Stories, stars and fire. For thousands of years, and still in some places of the world, when the sun goes down, bringing the chill of night, we light the fire and draw near. Above, the glittering display of stars, our first story reel, spins around our circle of sky telling stories of archers, warriors, bears, fishtailed goats, dragons, and dogs. Below, we circle the fire, a tiny echo of a burning star. The flames flicker, mesmerizing and jostling free our imaginations to roam beyond the known world and into realms of past and future, fact and fiction. The place is right, the time is right, for story.
Once we all would have heard our most important stories in the company of our community, the words of our elders soaking into our bones. These days we have so many stories, but increasingly these stories are told to us by strangers as we listen alone. I learned so many stories from TV commercials, text books, movies, and flipping through magazines (the old version of scrolling Instagram). I learned what to think about my county, what I should believe about my soul, and what my body should look like. This isn’t my parents’ fault. Parents alone can’t tell you everything you need to know or keep you from every bad story.
As humans we constantly inhabit a world of not just what is, but what might be and what might have been. A page of facts and figures is meaningless until we create a narrative for ourselves about what they mean. Stories need not be longer than a sentence to be powerful. They are all around us, often contradictory. They sneak into our inner worlds before we are old enough to argue with them. They can be discarded or rewritten, and new ones can be written. Truth for humans is more than observable facts, no matter how hard Western science tries to insist otherwise: it is relational, depending on context, always textured by inner experience and personal knowing. Even mundane truths we hold to be self-evident, like the flatness of the earth, turn out to be wrong.
We might despair about how to know anything, until we remember that truth is relational and it was always meant to be so—otherwise we could not evolve or adapt. It’s possible that storytellers know this better than scholars. Oral storytellers especially know how to flex their stories to generate reflection in their listeners. They know what to weave in or leave out so the story resonates for that time and place and set of people. They know how to use story to hold people together. The stories will persist where the encyclopedias will not.
Malcom Gladwell refers to the stories that encompass cultural norms and influence communities and large populations as overstories. According to Gladwell, in his book Revenge of the Tipping Point, overstories have the power to shape how people act and what they believe, and in his book he demonstrates several ways in which strong narratives have rapidly shifted societal attitudes, acting with the speed and spreading power of a virus—both for good and ill. Regardless of whether this is one of your stories or not, the narrative of “Make America Great Again” and all it implies has had an enormous impact on the United States and the world.
Neuroscientist Peter Tse points to the imagination as humanity’s defining characteristic—it is our greatest power and greatest weakness: we can envision what is not there. This means we can invent brilliant new things and also catastrophize about things that do not exist. Humans have the ability not only to observe the world around us, we are able to imagine other worlds. That ability to imagine the unreal not only ushers in anxiety and worry about as-yet uncreated circumstances – it also gives us the ability to shape reality to an imagined future. Numerous studies have now shown that placebos can outperform drugs in trials. The act of believing that a particular medicine will heal you, is often all that is needed to jumpstart the body into healing. It shows the depth to which what we imagine to be true has the power to influence the future.
In this way, the most essential human currency is the story. Through it we relate to one another, transmit meaning, tell others about our day, convey our values, create belonging. To belong is to share in the story being told, to be reflected or held within the story. Fascists and authoritarian leaders (note “author” in the term), are often charismatic or striking figures who scaffold their power by weaving a compelling—if not always factual—story. They often tell stories designed to spark fear in order to garner followers who then look to them to solve these problems. They are also the same leaders who seek to silence dissenting voices. They want to pack people off to prison, and burn books that offer a different perspective—because they know their power is fragile in the face of a more compelling story.
It is important, I think, to ground this not only in human experience. Many scientists and philosopher-scientists from different disciplines: biology, physics, neuro-science, genetics, and more, are coalescing around similar conclusions. We do not live in a mechanized, pre-ordered universe that functions according to a set of predetermined laws, leading to predictable outputs, populated by creatures acting out coded responses. Rather we exist in an enlivened, self-organizing, perhaps even sentient universe, that is not only responsive to, but created by, the subjective inner world of beings.
