The story spirits
A playful story reminds us that stories are powerful entities with a will of their own
Dear Friends,
Have you noticed that stories have lives of their own? That sometimes a story can slip under your skin, and then flex its sheer creative power to invoke in you the deepest feelings of mystery and longing, or fascination and delight, or sorrow and remorse?
Have you noticed how a story sometimes finds you at just the right moment, when you could really do with the particular insight or wisdom, or the strong medicine, that it offers?
In animist traditions, stories are often regarded as animate and alive, just like everything else. As the ecologist and philosopher David Abram observes, they are part and parcel of a world in which ‘there is no phenomenon — no stone, no mountain, no human artifact — that is definitively inert or inanimate. Each thing has its own pulse, its own interior animation, its own life!’1
These words felt pertinent, as my search for playful stories (September being the month of play) brought me to a traditional Korean folktale called the Story Bag. I had come across different versions of this tale before, and decided to work with this playful adaptation from the Circle Round podcast to develop my own version. You can listen to my recording here:
The story asks us to imagine that every story told in the world has a spirit. When stories are told from one person to the next, the Story Spirits travel freely from imagination to imagination, circulating their ideas in the world, offering their powerful and multi-hued gifts.
In this story, however, a stubborn young girl extracts a reluctant promise from her aunt, a magnificent storyteller, which keeps all the Story Spirits locked away. Prevented from circulating their magic in the world as they’re supposed to, the story spirits turn angry and vengeful. They become determined to get back at the young girl who has been holding them captive!
Working with this story has woken me up to the power of Story Spirits! It has got me thinking about the very real dangers we face when we hold stories captive, treating them as though they belong to us. It has made me confront this shadow side — if you will — of our human relationships to story. Because let’s face it — as people, communities and societies we all get stuck in certain stories, coveting them for ourselves or holding onto them like we might hold on to a grudge. We also get stuck in wanting to control, distort, dismiss, ignore, belittle or marginalise certain stories and narratives.
The Story Spirits remind us that stories are never really ‘ours’ to begin with. Even our own stories never really belong to us. They are ever-changing shape-shifters that live relationally, and spring to life when we share them with others. Stories live in the spaces between us, and exert a will of their own. Above all, they demand our respect — when we diminish a story we diminish ourselves.
In her book The Moon in the Well, storyteller and psychologist Erica Helm Meade explores the importance of telling any given story with ‘the wisdom of right time, right place, and right people’.
Her observations highlight the complexities of storytelling as a social practice and art. There’s an element of mystery in the process of recognising the story that wants to be told, and discerning the right time, right place, right people for telling it. This was ‘serious business, for telling the right tale at the right time ushered in the seasons and helped maintain the cosmic order,’ Helm Meade observes.
In many storytelling traditions, she observes, there are rules about when a particular story can be told and who can tell it. Traditional stories link people in contemporary times to ancient, ancestral wisdom — so the telling is no trivial matter. Some stories may only be properly understood with sensitivity to the particular social contexts, ecologies, cultures and cosmologies that birthed and shaped them.
Yet at the same time, stories also grow and change and evolve with the times. They contain universal wisdom that transcends time and place and translates to any context. In stories, we recognise global themes and catch elusive truths of the human experience and the living world. When I hear a cautionary tale of a little girl who wants to keep all the delicious stories to herself, it resonates. I naturally ask myself: what stories am I holding captive, and what is the consequence?
Helm Meade elaborates:
‘Learning to think metaphorically, thematically, and mythologically about one’s own life, and to share this through talking story2 with others is a healing revelation for individuals and groups. In my view, traditional lore is still our best shot at activating and animating these creative processes in the psyche…
Storytelling helps reduce isolation. It strengthens compassion, mirrors self-worth, boosts resiliency, and encourages personal integrity. Ultimately story helps us toward loving participation in the human drama. We cannot escape or fully redeem this passion play, for life is dark and light, beautiful and cruel, and we humans are fallible. But a well-storied imagination beholds the richness of the world, cultivates a perspective that is at once sagely and humble, and opts to embrace life.’
While we may approach facts or opinions with skepticism and judgment, stories that speak to our common humanity tend to light up the empathetic and appreciative parts of the brain. (As always, though, we have to differentiate between stories that are nourishing and constructive3, and stories that are not.)
I notice that when I am living in a healthy flow of stories, and in healthy relationship to both my inner stories and stories exchanged with others, I feel nourished and connected, stimulated and at peace. Echoing Helm Meade, with all the pains and difficulties of life, the world still feels like a brighter, warmer, richer, more nuanced and interesting place full of fascinating discoveries yet to be made.
