Story Paths

I recently called a small group of well-wishing friends together around a fire for a story share. This is a culture-weaving practice, where one person shares their life story with others. My friend John Wolfstone did this when he was leaving our island in the Salish Sea, speaking themes of ancestral healing that were present for him in his time here.

After being here for about two years, I felt the moment had come. I’ve noticed a tendency I have, when arriving somewhere new, to become silent. To observe, to share little about myself. Then, if I feel safe and ready, I come out. This is my coming out.

It was vulnerable, because I don’t have long-term relations here. Yet there are those I felt I could call on to be present, and I feel blessed by how they showed up and witnessed me. Friends backed me up with singing and guitar to accompany my own drumming, story and song.

My life remembered is a prism of portals: each one opens to detailed sensory and emotional experiences; what to choose? I thought of organizing my life story according to a theme, like my relationship with spirituality or eros. It felt too abstract. I settled on arranging my story according to land: places that have homed me. The lakelands to the east of this continent, the grassland-mountain regions where I grew up, the arid regions of recovery and introspection, the far eastern lands with dense mythical patterns forming a story skin over hill and plateau, and the bombastic temperate rainforest I now call home. With land, people. With land, memories.

I feel blessed to have lived this and shared it.

To hear more about it, do listen to the audio above.

Are you called to share your story?

Perhaps you’ve passed through a difficult trial, and feel called to be witnessed. Perhaps you’re leaving a place, or coming somewhere new.

People also share stories with pictures when returning from travels, as another friend of mine did upon returning from Australia, expressing detailed insights into the ecology there.

Life rarely ties up neatly in a bow, and many of us don’t have the full and constant community we might want, yet perhaps for you, as for me, the time to share your story has come.

I hope so.

This also marks the end of this season. What’s coming next? A podcast is, in its essense, sound. That could be interviews and musings. It could also be audio documents of travel, music, riffing on stories real-time, and much more besides.

This podcast and newsletter has an exploratory, curious, community-weaving nature. Kind of like a friendly dog, sniffing around, charming people and getting them talking. This coming season, this podcast-dog is going off-leash.

Hear you then.

Happy storying and being storied,

Theo

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Here's an interesting vista of reflection. Consider the meta-layers of narrative in your life, and how they cause you to interface with the world.

What's a meta-layer of narrative? It could be mythical explanations of constellations; it could be their scientific explanation, or a hybrid of the two. It's an understanding that doesn't come from your own life alone, but which affects your experience of yourself and the world. They are filters between us and our world. Not necessarily blocking the world, but perhaps letting a certain quality of light in.

In a culture with a strong oral tradition, the stories that are told and retold about orca, raven, buffalo, magpie, spider, selkie—all these inform people in their relationships with those being.

Modern media has its meta-narratives too. This is true in the case of nonfiction news, giving a specific account of the world, emphasizing certain parts, and de-emphasizing or omitting others. When we receive information from that news source, we are receiving a particular perspective on the world. That news source is like a collective sense organ and brain that gives information about the world to whoever is connected to it.

We’re also informed by fiction, which in the way it lands in us, is not as different from non-fiction as we might imagine. Reading the Lord of the rings, we see great heroes, simple hobbits, crafty wizards, agile elves, and ancient trees. We may find ourselves inhabiting those characters in our day to day lives.

In contemporary stories, we may find queer characters, neurodivergent characters, characters happily outside media beauty norms. We may inhabit those characters in their story, which will change how we we inhabit our lives, and our collective lives.

Which meta narratives are you influenced by, and how do they affect your experience of the world?

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I recently watched Studio Ghibli’s new film, The Boy and the Heron.

Perplexed and fascinated, I watched it again.

The film has many layers, and not neatly stacks. Metaphors, history, personal experiences, imagination, mythology: there are many aspects to focus on.

I’m especially drawn by the films’ two worlds, and how they intertwine. One is a countryside estate in Japan during World War 2. The other is an underworld accessed through a mysterious tower.

While it will be helpful for you if you’ve seen the film, and there will be spoilers, I reckon this will be interesting either way.

To help with this exploration, I brought on my friend Chandler Passafiume: storyteller, game designer, writer and poet. When we met, both of us staying in an island farming community, our story minds connected. He’s so good that he may even become one of a few regular, rotating co-hosts on the show. You can find him at Substack at Wandering Cloud.

