wayfarer • wayfinder• guide
I left home in the United States at age 18 in 1986, with $400 and a one-way ticket to Paris. I stayed for nine months, and have been making my way through life by trial and error ever since.
My life has been dedicated to inner exploration and creative expression no matter where I’ve found myself.
I am devoted to healing the world one imagination at a time through poetry, myth, and folk tales, and to assisting others to find the inner safety and courage they need to make their unique contributions to the human experience.
poet • Mystic • oracle
Coming of Age
1980s suburban Connecticut. Ronald Reagan was president. Capitalism was king, and people aspired to be yuppies—young urban professionals. Nobody talked about rites of passage, or the soul, or energy. My friends and I grooved to Duran Duran, Simple Minds, and Madonna at high school dances. We went on dates to movies like War Games and The Breakfast Club, partied in the woods, and snuck into bars underage. Prom, homecoming, sports, SATS, getting into college, and losing one’s virginity, were the ceremonies that marked our transition into supposed adulthood. Not much changed when I got to college, where the goal was a high GPA that would culminate in a high-paying job.
There was a dark side.
Binge drinking and eating, drugs, reckless sexual encounters. The kinds of ceremonies your soul draws you into when you and your society can’t hear its voice, drawing you down into the Underworld without protectors or guides.
I survived.
All through those years I had a secret best friend. Depression. Every now and then someone saw her and suggested medication. I declined. I knew I had to go down all the way, even if I had no idea for years, what was happening to me.
My soul was calling me.
Fool’s leap
I’ve already told you how I moved to Paris at age 18, but I didn’t mention I spoke no French and no connections in France besides the address of an au pair agency I was hoping would find me a job and place to live in the fabled City of Light. Remember, this was before the internet!
My life wasn’t in danger, but it was scary arriving in a big city alone my first time. One of my clearest memories of that time is walking to the tabac on the corner my first morning in Paris to buy a map and finding myself on it by looking up at the street signs.
The next decade of my life involved a lot of journeys without a map. It seemed like every time I did try to plot a course, the wind blew the map right out of my hands. I did return to the U.S. and studied English literature and creative writing. I was on my way to grad school to be an English professor, when some voice inside told me, “Don’t do it.”
That was my last chance at a professional, well-regarded career for years.
For the next decade I bounced around the US, living in Washington, DC, Rhode Island, Hawai’i, New Mexico, New Orleans, New York City, San Francisco, and Vermont. I worked minimum wage jobs I usually hated, scraped by. I wanted to be a writer, but barely wrote anything.
It wasn’t all bad. I met incredible people from all walks of life. I learned to shapeshift, became adaptable. With little money, I became resourceful and resilient. I gained some humility and self-esteem at the same time, realized work was not the measure of a human being. Having no goals, I stepped outside of time and learned how to enjoy the day-to-day. I made deep friendships, connecting through shared hardships and adventures.
devotee • disciple • islander
Everything changed when I made my first real commitment, though I have to admit I didn’t know I was making one. At age 29, with my bags packed to go move in with a friend in Providence, Rhode Island for the winter, I didn’t get on the ferry. I decided to stay on Block Island, my summer home base for years, for the winter.
living offshore
I still had no idea what I was doing, and there are many more detours in this story, but living on Block Island is where my soul was finally able to speak loud enough for me to hear it. I began to write, filling notebooks that became two novels. I published two books of poetry.
I still didn’t have teachers or guides I could recognize. I thought I was just lazy, laying belly-down on the beach all day, getting up to body-surf some waves. I got high on inhaling salt roses, biked into the wind, watched the same birds return year after year, foraged bladderwrack and cattails and chickweed; eye-gazed with deer I’d come across in stripped winter fields. I walked miles on a small island, circling. I never tired of it. The more I walked, the more the path deepened. I had found a way. I thought I would never leave.
In the Tarot, the Strength card shows a woman holding open a lion’s mouth with her bare hands. That’s how my thirties felt. I began to repair myself.
People were beginning to speak of energy around this time. 9/11 brought me into a modern medicine woman’s sphere. She was an energy worker, something I’d never heard of, and as we began to repair my energy body, she helped me reframe my perspective on everything that happened to me in life, especially the traumas.
In my late 30s, a kind of miracle happened. A friend of mine who was also a poet and owned an inn on Block Island, decided to start a yearly poetry festival for four weeks in April, during the off-season. For ten years, I got to study, literally at the feet, because my favorite spot was the living room floor, of some of the great contemporary masters of American poetry that I’d admired for years from afar.
People like Robert Bly, Mary Oliver, Marie Howe, Li-Young Lee, Tony Hoagland, Coleman Barks, Fran Quinn, Billy Collins, and Carolyn Forché joined our island community of poets and everyday mystics who chose to live as exiles far out to sea for many different reasons. The one thing we all shared, was love for our magical, little island.
getting claimed
Little did I know when I picked up a flyer for this cool looking conference up in Maine off the book table at The Poetry Project, that I was about to join the lineage of the great Robert Bly, and be embraced by a community of true elders who saw good things in me long before I did, quietly helping me put myself back together.
The GMC is a multigenerational community that comes together once a year to explore the life of the soul—as individuals and as a culture—through ecstatic poetry, music, dance, archetypal psychology, and the visual arts. But most importantly, it’s where I discovered the power of storytelling and rites of passage work.