When we hear someone telling a story, it is natural for us to try and relate that story to our own experience. The more constructive stories we engage with, the more we find ourselves both connected and expanded. For as much as stories reveal our similarities, they also highlight the diversity of our experiences and perspectives. Helping us walk the proverbial mile in the shoes of another, stories show us things we are not capable of seeing on our own.
Essentially, stories are teachers. As Ana Lorena Fabrega, author of the Learning Game, explains:
‘Stories are memorable, exciting, and captivating. We love to hear tales of ordinary people who faced conflict, failed, picked themselves up, and found new strategies to overcome adversity. Stories make knowledge memorable and practical.’
Arguing the need for story-based learning in education, Fabrega (quoting Polina Pompliano, author of the Profile) points out that one of the best ways to learn about a topic you are interested in is to find someone who embodies that knowledge and learn their story.
Fabrega urges:
‘Next time you have the chance, go watch kids play. They’re almost always pretending to live out stories they’ve heard. They copy characters from their favorite shows, games, and books. Much of the time, they’ll extend the story to include their friends, family members, and events from their own lives. In essence, they’re applying what they learn from stories to the real world.’
Indeed, the power of sharing stories knows no limits. As writer-musician-activist-futurist Pat Kane and host Rachel Donald reflected recently in conversation on the Planet: Critical podcast, creativity and imagination are ‘resources of abundance, multiplied when shared.’
When Kane shared his view of how a current dominant paradigm of extractive capitalism has ‘enclosed’ and commodified vast human repositories of artistic expression, creativity and imagination, I thought again of the Story Spirits. As the logic of an economic model turns art into something exclusive, to be owned and possessed, I can almost feel the Story Spirits gnashing their teeth and plotting their revenge.
Reflecting on their conversation, Rachel Donald wrote:
‘The great beauty of humankind is to be possessed by creativity, inflamed by imagination and spurred on by passion as we seek to uncover and explore and sink and fly and enrapture as if feathers sprout from our shoulders and harps hang from our hips. The great tragedy of humankind is we attempt to possess creativity rather than be possessed; feathers turn to ash and harps burst their strings leaving only an empty frame through which the world falls.’
In a playful way, the Story Spirits warn us of the dangers of living in an unhealthy relationship to story — which I extrapolate to any form of creative and imaginative expression. As part of the ecosystem of the living world, stories wield enormous power. As stories circulate, disappear, compost and regenerate through different times and cultures, they keep on seeding the world with ideas, possibilities and potentials both new and old. As much as stories uphold values and traditions from the past, they equally drive evolution and change and build the future.
Out of right relationship, stories unleash great destructive power in the world. So how do we nurture and sustain a healthy relationship with the Story Spirits? How do we free them to offer their multi-hued gifts to the world? How do we draw on the wisdom of ‘right time, right place, and right people’ to recognise, repurpose, reinvent and seed our lives and communities with stories that are needed for these times? How do we story our worlds richly, with conscious intention and discernment, so that we can draw on the power of stories to nourish and guide us?
These are the juicy questions I am grappling with this week, and I invite you to do the same. What stories are wanting, or needing, to be told through you?
Let me know!
With love,
Megan
P.S. October is the month of Ideas and Imagination! Find out how working with your stories can help you can soar to new ideas and rejuvenate your imagination. I’m offering 3 free calls in October, so email me (megan.lindow@gmail.com) to give it a try!
You can also work one-on-one with me for a deeper exploration of your own stories, or for storied support with your own creative projects. Get in touch to find out more!
Writing in the Foreword of The Moon in the Well, David Abram observes:
There is something about this storied way of speaking — this acknowledgment of a world all alive, awake and aware — that brings us close to our senses, and to the palpable, sensuous world that materially surrounds us. Our animal senses know nothing of the objective, mechanical, quantifiable world to which most of our civilized discourse refers. Wild and gregarious organs, our senses spontaneously experience the world not as a conglomeration of inert objects but as a field of animate presences that actively call our attention, grab our focus, capture our gaze. Whenever we slip beneath the abstract assumptions of the modern world, we find ourselves drawn into relationship with a diversity of beings as inscrutable and unfathomable as ourselves. Direct, sensory participation is inherently animistic, disclosing a world wherein each thing has its own active agency and power.
When we speak of things around us as quantifiable objects or passive ‘natural resources,’ we contradict our spontaneous sensory experience of the world, and hence our senses begin to wither and grow dim. We find ourselves living more and more in our heads, adrift in a set of abstractions, unable to feel at home in an objectified landscape that seems alien to our own dreams and emotions. But when we tell stories, our imagination begins to flow out through our eyes and our ears to inhabit the breathing earth once again.’
Talking story is a Hawaiian expression and practice.