Overlapping worlds is a huge theme in mythology, as in modern stories, and aren’t we each moving in different worlds that affect each other? The world of work and home life, of one group of friends and another, of diverse lands we moved between.

We discuss the boy hero’s approach to the otherworld, how the same characters appear differently on each side, how some characters move between the worlds, the role of the trickster heron, and even mutual causality between worlds.

As this one was a lively conversation, I’ve chosen not to make it into a written article as well. It’s available on any podcast player; just search under Story Paths.

Until the next,

Theo

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Here’s something a little different, a fictionalized story of my own life. You may find resonance with your own canyon crossings. For a version with music and sound, listen to the recording.

In we go.

A man is crossing a sandy, stony plane. As he passes, long-tailed mice with huge ears hop behind wiry bushes who are as thrifty with water as a posse of poor widows abandoned by their children are with their coppers.

The boy is thrifty too.

His energies run beneath his skin, burrowed in his bones.

It's been such a long journey.

And just when he's getting swing in his stride, and learning to avoid the little cactus balls hidden all about, he stops short, kicking pebbles down into a canyon so deep that the bottom is lost to dark mist.

He steps back, looks across. Of course, his trail continues on the far side. As usual, he could turn back, though he's not convinced that the land wouldn't shift to confound him on back here again. Or some parallel place.

Also as usual, there are people between him and the canyon's far side, skating on the air above the great drop as thought playing on invisible ice.

He is no longer fooled by their grace. Now he sees the hitches in their movements, the quavers, the dropping down a foot before rising triumphantly again. The dust embedded in their clothes, the rouge covering wrinkles and red scars.

F**k it, he says. Then bless me, my lord, and something about universal abundance. A couple words for Odin, for Zeus. Krishna, Mohammed, Jesus, Coyote, Raven, Cailleach and the Creator and Creatrix while he's at it.

Then he steps out.

It's even further down than it looked. The fall is slow, like a leaf. The wind is silky and succulent on his skin, full of moisture. A river runs beneath him, roaring up the walls, though he can’t see it yet.

The fall is so slow that on his way down, he has time to consider his entire journey, from start until now. The creatures who helped and thwarted him. The half dozen other canyons he's crossed. He even manages to release envy for those b******s skating up above. Or loosen it, anyway.

And of course, when he lands, it is on the near side of the river.

Fording it is wet, precarious work.The far canyon wall looks like it will be a hell of a climb. The last ones sure were.

He takes a few breaths and starts up.

He's getting stronger.

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Let’s open with a story.

Tiger Farming Termites

Neat rows of wood are crisscrossed to draw in delectable foragers, though truth be told, Tiger tastes termites in a pinch.

Waiting. Crouched. Poised. Bored as the boards he's laid out, until an unconscious ungulate wanders warily, to nibble green blades.

Tiger pounces, rolls, breaks the creature’s soft neck. Crushes termites.

The dying words of the aardvark are ‘Oh brethren bugs! Warn my kin.’

When the feast has passed, Tiger grumbles for weeks, hungry.

Are Stories Good or Bad?

If we ask the question of whether a given story is good or bad, this binary approach quickly falls apart.

For this exploration, let’s use the word ‘story’ in the broadest sense. This story could be an old myth that nourishes a people's relation with the land, or an old myth that pits people against others. It could be propaganda, put out by a political group or corporation to corral people into certain behaviors. A story could provoke racism, casting certain people in victor roles and others as villains. A story may cast us humans as masters of the Earth, with dominion over all others, or rather as newcomers to this wondrous place, and the most dependent of all the other beings who preceded us.

Is there anything as powerful as a story? The stories that we take in determine our behavior, over our lifetimes and over generations.

A story can be about everyday people from our own time and place, and the happenings in their lives may divert us from the difficulties in our own. The tale in a television series might capture the minds of millions, season after season, so much so that viewers know more about these fictional folks than they do about the historical figures upon whom they're based. For the minds and motivations of the historical figures are opaque, but those of the characters are transparent, allowing us, the viewers, to enter in, get a sense of who they are, and why they act as they do.

Living Stories

Is a given story good or bad? Instead of a binary rubric—rooted in computing and notions of piety and sin, good and bad karma, or a scale of justice—I instead propose an animistic understanding.

