Story Paths Learning to think in stories

Well met, fellow wanderer,
I welcome your company, here at this riverside resting spot, with willows budding, moisture and pollen swirling in the air, and the sun arcing overhead.
I must say, those are some fine tools you’re carrying in your pack. I’m curious how you learned to use them, and to hear of work that you’ve done. I’d like to know which paths brought you here, so I can get a sense of who you are. I wish to hear of your journey.
Ahem. I was just speaking in story, but I’ll say an equivilent in non-fiction speech. You see, I’m curious about the work you do in your business. Please tell me, what brought you to this work, and why is it valuable to you? That way, I can get a sense of who your services are for.
Back to speaking in story:
What’s that? You want to bring others across this river to join you? Ah, but it is flowing fast and wide, ‘tis true. A traveler seeking your services might attempt a crossing at any number of places, but there’s no bridge, and they would struggle to ford those waters without help.
Which we might say, in a non-fiction way, thusly:
I hear that you want to convey to others the value of your work, and why you do it. Yet ultimately, so many events led you to this work. When you’re trying to explain why you do what you do, you struggle with what to include and what to leave out. You end up tongue-tied, or talking all around what you’re trying to say without solidly landing on it.
Let’s go on with in story-form…
Aye, it’s true! This river you’ve crossed is formidable, wide, and full of contrary currents. Small wonder that you were able to cross, let alone others after you!
Yet just see, there beneath the surface… stepping stones! Those could let folks to come across and meet you. You say there are too many stones, no single clear way across. Perhaps, but what say we try a few ways? If you agree, we’ll walk them together, then decide which ones you’ll share with others. I say let’s try out variety of routes. What’s more, I’ll wager we can have some fun while we’re at it.
Which is to say, in a non-fiction way:
Let’s look at some key events in your life that led you to your work. We’re looking for events that were transformative, noteworthy. By telling this sequence of events—this story—you’ll convey the why of what you do. And that why might just be the why of your listeners too. Choosing and telling key events that led you to your vocation can not only help your people find you, it can help you yourself depeen into the why of what you do.
Let’s have some fun discovering events in your life that were transformative, rich, and challenging, and which made you who you are.
Now let’s merge fiction and non-fiction.
Ah, you’re asking about how I knew to notice those stones? How did I come to be here by this river, helping folks like you?
How kind of you to ask.
Hi, I’m Theo. I’m a story worker by trade, which is to say I tell stories and help people tell theirs. Or you might say, I cross rivers and help others to cross theirs.
How did moi come to this work? I fell in love with stories as a child, and gradually learned from the spells that stories cast upon me. Now I cast some upon others, and even share the spells themselves. I may be able to help you tell the tale of what brought you to this side of the river, carrying those fine tools and skills. My wish in this is for you to find kindred folks who love your work.
And it so happens that I’m holding a free workshop for purpose-driven business runners (like your good self?). Inside, I’ll give you teachings about storytelling, and there will be lots of practice time to tell the tale of how and why you came to the work you do.
If all that didn’t convince you, here’s the signup-style blurb:
If your business has roots in a unique, personal journey…If you want to discover and communicate that story…If you want to expand, contract and adapt that story to fit websites, prom

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You’re in for a treat. Today I get into all the good things with traditional Scottish storyteller Dougie Mackay. He’s a skilled storyteller deeply rooted in the rich heritage of Scottish folklore, who works with nature connection and inter-cultural exchange.
Here’s some of what we get into:
The Scottish Cèilidh, pronounced KAY-lee, serves as a vibrant ecosystem where storytellers both get their start and sometimes find their life’s calling. Dougie shares the distinction between hearthside storytelling, a cozy exchange among friends, and performance storytelling, where professionals take the stage to enrapture audiences. He also talks about where these two overlap.
Did you think we wouldn’t have a story? Dougie tells an old tale of a man's quest to retrieve his cow from the land of faeries. Through this seemingly simple story, we enter a narrative ecosystem, an invitation to ponder connections between nature, culture, ethics, and the mystical.
Dougie describes his recent visit to Jordan, and how exchanging stories, food and song with the people there countered the cliched propaganda that media often uses to describe the Middle East.
Stories shape our perspective. Where stories with good guys and bad guys foster binary thinking, many traditional tales offer a nuanced exploration of life.
All this and more…



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Here’s a greate way to conceive stages of creative work. I learned this from a friend who used them in the hospitality industry, but they’re applicable in any project.
Consider three layers:
1) Big picture thinking.
2) Big muscle moving.
3) Detailing.
Let’s Say You’re Opening a Restaurant
The big picture involves choices of menu, location, audience.
The big muscle stage is finding a location, sourcing ingredients, getting equipment, and setting it all up.
In the detail stage we’d be arranging napkins into cups, evening out tablecloths, making sure the place smells good, and choosing appropriate music.
You might take a moment to let this alchemist inside you, considering a project that’s alive in your mind.
Ready?
Let’s put on our swim trunks and dive in to get a better look.
But as you’re getting those on, here’s a prompt. As we’re going through, I invite you to ask yourself which role do you tend toward.
Of course, in any of these personality assessments, none of us are purely one type or another. We may shift between these types at different stages of a project, or in different parts of our lives. The map is not the territory, and yet maps are helpful, and this one is cool.
So in we go.

