What I'm Considering Now

Here it is Christmas Day and I am finally getting to the Winter Solstice missive.  It’s late but perhaps just as well as I have had time to consider and reconsider what I want to say. To that end, this rumination is in two sections: one personal and if you are a reader of these annual texts, expected, and the other more philosophically grounded in the role and nature of storytelling in these times.

Two weeks ago, Jeni Smith was at the American School of Storytelling prepping the space for her Sunday performance. I had a tickle in my throat and a persistent cough. I went home once things were set and took a cough suppressant and slept. Sunday I was feeling worse but went to the performance and left for home immediately after. The cough had morphed into significant nasal/breathing distress. Monday and Tuesday, I slept most of both days. I was unsteady on my feet when I walked, had no appetite and my shit was like little yellow pools of mucus. I had all the symptoms of a nasty flu.

Did I say sleep? Passing in and out of consciousness was more like it - marked by random thoughts, wildly dissociative dreaming, feelings of paranoia, shame, a foreboding sense of my physical decline / age from inside a feverish state. Wednesday, I was back to mostly coughing and congestion. I felt almost intact.

Almost - though recovery brought on a really bad insomnia - and the irony of having slept away most of the previous days I was wide awake and twitchy all night long. Thursday, I mustered enough strength and focus to go with the Christine to get a Christmas Tree. Friday I was better for brief periods and by Saturday, I managed to go to  our deliciously fun "Welcoming a Darker Night" performance. What remains of the cough is deep and thick. 

As I’ve said in various FB posts and conversations with friends, it was for all intents and purposes a "lost" week with neither strength or focus enough to feel healthy or productive. Get stuff done? I could barely keep track of what day it was. A reminder of the thin ice of aging. 

A really bad cold? Flu? Something else? Makes little difference, the fact was and is that once the perpetual motion of everyday living stopped, a mix of panic and insight followed. I did have some illumination into my relationship of poetry and stories to the facts of living. Not happy insights as much of it seemed to focus on what a shitty partner / lover / friend I've been. I might as well be Scrooge having to accept that I can't have a do over for the past. I saw that it was what it is. No number of apologies will change what happened but not repeating the same errors might be the best alternative going forward.

I did have a profound sense of gratitude for all those who have been there for me or put up with me or forgiven (ignored) my failures and foibles in this dark time between fits of extended wet coughing. In that illness I was also thinking about transitions and loss, especially in the storytelling community - Angela Lloyd's departure at the start of the year, Mike Perry this fall, and Doug Lipmann's anticipated departure here at the end.

I've said this or variations on this to several friends in response to their good wishes. I've scrolled though my FB memories and seen how many years death and the marking of loss have been posted alongside Christmas memories. That also, is what it is. So let me offer this to all with the reminder that our joy is knit with the awareness of how fleeting it might be.

In that same liminal space I have been thinking about friends, (present and departed, near and far,) companions, guides, the ones who prepare the way, who hold us in light and their hearts, The ones who tell the stories of what was and what might be. What a gift they are and you are for me.

I bless the gift you are in the world.

Life as we know is richly diverse and somewhat capricious so when I say, "let us live in the present with an attitude of gratitude" it is not a cliche but a command to be here and now.

May you be well in this here and now.

"Be well" is easy to say and not always easy to do.

And now the pivot...

The other day I had a long conversation with Mary Alice Arthur (https://www.getsoaring.com) about the state of the world, our work as storytellers and facilitators, as holders of space, and our own health and happiness (or lack thereof). In the course of that conversation she shared some notes that she made while on the way back to the United States from her most recent European projects.  I was struck by how timely they were and how they resonated with some of my own thinking about story in this time of “wobble”. I asked her if she would share them with me and if I could comment on them here. She agreed and so, the second half of this missive proceeds thus with Mary Alice Arthur’s notes (as a meditation on Dougald Hine’s “Work in the Ruins”) on the four tasks storytelling and storytellers are called to in this uncertain time:

1)    Salvaging what is useful – the storyteller inside every human / the old practice of deep listening / witnessing / the craft of language and the mystery of storytelling itself / focus on stories that help us survive and thrive together / love of language / the storyteller as cultural holder, curator, ambassador.

For myself, to salvage what is useful requires us to first acknowledge that we are in the midst of “cultural ruins” and that we have come to mistrust our own stories. That the fickle and fleeting story of celebrity and status, the life of another, is for many of us more valuable than our own. That the ordinary and the everyday of being in the world, in relationship with others and even with ourselves is seen as inadequate and unworthy of sharing.

I agree that deep listening to the joy and pain (which for many of us is frightening) and witnessing what it means to be human must be learned / relearned. As Oliver Sachs said, “If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.” That individual story is worth salvaging for in it lies all that is common and all that is particular to our lives.

