very edge of what we assume we are as human beings, and then she challenges us to climb further into fierce light, to sink roots deeper down into thick shadow. To hold firm in the central heartwood even as we are irrevocably splintered. Her dialogue between the wild girl and the woman healer is a dialogue we all need to have with ourselves and with one another (and this includes every other - from the pungent mustard flower to the lean cougar, from the tiny ant to the great sycamore) if our world is to survive. This book is essential, revelatory, and resonant with the song that calls us to return to wild beauty.