Big Picture
Personally, I tend towards the big picture role, thinking about stories that we live by, spending time between stories, realizing that I'm in a story when I do that… this kind of thing. I was a monk for many years, delving into philosophy. My challenge is to bring these big thoughts into podcast, books, workshops, and into community. I need quite a bit of space and time to do this kind of thinking. That's a big part of my nature.
I get work done too, I promise!
How far out do we want to go? If it has been decided already that we're going to open a restaurant, we can consider the big questions that come up. But what if we haven't chosen to open a restaurant? In fact, we’re not sure what we’re going to do.
So first let’s fly higher. Maybe instead of a restaurant, we might open a cinema, or start an app that helps people make these decisions. Or an app that makes an app that helps people make these decisions!
In this big picture thinking we're considering which portal to open. After that, there will be many more choices.

In Praise of Procrastination
I want to take a moment to honour this stage of deciding. In an overculture where many seem more concerned with getting things done than deciding what work is worth doing, I pledge support for consideration, for time given to thought.
It's not lazy. It's not avoiding work. It is the best investment.
While we’re at it, we can take it further. Instead of wondering which project to start, as though it’s a given that we’ll start one, we might ask ourselves, should I start a project? Or shall I become a meditator and become detached from these ambitions of starting projects and making money? Should I learn to be satisfied being an observer, watching this world. My contribution may be in sharing what wisdom glean during this slow time of being present with what is.
I might fly further out still, conceiving of myself very simply as a conscious being who can act. Further still, and depending on my cosmology, I might consider myself to be one with the world, friends with one who is in the center of our galaxy and in all things, in kinship with the creator and all other beings in their essential state. An essential state that remains within us while we express ourselves in temporal manifestations in myriad ways, from wondrous to horrendous and everywhere in between.
Why stop there? I may let go of duality and even spectrums with dual ends. I may let go of it all and simply be whatever being is.
Geez we’re high up! We’re out as far as I can think to go.
Coming in from here, I see a variety of possible worldviews, so= I'll pick a worldview and enter it. I'll meet other

Links:Laura Burns' family constellation course.Isaac Fosl-Van Wyke's music.Welcome to Story Paths.
Why stories? Because they help us imagine together, for one reason. They help us see possible pasts, possible futures.
Welcome welcome, welcome.
Today is a special issue. The audio version has music, so do have a listen. I’ll also share an amazing course that a friend and mentor of mine is putting on.
Let's start with the music. I recently traveled southward to Kentucky to visit a dear friend. There, amongst other wonderful experiences, I met a man called Isaac Fosl-Van Wyke. He was playing his songs at a little club, along with an artist who goes by the name Mother Marrow.
One of Isaac's songs, Coming of Age, fits so well with the theme of these last episodes, about a Third Ethics, about becoming aware of the wider world, of the times in which we live, and the gifts and responsibilities this time bestows upon us.
This song is called Coming of Age. Have a listen in the audio version.
Isaac’s whole album is excellent. You can it at these links.
Bandcamp, the best way I know to support artists directly.
Apple Music (pays artists a bit more than Spotify)
Spotify, who don’t pay artists nearly enough!
Also…
There’s about an upcoming course offering by Laura Burns, a friend and mentor of mine.
Now, there's different ways that I could describe Laura, as I know her, and many other ways besides. And of course, describing a person in words is not the only way to behold them. Which is to say that Laura is an enigmatic, witchy, rooted, seeking, queerly questing, midnight-walking, daylight-jousting-sing-song-songbird-exchanger kind of lady. I'm glad to have encountered her work.
I participated in the last course on this topic that she offered, and now she’s offering it again. It’s called:
Lessons from the Field: Tending the Ancestral Soul
A systemic approach to land, transformative justice and ancestral healing.
Learn more here.
In this course, Laura is bringing a very interesting, interwoven cluster of insights. This offers a radical way of looking at the dynamics between victims and perpetrators. This might be really interesting for people who are in the field of nonviolent communication or restorative justice, where the first goal is to stop further harm, and then to help heal the hurter, to help them become a positive agent in the world, nourishing the fundaments of life that they once harmed.
The course starts soon! It’s on May 1st, then every Wednesday after that until June 5th.
What’s Included?
6 Weekly Sessions - 2.5hrs - plus recordings. Sessions are every Wednesday 6.30 - 9.00pm BST, Online via zoom.
50min One-to-one session.
Material to explore each week, including Guided Audio Meditations, and shared reading resources.

In conclusion, Laura is a lovely, like, welcoming person deeply mystical, witchy and cool, and I recommend this and all of her offerings. She’s also doing really wonderful stuff with earth-soul connection ceremony and natural dye fabrics. She's just a really neat lady, so definitely sending love her way.
Until the next
Theo


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Let’s open with a poem
A power outage,
is not an aberration.
It is the old normal world
poking through
into the aberration
of tech depending on tech depending on tech depending on
the world.
Wind, water, weather, creature.
This wild wild world.