I'm sitting now by a pond where I often write these articles. I see old man's beard moss hanging on willow trees, and sword ferns with spores dotting their undersides. I feel the sun shining on my forehead, hands and chest. A mosquito lands on the moss, a raven steals eggs from another bird's nest. As the season goes on, this sun’s cool light will increase in heat until I must retreat indoors in the full of the day.

Are these things good or bad? The mosquitoes bad for me, but good for the birds who eat ki. The willow is beautiful to me, but is out-competing reeds and ferns around ki. The sun nourishes our entire planet, and yet can bring death-dealing heat.

So let us drop this consideration of good or bad, and even a spectrum between them. Let’s instead consider the willow, the raven, the sun, the mosquito, as beings with their own natures and wills, and their own intricate relationships with each other.

Now, let’s bring this allegory of an ecosystem to stories: their identities, their natures, and their relationships with other stories.

As there are predatory creatures, there are predatory stories: propaganda that divides and conquers, setting kin against kin, fomenting nations into war. As a bear upturns a stone and digs up the larvae underneath, some stories cause people to enter the homes of others and take whatever they want. Those stories say, ‘They are lesser than you. You deserve this.’

The bear doesn’t need stories to do this, but somehow we humans do.

Migrating Stories

A stream of water will gradually wear a trough into the land. That trough, given enough water and time, will become a canyon. So too with some stories who begin in an unassuming way, then grow and grow until they’re wearing a canyon into minds and hearts of listeners.

Consider the story of Christianity: a rabbi and his followers preached revolutionary love at a time of colonization and war. After his death, that story gradually spread from land to land, and as it did, it adapted to people's hearts and minds, or you could say they tamed it for their own purposes. The story appeared one way in eastern lands, another in the West, North, South, and indeed in every individual who came into contact with that story, be they believers or not.

So too with the spread of Buddhism: from a man's teaching in northern India, it spread north into what's now called China, Tibet and Bhutan, south into India and Sri Lanka, east into Japan, and now in pockets throughout the world. In each place this story adapted to the landscape of minds, hearts and culture, just as moss will grow differently on an aldar or on an oak.

Story Spores

There are stories that support empires. Empires arose in Europe, China, Japan, South America, United States, Germany, Italy, Rome, and Vijay Nagar, and elsewhere. Each had standing armies, central power, and stories to live by, which told them that they had a right to rule others, a right to expand, to take, to tax. Yet the stories within them had many different flavors in different times and places. Perhaps the stories justifying empire are like spores on the wind, finding purchase in different cultures and changing according to their host.

Are spores good or bad?

The old animistic view considers stories as beings. As people. Just as we're negotiating situations throughout our lives—setting terms, considering what kind of connection we want with this person or that person—so too let us consider our relationship with stories. Just as our relationship with human people is not fixed but shifting, so too is our relationship with stories.

Prompts

Reflect on a story that migrated into your life from a different culture or background. How did it adapt to your inner landscape?

Think about a story that supported or challenged an empire-like structure in your life (e.g. a restrictive relationship or community). How did this story challenge the old guard? Where did that story find strength?

Explore a narrative that your business or industry promotes. How does this story interact with the broader cultural landscape?

Reflect on how the marketing of a similar product varies between audiences. For example, how do you see different kinds of vehicles being marketed, or brands of ice cream? Which stories take root in which soil?

Until the next,

happy creating,

Theo

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In part 1 of this two-parter on belonging, we were getting into moving between circles of belonging.

I attended a class recently with the wonderful artist-teacher-ceremonialist-textile practitioner: Laura Burns. I interviewed her some time ago; dig back and have a listen if you'd like. She spoke about moving between circles of belonging, and gave the example of queer folks who were born in a family who are not welcoming to queerness, especially in their own children. These children experienced a crisis of belonging in their families. Those who stood their grown often found the strength to do so because of finding new belonging with other queer folks. In this other circle of belonging, that part of themselves—that integral part of themselves—was not just tolerated but very welcome.

We can’t live without belonging somewhere. How can we find the strength to disagree and stand for principles in one circle of belonging, unless we find belonging in another circle?

For myself, when I came into seeking spiritually, I didn't find much belonging in my own culture, in secular society or in a church. I found belonging in a spiritual path from another land. When I fell out of that, I found belonging in marriage, and in connection with the lands where I grew up. Now I'm seeking a diversity of belonging, because I'm suspicious of putting too many eggs in one basket, especially baskets of human belonging.

