Story Paths

I must do what I must do. But as a friend, I ask you honestly if you want something more coherent and less experimental

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Listen to ambient sounds from other lands as you travel through your own.

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A ridiculous song written in the foothills of the Himalayas more than 20 years ago.

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For many years I learned of sensuality and spirit as being different, or opposites. Here I discover ways that they are the same.

Special thanks to Ji for beatboxing with me at the end. Recorded at the Freezer Burn Festival (Alberta Regional Burning Man) in Summer ’24.

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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

Listen to ambient sounds from other lands as you travel through your own.

Free consultation for your creative projects: https://tidycal.com/theodorestorypaths/15-minute-meeting

Comment here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/1c1e2383-21c4-4cf3-a9a1-23af8a074de3

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

Welcome to Season 5.

What is a podcast?

Simply put: sound.

Any kind of sound.

Let’s take this medium for a spin.

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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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