On the Power of Storytelling and Why your Story Matters
You can listen to this post here too (10 mins) 
Summer is hitting West Cork in full glory. Across the skyline a heat haze hovers. It has the look of a mirage as the sea lights up in sparkle and dance. None of us can quite believe it. This is the weather of ice-creams and ice cubes, of deep orange sunsets, of spontaneity and buzz. I see people of all ages diving in to the sea, letting their bodies go under and emerge with an exhale of release.Yet, I’ve been finding it hard to locate my words over the last few days. It is as if they have melted in the sun, moulded to the rock, or are evaporating in the mid-day heat. I know the words are there, for I can sense them, so many of them, circling and circling, in an ever widening sphere, spinning a vortex or a cocoon perhaps, into which I can climb and be transformed.But the poets find a way even when we don’t quite have the words, and so instead I have been turning to poetry, to the curve and the swell of it, to its softness too. Reading aloud, and reading at night, under the cover of stars. Among them, these words from William Stafford glimmered and shone,‘There is a thread you follow, it goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain the thread.’ And so I have been circling, locating the thread, pulling it, wondering where it will lead. I’ve been tracing it back through my work and words, seeing if it will reach a coherence, a theme, or even a guiding word which is the ark of all the other words, under which so much of my work has been unfolding. It’s like I need one word to coax the rest into being. So I go back still, tugging and unravelling, spinning and spiralling, into journals and archives, into memory, and then, just when I think I myself am unravelling, there it is, the one gleaming word shimmering amongst the thousands of words:Story. ‘What’s your story? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice’, writes Rebecca Solnit in the opening lines of her book, The Faraway Nearby.‘Without a story, we are lost’. And so then to be with a story is to have a map; a way of locating ourselves in time and place. With a map we can orient ourselves through the terrain of our inner landscape- the rivers of our emotions, the fields of our relationships. The poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes of this also, ‘Get in the habit of welcoming your own words, you are making a map to the days of your life’.Our words give us access to the power of narrating our own stories. They help us to listen in, dig deeper, find the thread and pull it closer. In that sense, when we listen to the stories we have been telling of our lives, we also have the choice to re-tell those stories. We get to narrate our own life rather than be passive about it.Our personal stories may have taken us through loss, or heartbreak, or even trauma, but when we can find the fragments of ourselves in our words, and weave with them into a map of the terrain we have travelled, we get a fuller, and deeper, map of our lives. ‘We make our lives bigger or smaller, more expansive or more limited, according to the interpretation of our life that is our story’, writes Christina Baldwin in Storycatcher. This art of narrative re-telling is also the art of expansion; giving us a broader view, allowing us to survey where we have traveled with the tools of perspective and the tools of writing craft. It seems that our stories hold the key to our growth too.Storytelling is also an art of combining things that otherwise would remain dispersed; we get to cohesion by illuminating the fragments. Take a mosaic- it’s the fragments which get re-worked into a new object, transformed into art by virtue of their brokenness. When we each tell our stories, we get to craft another object of beauty; the mosaic of our lives and place it central, like a cathedral window looking out into our days. It is a way we can heal the past, but perhaps too it is a way we can heal the future. A life, well lived, is the storyteller’s art. So, yes, your story has power in it. Perhaps more than you think. For there are the stories at the individual level and then their are those of the collective. These are the stories we use to tell of the culture we create, and are also the stories of the rules and laws we use to protect and maintain that culture. It is why our stories are our survival, but perhaps our downfall too. It depends on how we choose to tell them, and what we choose to listen too as well. ‘Stories contain the hidden secrets of transformation, the alchemist’s formulas for turning lead into gold. If we hear enough stories about profound transformation, we find ourselves transforming, even in spite of ourselves’, writes Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona in Coyote Wisdom, adding, ‘while we can’t command transformation, we can create an enriched environment that makes it more possible’. Which basically implies that if we want to transform the culture we live in, we must learn to transform the stories we tell of that culture too. Storytelling is a collective act as much as a collective art.Let me offer an example.
I went to a public protest in Bantry earlier this week. Several hundreds of us gathered to stand up for the sea kelp forest in the bay. A company called BioAtlantis has been issued a licence to mechanically extract it, en mass, to be used in the production of animal antibiotics and other veterinary products. There was no proper public consultation and many locals are outraged.As I was joining the march I met a woman and asked if she was joining too. It turns out she was a visitor to the town, and when I told her why we were gathering, she too was shocked. But the flavour of her shock also surprised me, ‘Why would you do that when you can eat it’, she said. As in, why would you harvest the sea kelp for animals, when it can be used for human consumption.Herein lies a core problem with one of our main cultural storylines: it is human centric. What is nature but a resource to humans to exploit for our benefit?, this storyline dictates. When you follow that storyline through it will lead you the problems of over population, the over extension of our natural resources, and then even to mass extinction and the denial of the innate and essential reciprocity of life. It’s a storyline we need to flip, fast.But what if we could tell a different story, one where our non-human neighbours on this planet are given back their rightful place? What if us humans are not the most important species? Think how different that would be, not only to the other species but to ourselves too.‘There is an ancient bond with the natural world surviving deep within us’, the naturalist Michael McCarthy writes in The Moth Snowstorm, ‘which makes it not a luxury, not an optional extra, not even just an enchantment, but part of our essence- the natural home for our psyches where we can find not only joy but also peace, and to destroy which, is to destroy a fundamental part of ourselves. Should we lose it, we would be less than whole. We would be less than we have evolved to be. We would find true peace impossible’.Are we telling a story of fragmentation and ‘other’ or are we telling a story of wholeness? Our lives, all our lives, depend on narrative.What is the story we are telling of ourselves? And what is the story we are telling of the world? I think these may be the two most important questions of our time. Why? Because at the root of it all, we always get to story. How we choose to frame our world, our policies and our practices, depends on the stories we hear. Who we choose to create a narrative of love around, or who we choose to tell a story of hate about, it all comes back to the stories we know. And so it is that our stories are what bond us, but are what can break us too.A life, well lived, is indeed the storyteller’s art. And a culture? And a society? They too are crafted on narratives. How we choose to tell them is up to each one of us. I think it is time, high time, that we learn to tell a better story. We start with our own, so that we can build bridges made of stories between us. And as we listen so too are we transformed.We are alchemists after all, one story at a time, word by precious word.Clare x..
There are lots of ways I can support you in discovering and telling the stories you want to share. Come on a one day workshop- the next 'Write to your Truth' workshop is on 18th August in West Cork. You can also come on a longer Wild Edge Retreat - diving into your writing process and crafting narratives.Look out for a new online writing programme this Autumn, and also you may want to consider some one to one writing coaching and support... please get in touch and I can tell you more...
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