We see this moving between circles in the animal world too. If the mother of a group of ducklings is killed, they may follow another mother. We see it on an international level. When Einstein couldn't stay in Europe at the onset of World War Two, he found some belonging in the United States. When young men from the United States were drafted into the Vietnam War, and they refused to risk their lives for a cause they abhorred, they found belonging across the border in Canada.

I have a great uncle named Walter, back in England, more than a hundred years ago. His father had died and his mother lacked the means take care of him and his sister. She left them in Sherwood Forest (famous for Robin Hood). They were found beneath the trees by passer-by’s, and the call went out, ‘Who will care for these children?’

Someone took Walter, another took his sister. The people who took them in were not biological relations, but relations nonetheless. They raised the children up, and Walter married into my family. Those kids found a kind of belonging, and Walter and I are part of the same extended family, although I'm too young to have met him in the flesh.

In this way, people and animals are sometimes forced to find belonging, unsure of whether they'll find it or not, of whether they'll even survive. But for many of us, we may at least step into another circle of belonging to find some strength so we can turn and make a stand in the circle giving us trouble. Like finding belonging in a queer community to make a stand when coming out with one's family. Or taking a step into a spiritual community to come out as weirdly spiritual with one's colleagues. Or taking a step into an earth-connection group to make a stand with one's ascendant-minded congregation.

Laura Burns also spoke of a mentor of hers, who as a child got bounced around from one foster home to another, and couldn't find anything close to the kind of belonging that she needed. She found it in spirit. A spiritual belonging where she dwelled, in the absence of human belonging. Now, as she grew up, she was able to find and forge connections within fellow humans, but for some time that spiritual belonging was enough to keep her alive.

Human and Spiritual Belonging: A Figure-Eight

Laura Burns suggested that human belonging and spiritual belonging could be conceived of together as a figure eight. Energy moves around this form, with each one feeding into the next.

Human belonging can help spiritual belonging can help human belonging can help spiritual belonging can help human belonging.

When things go sideways in human belonging—because we can be strange and fickle—then there is spiritual belonging. It is more steady, though perhaps more difficult to conceive and understand for our mammalian natures seeking warm skin and food. Spiritual belonging can feel vast and cosmic, or near and intimate. Both are important, and both can feed each other.

Moving Between Vocational Circles

In business, moving between circles could mean stepping into a new field to gradually build up connections, clients, and funds; while keeping one foot in the old arena. For myself, my old arena is working with media— films, podcasts, paintings and such. I'm stepping into helping people think in stories, as I'm doing with this article. I thought I might leave the media work quicker than I have, but I'm realizing that this is a slow step, and that actually there's more connection between these two fields than I had realised. It may not be such a bad thing to keep a foot in both.

Story Prompts

Consider a circle to which you belong, which feels prescient and relevant to you now. This could be family, friends, an interest group, an area of the earth or business that you're involved in.

What do have to offer to this circle?

Of that, what is understood and welcome in the circle and what is not?

Then consider another circle of belonging.

What do have to offer to this circle?

Of that, what is understood and welcome in the circle and what is not?

Consider how you might adjust yourself in relation to this first group, and in relation to this second group, so that you can express all that you want to express, and receive nourishment in kind.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

Thanks for reading!

Until the next.

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Let’s open with a poem.

Now is the Time

Now is the time to remember

that our green globe is the best-dressed in the ball

lit through with organic filaments

bombastic living miracles.

Now is the time to turn off the engine and

set down exhaustion

into lakes that remain

and bask for

an

infinite

instant.

Now is the time

to be

a miracle

too.

Cosmology: It’s a Heck of a Word

It is! It’s up there with ontology and epistemology, the kind of word that opens us up to broad ways of thinking. It’s an account or theory of the origin of the universe. Along with that view of its origin, cosmology implies principles and beings who govern our universe.

In story terms, we can say that the cosmology of a story is the largest conceptual framework, in which are nested the smaller frameworks. It's the largest explanation, the largest context, like the shell of the story egg. Or perhaps a better analogy is that cosmology is the bedrock which influences the chemistry of all the layers of soil, up to and including the topsoil. You see, cosmology speaks of the background of the story, but it also infuses each part of the story. It gives the big why’s and who’s and how’s of the story world, in which all smaller stories must take place.

We live in stories.