In the final years of his life, Stephen Hawking theorized that the laws of physics themselves evolved with the universe and even more wildly, suggested that perhaps our very observation of the origin of universe may play a role in fixing and determining the past. From quantum physics, we understand that quanta (the smallest bits of energy) do not behave according to some predetermined coding, but rather exist in a constant state of possibility of both form and location. Much like that one friend you can never pin down and who finally, only when pressed for an answer at the last minute, decides to show up for the party, quanta can simultaneously be both a particle or a wave until they are observed.
Andreas Weber in his book The Biology of Wonder, discusses how DNA is no longer seen as a precise blueprint for our bodies, but more as a guide – and a guide that changes and adapts throughout our life in response not only to physical but also emotional experiences. Ecosystems, and the planet as a whole, are not what remains after mechanized life has competed for sustenance and reached some semblance of balance or stasis – rather they are ever-evolving systems where life not only competes but cooperates, each organism seeking their niche and contribution, creating a sentient whole. Weber writes, “Every cell decides and chooses. It organizes the way it makes connections to neighboring cells, how it puts together its internal structure and outer membrane, and ultimately…it does so in a way that can be independent from genetic instruction. It does so as a way of meeting its needs, producing the actions necessary to remain itself, to keep itself alive and to flourish.”
So not only do we live with brains that prioritize “story,” we also live in a world that is defined by the inner, subjective worlds of beings. The world is made of and created by interactions and relations. Laws and objective facts do not guide the universe, rather relations and interactions between bodies create the world. Our subjective inner experience, which for humans is heavily influenced by our imagination—or ability to make and understand story—constantly influences our actions. We do not live in a predetermined world, in bodies predestined to be a particular way, but rather in a world of aliveness and possibility – in a universe always in an expectant state of “what-if” on both a quantum and biologic level. We are all contributing as individuals to this complex and ever-evolving world.
Our ability to imagine both the immediate and the long ranging future is a powerful ability, and one that functions not from some divine and unbiased truth, but on the highly subjective stories we have learned or intuited about the world. While it has its dangerous side, it also has beautiful transformative potential. The responsibility of harnessing this gift then is of telling or stewarding the stories that lead to flourishing and thriving—not just for humans but for all life.
Our preoccupation in Western science to stand objectively outside reality and make observations, has influenced many of us to not take the act of storytelling seriously enough. Some of us, however, take it quite seriously. In the United States we have parents and “concerned citizens” taking over school and library boards in order to eliminate materials that don’t support the worldview they want to cultivate. To be clear, as a librarian myself, I would never equate stewardship with censorship. A healthy society does not quell alternate stories but rather continues to discuss them, even ones we find distasteful or dangerous. We should question all stories, even the ones we like, and especially the ones we adore.
Maybe we don’t all think of ourselves as storytellers, but its inherent to us all as humans. Before we can wield the power of stories for ourselves, we have to hone the skill of noticing which stories impact our lives and how. If we aren’t mindful of this, it’s easy to outsource a lot of personal storytelling to others. Outsourcing might look like believing our biases to be fact, letting dominate but damaging narratives dictate our actions, and even being swayed by advertising and trends.
Outsourcing can also hide in spiritual places. For me, this was my longtime desire to attribute my life to Destiny—to what was “meant to be.” I wanted to be given a story. I wanted the universe, the Fates, a god—some entity with a long and wide view—to have written a story just for me. Not the kind written with a pen, but the kind of story that begins before one is born, woven from the threads of time, and begins “once upon.” Challenging things would happen in this story, probably at least one broken heart, but at the end of the story everything would work out exactly as it was meant to turn out.
I think perhaps this came from a desire for comfort and greater belonging. I wanted to know something wiser was in charge and looking out for me. What I missed is that the wisdom is collective, not singular – and it is encoded in the world around us, working its way out through successes and failures. We are co-authors in this endeavor, and we are not alone.
I believe it’s important to dig deep to see where we give away our power, and for me that means looking into my longings, wish fulfillment and where I soothe myself with story. Therefore, I had to look more closely at one of the hallmarks (pun intended) of destiny-thinking: the soulmate. I know the word makes many of us cringe—me included, but it’s a powerful story, with mythic undertones, that gets told often about love and connection.