What is it to be cut off from ancestral stories?
When gaps to appear between generations, between children and adolescents, adolescents and adults, adults and elders? When these age ranges become stratified. When the movement between these ranges becomes sparse.
We still have our genetics, from our parents and our grandparents and on back.
Going back. Each generation with two parents and each of them with two, branching back and back. Still, we have those genetics within us. We also inherit language and customs and talents and traumas.
But what do we lose when the stories get interrupted? When we don't sit with our parents and hear about our grandparents. When we don't receive cultural stories from our kin, but instead are immersed in stories crafted to capture and entertain us. Crafted by those we will never meet.
It used to be that age ranges mixed in everyday life, from can’t-see to can’t-see. Of hearing about those who've departed: grandparents, grand uncles and aunts, great grandparents and on. From being nested amongst the bodies of kindred relations, with stories being passed amongst us,
from mouth to ear to heart to hands to mouth to ear to heart to feet to song to ear to belly to breath to song to ear.
Stories adapting, stories weaving past into present and passing the present on
through ears and hearts and hands and feet
into the future.
Such a delicate, fragile form of knowledge , and yet it is the most enduring form we have. Still we have stories that are tens of thousands of years old. They’re still with us today, after plagues and floods and invasions.
Thank you for staying with us.
What stories will we tell when the screens go dim, when the vast cooled data banks grow silent? When the pages in books tot or burn, or people forget how to decipher the codes.
What will we speak to each other about these times? What words of warning might we pass on to warn our kindred descendants of toxic zones that we created for a few decades of power. Lands which will need warning of for thousands of years to come. What stories might we tell so those people who come after may know to tend those sites, so the consequences are not as grave as they might be. Tend them when the fifty or a hundred year mechanisms containing them break down. Tend the leaks, contain the radiation. Tend and perhaps begin to remedy the great rifts and damages that they will inherit.
What stories might we pass on to help those who come after?
What lore might we pass on to them that will be useful for what they will surely face.
What will we pass on?
What lore?
Until the nextHappy creatingTheo


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Bringing Distant Ones Close
A Spiritual Approach
How might I connect with the water in Nigeria, Alberta, Costa Rica, Australia? How can I come to understand that this water may well come into my own body?
We learn from many spiritual teachings that all beings are in interrelation with each other. We are, as Martin Luther King said (in 1963 from the Birmingham jail) in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
Looking at religion, we find ideas that cause people to consider the wider implication of their actions.
There's the concept of karma: simply put, of cause and effect. If I commit harm to another being, I will eventually have to taste that bitter fruit, whether coming from them or someone else, in this life or another. The concept of sin is similar. I may get away with something now, but in the long term, God will punish me for it.
Connected with karma, dharma teaches me to do good for the sake of spiritual upliftment. For myself and others. It’s not just in dharma: this sense of acting a good way for its own sake can be found in spiritual paths throughout the world.
I might approach this in a ceremonial way, bringing cups of water into my sensory space and saying, ‘This is the water of the south. This is the water of the east, of the north, of the west. I am of them, and they are of me.’ I might travel by mind to lands affected by resource extraction, travel there and witness their struggles, then consider this when I decide whether or not to get in a car or an airplane.
Technology
What are other ways we might bring distant places nearby? There are apps that tell me how much pollution I'm responsible for, and there could be apps that tell me the consequences of my buying this kind of lemon, which comes from 20 miles away, compared to this kind of lemon which comes from 200 miles away, or a thousand. They could tell me who my phone battery is harming. Tt could be mandatory that on every new car there’s a label, like descriptions on cigarette packages, listing that product’s consequences to people, place and creatures.
Stories
Story is another way that we might bring distant beings close. By hearing the stories of refugees in other lands, of those living on islands subsumed by rising sea levels, or of those in the north who cannot hunt as they used to. To hear those stories and imagine myself in their lives, including them in my sense of self and place.
Stories bring empathy. So much so that author Lynne Hunt figures that the the modern novel is the basis of the human rights movement.
That’s quite something. By sitting and deciphering symbols on a page, wide swaths of people learned to enter into the minds of others. Often these ‘readers’ came to know characters even better than their families, for fictional minds are transparent. This art form, and the empathy it allows, may have kindled the kinship required to declare that all people have worth.
This Green Globe is the Best Dressed in the Ball
It wasn't that long ago we first saw photographs of the earth taken from space. That moment was part of a big shift for us, shifting towards a larger awareness: from first and second ethics to the third.
And perhaps from here there could be fourth, considering not just our own planet, but other planets, other beings out there ,with whom we are in relation, and to whom we are of consequence. In karate, students are taught to punch through their target; by widening our perspective to other planets, we may take good care of our own. By widening into deep time, we may act well in the times we’re in.
May we include within my sense of self and place this whole beautiful green, blue, brown, cloudy, watery globe, upon whom we are spinning through space.
Story Prompts
Consider something you've bought recently. See if you can trace down where the parts of that thing came from: where it was sourced, who helped crea