I was unbelievably blessed to be along for the ride as Martin Shaw began his storytelling career in America. After Bly, slipped into the twilight, Martin became the Great Mother Conference leader, and we on Block Island were blessed to have him come to the island for the Poetry Project many times. Working with Martin, I began to see what I’d been doing for the past twenty years where it seemed like I was doing nothing.
All those years of living in tents, barns, school buses, and on boats, because that’s what you had to do to get summer housing on Block Island when the tourists came, I’d been forming a relationship with the land; letting rocks, waves, willow, and mallow; hawks, owls, wrens, and gulls; hurricanes and zephyrs, whitecaps and calm marsh inlets, initiate me in the old ways.
Now, conscious of what was happening, I began to devote myself to these rites of passage with will and intent. I started to come out of fairyland, strong enough mentally and emotionally, to be an advocate for magic in the real world of late-stage capitalism. My soul was not crushed. My voice got more refined and louder.
listener • shapeshifter • STORYTELLER
Against a lot of odds, I was able to follow the thread my soul rolled out to me from the heart of the labyrinth and find my way to Block Island. I let wind and waves wear me down, I persevered, and eventually I re-grew my limbs like a sea star, five of them, a witch’s pentacle of protection, a symbol of the magic I could now wield as a conscious creator of my life.
Tidal WAves
A lot more rivers were traveled between the time I discovered I was being initiated by the land, but they were no longer desperate rapids that led to me crashing on the rocks, although I did ground myself through a chronic auto-immune illness that had me in and out of the hospital for a few years. Although it was awful, I understood why it was happening and worked with my soul and made the choices it was asking me to evolve so that my body could be a strong enough vessel to hold what my soul was inviting me to contribute to others, this body of work here.
In my 40s, I answered the call of underground water and journeyed to the Yucátan peninsula in Mexico, immersing myself in the lagunas and cenotes of the Sian Ka’an.
In Mayan, Sian Ka’an means “the place where heaven is born.” Although I still had flares of ulcerative colitis, and went through another devastating romantic loss, in the place where the sun was born, my body and soul merged. I encountered janzu and aguahara, went through deep healing that spanned centuries into the past and future; became part of the international aquatic community, and started to offer aquatic healing to others.
I published another poetry book, Breaking Up With The Moon. It’s not that I didn’t still love the moon, but I was done with being someone’s reflection.
I live now on another island, Moku o Keawe—Hawai’i Island. I swim with dolphins, mantas, and sharks. When I dive down deep enough, I hear whale songs.
For the past few years, I have been in sacred mentorship with Ke’oni Hanalei, of Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals, immersing myself in the Mū Hawaiian wisdom teachings of pua’aehehu (fern medicine) and aloha mā.
The Coracle is the result of my life so far, specifically the past 16 year transit of Pluto through Capricorn. As a solar Capricorn, I have been tested over and over, and I can now say that all the trials and tribulations have led to my triumph, no matter what the circumstances of my life.
This is the medicine I now offer to others with gratitude and awe for the process that has led me to this moment here.
I don’t need to tell the story of how i was broken anymore. Now I can speak of how a wild horse watched me from the ironwoods, and of how warm the river was when i knelt to lift the late afternoon light out of the water.
how it poured over my head.how it flowed down my hair and shoulders, gilding my skin, returned to the river unbroken.
Professional bio
Jennifer Lighty is a storyteller, writer, mentor, and bodyworker. She received a BA in English from George Washington University, and her MA from the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College. She attended the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and the MFA program at San Francisco State. Author of three books of poetry, Siren, Bluebell: The Apocalypse Diary, Breaking Up With The Moon, and the mythopoetic memoir, Piko; A Return to the Dreaming, her writing has appeared in many journals like the Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, North American Poetry Review, and Earthlines. She has been nominated for Best New American Poets, the Pushcart Prize, and received an honorable mention in the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize from Cutthroat Magazine. She was the beneficiary of a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She writes on Substack at The Corpus Callosum Chronicles.
Jennifer’s awareness of the body is a part of all she creates and facilitates. She is a licensed massage therapist, graduating from the Pacific Center for Awareness and Bodywork as a trauma-informed somatic bodyworker. As a trauma-informed guide, she promotes agency in her clients and students by allowing them to find the answers they seek for themselves with subtle and skillful encouragement to explore and integrate their core wounds. She is a Reiki Master/Teacher, aguahara practitioner, craniosacral therapist, certified ™JourneyDance facilitator, and received a certificate in permaculture from Starhawk’s Earth Activist Training.
Jennifer is the founder of The Coracle, an online rites of passage mentorship carried on myth, folk tales, and the Mū Hawaiian cultural practices of Heka (magic) and pua'a'ehu'ehu (fern medicine) received through her mentor, Ke’oni Hanalei, a descendant of the Mū Hawaiians whose lineage spans 1,017 known generations. She is devoted to honoring her European lineage through folk tales and myths, and the lineage of Mahat, who resurrected the Mū teachings after ancient planetary cataclysms, by making these teachings relevant to modern life so this wisdom can continue to guide humans in this time of great planetary change and transition.
