The stories we return to

Welcome! I’m so pleased you found your way here. I’m thrilled about this opportunity to share all manner of things I’m finding nourishing and beautiful. And I hope this is a space to spark your creativity and feed your soul. Thank you for coming alongside.

Not too long ago I stood in front of an audience and told a story for a “story mixer” event held in a cooperative arts space called Story Parlor in Asheville, North Carolina. It was one of the few times I’ve really been out of the house and nestled amongst a large group of people in the last couple of years. My fellow artists brought their gifts—poetry, music, a reimagined fairytale, and a short film—each offering embedded in stories. It was a chance to soak in a little beauty and remember why I tell stories in the first place. Pure and simple, I felt joy. And there’s something gorgeously energizing about sharing with a live audience. I imagine actors know this feeling well; it’s the difference between performing for theater or film. The instantaneous feedback and engagement create a sense of collaboration between performer (or in my case, reader) and audience, the separation between us momentarily blurred.

I see any form of storytelling as an opportunity to participate in that blurring, increasing the kind of connection we crave. We can use stories as a resource for increasing our capacity for empathy. For filling the cavern of loneliness. For expanding our sense of the worlds we inhabit.

Science postulates that our brain is a narrative organ, and one theory suggests our instinct for story evolved as a survival skill. It makes sense: humans’ ability to think creatively and problem-solve as a group helped us evade predators, feed ourselves and the group, and eventually, played into every major advance we’ve had as a species. Writer and UX strategist Carl Alviani says:

"Achieving this kind of persistence and unity requires imagining outcomes that haven’t come true, and of seeing your neighbor’s welfare as tied up with your own. And this is where story comes in. In the days before written language – most of human history in other words – the only way to create an idea that persisted from one day to the next and spread from one person to another was to somehow make it durable in our minds…a story solves this problem by linking an idea to an ego. It presents a sequence of events that haven’t happened, but could, and invites the listeners to put themselves into the role of the one experiencing those events…what we’d call a protagonist. We all have a strong, persistent sense of self….and stories leverage our self-awareness to lend emotional heft and durability to an abstract idea.”

What stands out to me in the midst of Alviani’s explanation for the power of story, is the idea that story allows us to truly see our neighbor’s welfare as tied up with our own. The poet Gwendolyn Brooks (the first Black writer to win a Pulitzer Prize) puts it this way:

…we are each other’s harvest:
We are each other’s business:
We are each other’s magnitude and bond.

The story (I’ll tell it here, too…stay tuned) I told at Story Parlor is one I’ve told many times, in various forms, slightly adapted, but the essence of it is always the same. I was on a journey (literally, a retreat in northern Ireland), I crossed a threshold (mostly metaphoric, but also literal), and a measure of healing had its way with me. This story is becoming something of a personal totem, a place I return to when I need to be reminded of the roots of my hope in a great Goodness nourishing both my private life and the vast universe to which I belong. To which we all belong.

I leave you with a wondering, a simple writing (or thinking, or painting, or dancing, or… whatever else you’re into) prompt to consider.

Do you have any stories you return to again and again? And what, if anything, does this say about what you value, or what you love, or what you hope for?

With warmth,

Currently…

Reading: The Hurting Kind, poetry by Ada Limón
Cooking: Pickled Blueberries (courtesy of Watermelon & Red Birds: A Cookbook for Juneteenth and Black Celebrations)
Listening: Batch, episode #1 = food stories from The Bitter Southerner = yay!

Care to share what you discovered? Let me know about it!