In popular scientific cosmology, we have the Big Bang and the theory of evolution. For those who live in that view, their daily lives are nested within that bigger picture.

Most other cosmologies are more personal, in the sense that there are beings who were and are involved in creation. That could be gods, the spirits of planets, animals, creators who create with clay, and more. There is a great variety. For those who are within those cosmologies, their daily lives are nested within this larger context.

Cosmology in Hinduism

Hindusim is varied to say the least, but there are trends. The branch of Hinduism that I studied and practiced was Bhakti-yoga, or Gaudiya Vaisnavism. It holds a personal cosmology, with all creation originating from a divine being, or rather, two divine beings, masculine and feminine. After the initial creation, those divine beings had a hand in subsequent sub-creations.

The big creation is where Divinity arranged the soup of matter into planets and stars. In the sub-creations, planets are populated with beings, and in further sub-creations, there are more beings, all within a universal governance with strata of gods, all the way to the top.

There are variations of this cosmology, within India and the larger area around her. It is as though the conceptual egg is multidimensional, existing in various ways for different people, yet with a common essential form. I’m afraid that’s the best metaphor I can think of now. I’m open to suggestions!

What are the variants? Some speak of Vishnu as the supreme originating deity. Others speak of Shiva, or Shakti. Some forego personal origins and say that the universe came from a void, or from an all-pervasive energy. Early Buddhism entered the scene with a teaching of interdependent causality, which you might roughly say means, everything causes everything (though there are greater concentrations of causality).

Jostling Cosmologies

If each of these cosmologies were a person, they’d often be bickering, and in fact the world is full of jostling cosmologies. If you hear two people making different claims about whether life came from matter or spirit, whether there was a big bang, whether creatures evolved from the ocean or were created in some other way, or perhaps both—you’re witnessing jostling cosmologies.

However, within a given story, we tend to find a single cosmology, a single world-view about the origin of things. From there comes the ontology of that world: what the story allows to be true. (Thanks to Sarah Kerr for that framing). In a given story, the cosmology may be spelled out or implied. It may be assumed to be the same as dominant modern world-views. In any case, there’s always a cosmology.

Let's use Lord of the Rings for an example, because the cosmology is spelled out clearly, at least if you get into the Silmarillion. Here it is: in the beginning there was one singer; from that singer came many singers. With their combined voices they created celestial harmonies. Then, one of those singers began to sing in disharmony; kicking off the troubles of creation, much as Lucifer did when he rebelled against the Judeo-Christian god. From there come Elves, Men, Dwarves, Hobbits. And in a particular place called the Shire, in Bag End, there’s Bilbo!

Cosmology is the biggest layer. Within that we have nested layers, and within all of that we have the actions of our characters, or, in our lives, ourselves.

Worlds Within Worlds

Within the cosmology of a story, nested inside, lie other layers of explanation. We've been talking about big picture cosmology—the origin of the universe and such—but thought of any scale has its own cosmology. It’s in pop culture. Every Spiderman comic doesn’t go into the bigger picture in the Marvel universe, but it’s there. Spiderman might be fighting a street thug, but Galactus is out there, him and other godlike beings who are part of the story’s backdrop.

Let's look at the Christian cosmology. In the beginning, there was God, who created the worlds, waters, and the rest of the support for life. He then created humankind and put them in the Garden of Eden. Aye, there’s the rub. They disobeyed him, got kicked out of the garden, and we’ve had trouble ever since.

Here’s one version of scientific cosmology. There was nothing, then there was a big bang, which created a universe with lots of empty space, and some plasma: superheated matter. This plasma coalesced into stars, which brought light to the universe, which had been dark until then. When these stars grow old they implode then explode, spreading complex matter throughout the universe. This becomes planets, asteroids, you, me; within at least one of these planets, ours, this matter gave rise to the first stage of life; it’s become more complex over time.

Cosmology and Colonisation

Cosmologies are often used to justify conquest. For example, the theory of evolution was used to place Europeans at the top of an evolutionary hierarchy, a ladder from simple celled organisms to animals, then to ‘primitive people,’ and finally to ‘civilized people.’ The cosmology of modern capitalism borrows from the theory of evolution, emphasizing survival of the fittest over cooperation for the good of all.

Religious world-views have also been used to justify conquest, usually with a justification that goes something like, ‘We are God’s chosen people.’

