To move from where we are, to where we
might be, there is only one way --- to change the stories we tell ourselves. Stories fuel transitions. Where they lead we do not know, but
what we DO know and have known for a long time is the healing power of a good
story. Stories, like art, can feed the soul.
Stories have a way of taking care of us.
They come to us as gifts from those who have gone before. They come to us
across time and space, expanding our imagination, strengthening us and
energizing us, holding a mirror to our beauty and our ugliness and encouraging
us to embrace life and death in all its glory and horror.
Learning to collect them, to tease out
their inner goodness, to re-shape them for our times and to give them away, are
skills we have to re-learn if we are to make our lives meaningful and our
futures safe. Stories are as vital to our lives as the oxygen we breathe. That
is why our ancestors put stories into our memories. It was their gift, of
caring for in teaching us how to tell stories they were teaching us care for
ourselves and each other.
There are many stories we learn along the
course of our lives, food stories, family stories, friend stories, fairy stories,
myths and legends, stories that empower, stories that diminish. Our challenge
is to take the time to examine the versions of these stories we have
unconsciously adopted, keep what makes us strong and re-work what doesn’t
giving them all the language and metaphor of our times.
Each of us has a story and it is in the
telling that we define who we are as individuals and as a collective. Stories
are ancient powerful medicine or poison depending on how we decide to spin
them. It is in the telling or the silence that we make ourselves whole or
fragment ourselves. Through storytelling we grow close together or tear
ourselves apart, we form communities or demonise people as “the other”
confining ourselves to mental ghettos. If we learn to tell our stories with
dignity and compassion and to accord that same right to other people, we feel a
connectedness which transcends time, space and experience.
So, how can we use stories to empower
ourselves and others? We can search for those stories that resonate with our own unique experience of humanness and share them. We can learn to recognize when it is time speak our truth and how. We can learn when it is time to listen
and learn from other people’s truths, according them the wonder and respect they
deserve. It is a long apprenticeship learning to tell a story with poise, truthfulness
and kindness. This is a competency we have to equip ourselves with. A wisdom
which our predecessors acknowledged and celebrated regardless of which part of
the world they came from.
The best stories are those that have
survived the ravages of time. They will keep us connected to a time before
money ruled our lives, to a kind of love
that is not defined or limited by any societal designation, to a kind of
co-creative partnership with each other and with the earth from which we have
taken so much.
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