What I’ve learned, far later than I might have wished, is that in an enlivened world that makes itself every moment, soulmates are not someone you can find, but rather a state of relationship you create. It should be a verb, not a noun. Thus “to soulmate,” you begin with someone with whom you have some mutual understanding and then you both let down your walls. You build not only your present and your future, but you work your way backward as well, weaving together the events of your life before you met, looking for the coherence, the similar experiences that would later help you understand one another. You time-travel in each other’s life stories until you know this person knows you in ways you do not know you. It feels meant to be, because, suddenly, you have made it so. Born out of shared vulnerability, the opportunity to connect across time emerges and you make the temporal leap. In observing the origin of your beloved, you solidify your place at the beginning of their story.
For me, learning the world is constantly changing direction, every interaction reshaping the future, every past slipping away into uncertainty, the romance of being held in the hands of fate fell away because it no longer made sense. If something terrible happens to me, then I can create meaning from it as I learn to cope. I don’t have to believe the bad thing was set before me to test me. Instead I can choose to believe in my own power to transform setbacks into growth. I will define when I go through an “initiation” and when the world simply sucks. I want to be the author of my story, not the ending of someone else’s. To ignore this power, gives it up to those who have figured out how to wield it, and keeps us steeping in a frustrating and miserable soup of complaining and handwringing.
While we must look internally at the ways in which story functions in our individual lives, storytelling has never been a wholly individual endeavor. Tyson Yunkaporta, Aboriginal scholar and writer, uses “right story” and “wrong story” in his book Right Story, Wrong Story – How to Have Fearless Conversations in Hell, to distinguish between stories that do collective harm and those that bring flourishing. Reading Yunkaporta, the word “story” takes on its fullest meaning more like, “way of life.” Thinking back to what Gladwell would call overstories – Yunkaporta is discussing the shared stories that shape and guide people collectively. “Right story” is not a personal truth, but a collective of personal truths over time. As individuals we are ignorant. We cannot as one person hold all knowing about human experience, let alone nature. “These diverse ignorances create right story,” he explains, when amalgamated over time. Stories that are rushed, and driven by needs of the few, are where we get wrong story—stories that do not lead to communal thriving or flourishing. In an interview, Yunkaporta says, “story is so powerful: story can heal, story can kill. Right story is clunky and it takes time—because it’s supposed to take time.”
So, for this month’s dark moon, where we take time to reflect, review and germinate, let us return to where we started: under the stars and around a bonfire. We can think of the bonfire as the place where we hear and tell the stories that will bring us into right relations with each other and the world. We have an individual responsibility to identify, question, and even author the stories we tell ourselves. We also have a collective responsibility to consider the impact of the stories we tell and retell. We need not individually have all the right answers. As Yunkaporta reminds us, we need but gather a diversity of ignorance to keep shaping and reshaping the world into a place where we all can thrive. If we do not, someone else—maybe even a single person with all their gaps in knowing of what others need—will come in and write the future for us.
We have some good stories already, but I think we can all sense we also need a myriad of new stories, to lead us forward from this point, weaving the tapestry that will become the future as we internalize and act on the stories that move us. And we’re not alone. There are a myriad of more-than-human voices waiting to be heard, ready to join in with their stories of abundance, perseverance, and mycelial mutual aid. It’s time to tell stories, it’s time to listen, and it’s time to get rid of the stories that no longer serve us.
It’s bonfire time.
Here are some questions to help you consider which stories you want told around your bonfire and that of your communities:
- Which (over)stories are influencing you right now? (good or bad)
- Which (over)stories do you wish to disrupt and how will you do that in conversations with others? (conversation is where human story thrives)
- What stories do you tell yourself about yourself? Are they as kind and forgiving as the ones you’d tell about your best friend?
- What stories are you telling that ascribe motivations to other people? Where are you filling in “facts” about others, based on assumptions?
- Which stories did you use to love but have since worn thin because of what they ask of you, no longer serves you?
- And my favorite: what stories are missing from your life that you want to start sharing?
Works Cited:
Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
To the Best of Our Knowledge – Interview with neuroscientist Peter Tse
https://www.ttbook.org/interview/why-human-imagination-both-our-greatest-gift-and-weapon
On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory by Thomas Hertog
The Biology of Wonder by Andreas Weber
Right Story, Wrong Story – How to Have Fearless Conversations in Hell by Tyson Yunkaporta
Emergence Magazine Interview with Tyson Yunkaporta, Feb 29, 2024
https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/deep-time-diligence
Not cited but related reading:
The Body is a Doorway by Sophie Strand
Helgoland – Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution by Carlo Rovelli