It should be said that categories like ‘religious’ and ‘scientific’ are so broad that they are useful only to an extent. Within scientific or religious groups, there are a many variations. These groups are patterns that make many people into large units, but there are overlaps between those units, and within each are individual people with diverse world-views.

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Let’s open with a poem.

Belonging.

She gives you all you need. Friendship. Safety. Meaning. Being rid of that pesky loneliness.

With her you overlap others. Share deep parts of yourself. Yet if you want this always, you must compromise. Give up the parts of you that rub them the wrong way. Sacrifice uniqueness to relax into unity.

Fearing loneliness, you'll take conditional belonging instead. Those conditions will rob you of your itch, of your restless yearning. Safety, enoughness, togetherness. A balm on your deep wound. Not healing, but sealing.

And yet, belonging is not all tricks to test your soul. As you find your deeper layers. May you find deeper layers of belonging as well. May you find strata that you have always shared with others, a bedrock of being. A layer so deep that you share it with kind and opponents alike, with human as much as cedar and squirrel.

May this bedrock belonging claim you whole, with all your jutting edges and inconvenient truths, your strangely shaped gifts and your occasional bouts of lonely longing for that surface belonging which would compromise you.

The Belonging of an Alder

I'm sitting in a forest near where I live, and thinking about belonging.

The alder trees around me, the bulrushes in the pond before me, the water striders skimming across the pond surface; all of them belong to the forest.

The leaves on these alders have now fallen to the ground, and are gradually becoming part of the it. Part of the soil. When in springtime the alders will again sprout leaves, they will draw their nutrients from the soil. Dying leaves become living leaves, in new arrangements. This is a kind of belonging: to be of a community of life.

For us humans, this word community connotes a place where our hearts, minds and soul gifts are welcome. Asked for, received, incorporated in the old sense of the word: becoming the body and thought forms/heart forms of that community. In business, it is one thing to belong to a particular vocation, and another to be an integral to that vocation. To have colleagues and even competitors with whom to exchange insights and practices.

Each of us were cared for in our upbringing, whether by biological parents, step parents, adopted parents, by people running an orphanage, or by a mixture of these and others. If we hadn't been cared for at that time in our lives when we were babies and young children, when we were so dependent, we simply wouldn't be here. Yet we want more care than is needed for our survival.

Stories as Miniature Worlds

I find it easier to see the community's that I'm in if I consider myself to be in a story. A story can be the world in miniature, like a model railway, with hills and trees and trains. The trees might be about as tall as our thumbs, the people as tall as our pinky fingernail. It’s all easier to conceive than a vast railway stretching across the country, running through cities full of thousands or millions of full sized human beings, and surrounded by hills weighing ton upon ton.

Likewise, a story can be a model. It’s easy to see where a character belongs. Gimli the dwarf? Well, he belongs to the dwarfs. Legolas the elf belongs to the elves. Even loner characters, like cowboys, belong among horses and arid lands and saloons. We know their habitat. It can be trickier to identify the circles of belonging in our own lives.

Fictionalise your Life

Here’s me in the third person.

Once there was a man, somewhere in the middle of his life, and out on a walk in a forest. He was looking at birds pecking bugs within moss-covered logs. He was hearing the calls of ravens, and watching giant human-made steel birds cross the sky in strangely straight lines. He was staying in a farming community, where he felt some community, but was called to move on. He wanted to be with people who would call forth his gifts. He was learning again to be alone without being in loneliness. To be in solitude.

There's a little snapshot of my life right now, in the form of a story. That’s a tool I keep returning to, to speak about myself in the third person. There was a child, a man, a woman or two spirit person. Or you might even conceive of yourself as an owl, a raven, a buffalo, an elephant, depending on what feels true to your experience in the moment. Why not try it now?

You can use this same third person tool to speak about yourself in your vocation. For myself I’ll say, Once there was a man who had been a monk for many years, studying and practicing the mythology of a distant eastern land. When he returned to his own land, he struggled to apply what he had learned to very different situations. He had learned much about stories, and so he worked to bring this understanding into the fields in which he found himself, to make relevant to the people he met the things he had learned. He strove to join the ecosystem in this place.

You could get into more detail, giving more specifics about your business, but it's easy to get bogged down. Instead, I suggest staying zoomed out to get a bigger picture on your situation. You can use this same third person tool to speak of others.