On my part I am committed to telling stories of small moments, of sharing coffee and bread around the table, of the extraordinary in the everyday. I am committed to teaching the elements of good stories / storytelling and providing spaces for folks to share their experience of living.

2)    Mourning (grief and letting go) – the abuse of stories for power and control / the refining of the art of manipulation and commodification (aka stories as fast food / soundbite fodder) / losing the roots of our mythology and archetypes / the disconnect of human as part of nature (aka the story of separation / domination / extraction) / The falsity of “us against them” / our story as conscious closure.

For myself the abuse of stories for power and control is ubiquitous and yet, many of us pretend those stories matter more than the stories of connection and shared experience. Death is one of our most common, shared, experiences but as a culture we have little space for it, individually and collectively.

Alongside her notes, Mary Alice has a little image labeled “sitting by the river of grief for long enough”. What a powerful insight and invitation that is.

In thinking about grief, I see that many of us do not know grief – how to grieve, why it matters, how long it lasts. That nearly a million people died in the Covid epidemic is treated as a statistic, not as a tragedy we have yet to grieve as country and culture. From my perspective, that failure to acknowledge and mourn the cumulative loss, pushed us to denial and continues to keep us disconnected from the experience and each other. It remains a shadow that we have not looked at.

We prefer death to be cinematic and at a distance. Mass shootings are taken as something others experience. If we really understood gun violence as both the end of an individual story and the beginning of another that we must individually grieve, we would feel a sense of loss that cannot be papered over with a headline or “Thoughts and prayers”. The story we do not tell has power. Our withholding the story of what has been taken keeps us from seeing (and feeling) our relationship to nature and each other.

As storytellers, we are called to tell those stories of loss. To share the old stories as well as the new, to invite each other to sit by the river of grief and give the permission of tears.

3)    Discerning what is still useful – The true goal (gold) of lived experience and the power of listening as love in action to mend the of brokenness of human experience / What is mine (ours) to do? – What story do we want to live in and in that, what are we prepared to live into? What makes a truly generative story? What is warning? What is prophecy? / How do we grow our discernment of what we can / must / will we allow to move within and through us?

For myself the central question is “What is mine (ours) to do?” We are not called to save everyone and everything. That salvation is the accumulation of the thousands of beings in the present, of deciding and acting in the now. In the repeated invitation to ourselves and others to as Kurt Vonnegut said, “You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.”

To behave decently in an indecent society is no easy task and yet, the choice is before us day in and day out. To use another older phrase from John Wesley, we are called to “"Do all the good you can, / By all the means you can, / In all the ways you can, / In all the places you can, / At all the times you can, / To all the people you can, / As long as ever you can."

The very act of telling stories, and especially those old stories where kindness is offered to the stranger without expectation of reward is worth the effort. They are both a reminder of what we aspire to and a model for how to arrive at a (metaphoric) “Happily ever after.”

4)    Weaving the dropped threads that make the difference – what are the threads that need to be woven (collected) to create a more integrated and beautiful net for our collective generative future? / The future of and for story itself and how this deepest articulation of human consciousness, subconsciousness and learning (itself) can be reclaimed for these times / What desperate worldviews need to be re-storied and then rewoven into a braided skein of (shared language / shared values) for humanity moving towards the sea of collective consciousness?

For myself the central paradox of storytelling is the personal (the “I” of experience and imagination) is the universal. The great myths endure because they contain that dynamic. In the story of Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Beowulf, we can come to a deeper understanding of who we are, of what matters, of the cost and consequence of action.

Yes, I am glossing over the real and necessary dive into what stories need to be told and re-told now. Consider that exploration as a gift (or homework) for yourself. I do feel an urgency in this moment about weaving the threads of story – both yours/mine and ours – to counter the increasing pace of (digital) distraction. A five-minute Moth story may tell us something but really, is there more that is unsaid and more importantly, unfelt? A two-minute social media reel may provide a fleeting (addictive) moment of satisfaction but I do not see how they build understanding and connection. We deserve more. Story deserves more.

In the end, my task is to tell the best stories I can and to hold time / space with others to hear what our stories offer. I am called to this as life work and I do not take the challenge of doing so lightly.

I will end this by repeating what I said before the pivot.

Life as we know is richly diverse and somewhat capricious so when I say, "let us live in the present with an attitude of gratitude" it is not a cliche but a command to be here and now. It is an invitation to observe and craft the story of the moment, then tell that story to ourselves and others as a validation of what it is to be human. All the joy, all the sorrow, all the connection of past and future possibility in the now - the only time that we can actually act in.

May you be well and tell artfully, tell truthfully, in this here and now.