Stories across time
Dear friends:
Last time, I explored stories of stubborn optimism as a response to climate change and our deep planetary crises.
This week I have been thinking about storytelling as an art and practice of community and togetherness. All of us have had to adjust and sacrifice our gatherings with other people to varying extents over the past couple of years. Developing my own practice of ‘storytelling in the community’ during this strange time has definitely stretched how I think about community and togetherness, lineage and time.
Almost exactly a year before the pandemic hit, in March 2019, I had just completed a five-week intensive training in storytelling in the community, facilitated by the fabulous storytellers Sue Hollingsworth and Gilly Southwood.
In that course, we learned the arts and practices of working with ‘traditional’ stories - myths, legends, folktales. We developed performance skills: working with the voice, the gaze, the gestures, the imagination. We practiced different techniques of excavating and developing themes: mapping worlds, and visualising rich imagery. We practiced playfulness and presence, and focused on telling stories as an artful practice of building community - a practice of attunement with the collective of all those present.
The process was deeply challenging for me - as someone who is fairly introverted, and often struggles to find my place, and voice, in a community. But it was also healing and transformative. I discovered that I could tap into a kind of magic that only comes alive in the presence of others. I fell completely in love with this kind of rich, juicy, enlivened and relational storytelling, and knew in my bones that I had discovered a lifelong passion.
Well, the rest of the year was extremely busy, and I could only carve out little bits of time for storytelling. But I could still feel a practice of sorts slowly gaining traction in me. Then in a daring moment, I sent off a proposal to give a practice session on storytelling at an academic conference later that year in Chile. And blow me over, it was accepted! (That was a whole other story - which I will probably share some other time).
And then suddenly, in the pandemic, it became much harder to practice this sort of ancient, oral storytelling - and access the alchemy of connection and enchantment, arising through the power of imagination shared amongst a collective.
In these times, I have often thought of our proverbial ancient human ancestors. You know, the ones who would have gathered around the fire at night to tell stories under the starry skies all those millennia ago.
I have held in my mind’s eye that expansive (and yes, romantic) image of a small circle of people together beneath the stars, connected to one another and the infinite universe through their stories. I have thought of my own experiences around the campfire with friends and family in the wilderness: the sheer wonder of those glittering stars, and that feeling of quiet awe coupled with a profound sense of belonging - almost as if being held in the embrace of the universe itself.
I contrast this feeling to one arising from a pervasive image of our current time. The scene of a lone figure cloistered away indoors, staring at a pixelated screen.
Now more than ever, the modern built environment only heightens the separations we have created for ourselves. The fence, the grid, the four-walled enclosures, and now more than ever the electronic screen all so powerfully shape our encounters with one another and the land, boxing off space, narrowing our view and diminishing our sensory experiences of the world.
In one sense, the pandemic has connected some of us much more across vast global distances in the virtual space. I have found some of these encounters to be surprisingly rich and meaningful. Yet I’m still holding feelings of unease and ambivalence about connecting in this way.
If we choose (or passively accept) living more of our lives in such a state of physical separation, do we, contrary to our intentions, begin to reduce our capacities for wonder and expansiveness, and for living with the world and letting it live through us? Do we diminish the richness of our own living thought and experience in the process, even as we discover meaningful connections in these virtual spaces? How do we keep alive our enchantment, connection and wonder in these times?
Across most of our human lineage, people had no choice but to live with the elements. And the elements lived powerfully in their stories. The world was animate. Just about every ancient pantheon you can think of has its plethora of gods and goddesses of the sun, the moon, the wind, the storms, the seas, etc. The stars themselves were ancestors and divine beings, guiding us mortals to navigate the passages of our lives, both literally and metaphorically.
Some of the stories I’ve been working with come from these ancient times. Perhaps they’ve been told in some form since the time of the Buddha, or even before. Civilisations have risen and crumbled within the lifespan of these stories. They have passed from the hands of countless generations of other storytellers, into mine. I love to think that I may be part of a lineage of storytellers that stretches across such deep time and far into the future - always seeding the world anew with the wisdom of stories that both carry and transcend the cultures they arose from, and percolate with newer human perspectives as they are constantly evolving.
In COVID-19 times, with sunlight and fresh air offering some protection from the virus, I saw the opportunity to return to storytelling in community - outside in the natural elements, and extending to a wider, more-than-human community.
I began to host small, casual, outdoor storytelling gatherings. These gatherings, which have continued through the year, find a small group of us sitting together in a park or a forest or at the beach, telling and listening to stories of Skywoman and Amaterasu, the Brave Little Parrot and the Selkie.
Telling these stories in the fresh air as the birds sing, the waves crash, and the tree branches wave in the breeze, reminds me of how, as living beings, we are all connected. It reminds me that we stretch to infinity. It reminds me that just there, above and beneath and beyond the concretized and colonized spaces, is a richly interconnected and enlivened world that beckons to us all.
Telling ancient stories in this way reminds me of the philosopher Roman Krznaric’s idea of ‘Cathedral Thinking.’ In order to become ‘Good Ancestors’ to the generations that follow, Krznaric writes, we must grow better at using our capacities for thinking in the long term, and carrying a vision that extends beyond our own lifetime - much in the way that Europe’s most magnificent cathedrals were built over many centuries by people who would never live to see their completion.
Thinking on these longer time horizons, we may enlarge our perspective and work towards goals and visions that come to matter profoundly to the future. We may become those proverbial wise women and men who plant the seeds of trees whose shade they know they will never live to enjoy. What matters is that we plant and nurture those long-growing seeds now, while it is our time.
What are the stories that you hope to help carry into the future? How will you share and nurture these stories? Let me know - I would love to hear from you!
With love,
Megan