Moving Between Circles of Belonging

Each of us are in multiple circles of belonging. They may not all be comfortable or even healthy, but we’re in there. There's family, vacation, friends, the natural world as a whole, and also particular places where we may walk or camp, places that may be close to us now, or far away.

I'm part of this farming community here. I'm also connected with people who are in different circles of friends on this island in the Pacific Northwest. These circles overlap. I know people in different countries. There are people I'm connected to for work, and there's often an overlap with friendship. There's this forest that I'm inside now, where I've been taking walks for some months, and gradually coming to know the trees, and the calls of the birds (in the audio recording of this article).

It's helpful to remember that we are in multiple circles of belonging, because in any given circle there may be some trouble. For many people, the circle of family is troubled. Some have healthy, loving parents and siblings, with whom they can share their hearts. Many of us don’t, and for most of us there's an odd mix. For many, family brings more grief than the sustenance of belonging. Yet we are interdependent beings.

The good news is that if there is trouble in one circle of belonging, we may find strength in another.

To be continued in part 2

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Let’s open with a parable.

A king, powerful and wise, goes into his city, moves among his people, dressed as a commoner. He wishes to see how they regard him, truly, when they do not know who walks amongst them.

As for me, I mingle with such kings and queens each day, and I am one of them. We regard each other in our moments of weakness, awkwardness and poor decisions.

We see how we treat each other, when we do not know each other’s true natures.

We, who are bright as sons.

In Stories Something Goes Wrong

It's Monday morning here in the Pacific Northwest, and I’m back from a great story workshop. It was run by one Deb Williams from a group called The Flame. In it, she invited and guided, cajoled and encouraged people to tell stories from their own lives. Deb's been a stand-up comic for years, and that made for a direct and funny teaching style. We twenty or so participants each looked into our own lives, seeking moments wanting to be told.

Here’s how it went. Going around the group, everybody gave two or three life stories they might tell, as though pitching the group. Then, the group voted for the ones they wanted to hear.

‘Ah, that sounds juicy.’ ‘Oh… that's controversial. That's the one we’re not meant to hear. That's the one.’ ‘That's the one where things went wrong. Yes, that's the story I want to hear.’

It turns out that the most pleasant experiences in our lives are not necessarily the best stories. In a story, something goes wrong. There’s a twist. Something's learned, but the story is not necessarily about teaching.

Stepping Stones on the River of Life

Let's say you want to cross the river of your life. You can choose only five moments, five stepping stones. Which ones will you choose? Each combination of moments will give a different story, revealing your life in a unique way. You could choose five moments that led you to your current vocation, or five that lead you to your outlook on love.

The moments I chose were from my time in India. It’s a huge part of my story, but I haven't been quite sure how to integrate it into this next part of my life, here in the Pacific Northwest. I haven't figured out how to bring in those years of spiritual study and practice in another land into this time, with my explorations of genetic ancestry, and building relations with the people of these lands.

My story begins when I was twenty, and finishes at around forty. There are many different moments—stepping stones—that I could have chosen from my life, all of them truthful. It turns out that our lives aren’t just sequences of events; they’re more like fractals, with multifarious unfurling scenes hidden within them.

Tattva and Lila

Not everyone thinks about stories as patterns. A good story can be bawdy, gossipy, guttural, hilarious. My story thinking tends towards patterns. All that study in India got me thinking very philosophically. I’m drawn to sutras, codes, the essential parts from which all else can be understood. But other participants chose great stories about their pets and their grandchildren, about giving birth: mammalian moments.

In the path of Bhakti that I practiced for many years, there are twinned concepts called tattva and lila. The first could be called philosophy, or fundamental truth, whereas lila means pastimes—story. These terms are usually applied to the movements of divine beings, but I find them helpful for just about everything. Tattva is the truth of things concisely spoken, and lila is the stories playing out with those truths inside them. You might also say that tattva is ontology, the givens that a story assumes are true, and that lila is the tales that play out within that worldview.

These days, I find myself exploring the spaces between ontologies, like being a trader moving between cities. What are the stories of the in-between, that cross into a worldview, then cross into another? Is there an ontology of the in-between?

Hold that thought. I'd like to share with you the story that I told in this workshop, but it’s really best listened to, for this was an oral storytelling workshop. You’ll find the audio link above. Just skip forward to about 9:45.

Until the next,happy creatingTheo

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How do characters illuminate their world?

We experience stories through the eyes of their people. What they seek in their world, we seek. What they find, we find. As such, to choose a character is to choose the manner of entering the story world.

Truth-Seekers

I recently watched the Studio Ghibli film The Boy and the Heron. It’s fascinating. The titular boy is a truth seeker, earnest wants to get to the bottom of mysteries. Because he has this nature, we enter into those mysteries with him. He illuminates the story world’s mysteries and brings us along.

If he were passive, he wouldn’t delve into that same mysterious world, and we, the viewer, wouldn’t either. A character keen to discover the truth of things carries a spotlight into their world.

In another Studio Ghibli film, Princess Mononoke, a young prince is desperate to bridge conflicted groups. This active role is beset with challenges, and gives him unique insight into the different sides in a mythical battle. Through his actions, he activates other characters, bringing out their true intentions. It's a great choice for a central character. The Princess, on the other hand, is dead set on defeating her enemy, but the prince illuminates her compassion.

What are other ways characters illuminate their world? A detective is someone who digs into their world in a narrow, focused way. They are excavating clues to get the truth on a particular crime, and in so doing they unearth truths that are savoury, unsavoury, tactical and deeply personal.

Explorers

An explorer wants to know what is across the ocean, above the sky, beneath the earth. They seek the ruins of lost civilizations, and find forgotten wonders. Their objective is not to unearth one truth, but many.

A scientist is also an explorer. They might be exploring through the medium of a microscope, and in so doing discover vistas that open up the story.

Let’s say our story explores the nature of time, raising questions like: is time linear, circular, spiralling, or all of the above? Is reality a web, with time and space as its warp and weft? A scientist would bring one lens to bear. A mystic would bring another, a hybrid another still.

A time traveler character is moving throughout time differently from the rest of us, and experiencing it in according to the rules of their fictional world. That’s quite a vantage.

This may be very personal for them as well. Someone they love may be caught in a part of time that’s hard to reach, as though across a vast mountain range. In trying to save them, our timescape-rescuer is illuminating the temporal expanse of the story.

If our story is about traveling through the chakras of a human body, and vertically through layers of self and cosmos, then we might choose a mystic character. Or, to make them more relatable, someone apprenticing with a mystic.

Why Are They Doing All This?

This brings us to what pushes characters to act: their motivations. This might be a simple wondering about what is out there, but it often helps to give them a focused desire. They may be sailing through time to find their lost child, or trying to connect to their previous life so that they can join with that old self and become whole. They're crossing the ocean in order to consult a wise elder, then bring back council for their ailing people. These motivations focus the tale.

Whew! Could You Summarise All That?

Sure, that would help me too.

So there's the story world, with its particular landscapes, beings, rules, and truths waiting to be discovered. The question is, what is the journey of a character through and into those possibilities? Imagine them as a light investigating into darkness. What do they discover? How will different characters within the same story illuminate the world and each other?

Prompts

Consider the land where you live, and the disposition of the people there. Where I am, they are externally friendly and inwardly reserved. Like peaches, they are soft on the outside and hard to make deep friends with. What are they like where you live?

Now, consider a character who would stir everyone up, who would bring out what’s inside them. For example, it would be interesting to have a character around these parts who always says the wrong thing. They take a smile for an offer of friendship. When someone says, ‘We should get together sometime,’ this character takes them at their word. They hear that it’s good to express yourself, to not repress anything, so they go into a yoga class and let out massive sighs, burps and farts.

This character is a contrarian. If she's in a right wing group, she says extreme left wing things. If he's in a left wing group, he says extreme right wing things.

Consider your particular situation where you live. What kind of character would reveal what's beneath the surface?

They might stir things up socially, like the guy above, or in any other field. What kind of character would reveal what's interesting to you, in the place that you live?

Business Prompt

A character is a role in a story. To emulate this in a business meet-up, it can be helpful to have different physical hats to don, each one for a particular perspective. If you're a one person show, then you could have some hats that you put on for different ways of thinking. This could be the strategic planner, the innovator, the historian looking back at how things have gone in the business so far, and guessing the future. The comparer, who looks at other similar businesses and makes patterns. These are all roles through which you can illuminate your work.

What are some others, perhaps specific to your work?

Until the next,

happy creating,

Theo

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit storypaths.substack.com/subscribe