The Stories We Tell Ourselves

We have the power to talk ourselves into extinction...or...(with gratitude to Diane di Prima for her poem Rant, excerpted here)

“You cannot write a single line without a cosmology…dig it”

Cosmology: n, the comprehensive story of the origin and meaning of the universe and all its elements and parts (my own personal definition)

We all live by stories. As the super (self) conscious beings we are, those who can experience ourselves experiencing as we make up complex stories about what others surely must be experiencing of us, we require stories to make sense of the immensity of our experiences. Big stories and small stories. Creation stories and one-liners both, to keep us from falling into a state of despair, or terror at the current reality of our lives, or simply to make sense of the seemingly endless benevolence and beauty. We are beings who require meaning; our own meaning and  meaning for the larger context within which we exist. But it seems our antennae for which meaning is worth our belief and investment of energy has gotten hijacked. It has atrophied amidst an utter wasteland of relevant stories that provide relevant meaning. It’s all too easy for an opportunistic, power-hungry, small-minded individual or group of individuals to come in and violently supplant old, meaningful stories with shiny new and terrifying ones. Stories can extort just as much as the people who invent and recite them. For, as we tell stories they take on a life of their own.  

“w/out imagination there is no memory
w/out imagination there is no sensation
w/out imagination there is no will, desire” 

Stories have the power to either snip, or strengthen, our imagination. And the stories we, in Western society have been living within and under for the last few millennia, have strategically, surgically neutered our imagination. 

“You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology
a cosmogony
laid out, before all eyes” 

Humans have been telling stories for as long as we have been communicating ourselves to this world and each other. But we must ask a few questions before we adopt a story to make meaning of our lives and the world around us. Whose story is this? Where does it come from? Who do I become when I tell this story? Who benefits from this story?  

And then we must not forget that stories are living beings. They have lives and souls and spirits of their own. As we tell stories they take on a life of their own. Stories can become as vibrant and powerful as forests or entire generations of humans. They need food, and attention. They need to be told and lived and shared or they will die. 

But when unimaginable things happen every day, things that cannot be easily explained with any rational or benevolent story, our stories must amend themselves to account for the unfathomable. And slowly the world becomes the story. Slowly we are shaped by the world we have told ourselves is the one we live in. We hardly notice, as time goes by, that these stories continue to shape us. We continue to to be shaped by the stories we tell until, slowly but surely, they are telling us.

I’ve heard from so many people that they are hungry for more meaning around the holidays. That the stories they were told simply don’t hold anything for them. If there was ever any truth in the story of a fat jolly old man dressed in opulent red velvet and ermine fur with shiny black boots and polished buckles making his merry way around the world in the wee hours of December 25^th delivering presents to everyone, it surely has no meaning to most of us anymore. If we are Christians and have young children we might find ourselves going through the motions to ‘preserve some kind of innocence and wonder’ in our children. That’s what I hear parents say all the time: I don’t want my kids to grow up without any stories! Yet we make a mistake when we imagine that it’s possible to have no stories. We cannot ever have no stories (proper grammar tossed aside for impact). I watch people go about their lives as if they are without stories, having no clue that to simply go to the store and fill our car’s tank with gas, we are telling ourselves stories. So many stories we cannot keep them straight. Stories whose purpose is to dull our sense of wonder – actual wonderment, not the dull-eyed stupefied wonder that happens in the Wholefoods cheese section as we try to figure out which cheese is the right cheese for the grain free crackers we just bought four aisles over. 

Wonder: both a noun and a verb, originating from wundor, meaning marvelous thing, the object of our astonishment; the act of being astonished

Astonishing to contemplate that originally wonder referred to the subject of our wonderment. This is still true when we speak about the seven wonders of the world, or refer to our child as a ‘true wonder’ on the basketball court. Yet even our capacity to recognize true wonder when it is staring us in the face, has been diminished. I remember leaving the Avatar movie years ago and listening to everyone speak about the incredible world of Pandora inhabited by the Na’vi people. ‘It’s so beautiful! With trees that talk! And creatures everywhere! And the Na’vi are so sentient they can hear the forest speak to them!’ Adults and children marveled and cooed, and inevitably came to the wistful realization, ‘I wish we lived in a world like that…’ (deep sigh, head hanging low…off to the car and home to the computer games and TV shows…what else is there to do on planet Earth…). I remember as a child making the observation that apparently there seems to be something particularly awesome about the color blue for humans, as I noticed that when a product (from dish soap to shampoo to bubble gum or breakfast cereal) needed a facelift, it would merely be reinvented in blue, with the words, ‘New and improved! It’s Blue!!’ plastered across the packaging. If only our little Earth were blue maybe we wouldn’t need movies like Avatar to stir our wonderment…(Even though, as far as planets go, Earth is about as blue as it gets.)

But there’s a story coming…a little something to feed our beleaguered spirits…if you’re willing to dust off the muscle of your true wonderment and come along with me. This story is fed by a cosmology that believes that everything is alive, intelligent, ensouled and connected. How about that for the foundation of a story? This little journey of a story is no-doubt informed by many factors…For this morning, for me as a woman of northern European descent, is Christmas Eve.

The ground outside my little home is lightly dusted with an inch of powdery snow, and the fields just beyond are alive with wonders and the bustle of a cold Winter morning’s work. The birds are a flurry of activity, sending sprays of crystalline snow into the air each time they land on a tree branch. It feels like it’s not just any morning, but where did I get the idea that there are special mornings and not-so-special mornings? It is a very special morning, as they all are.

Just a few minutes ago, as I was preparing my tea to steep, the 26-pound terrier began a racket of barking and groaning and whipping in circles, every now and then tossing herself at the sliding glass door that leads out to the beauty I just described. This is a thing she only ever does when something is really happening out there. I looked over to see her ferociously looking out at our wire fence line with a bead on a fat healthy (meaning not emaciated) and no doubt hungry coyote standing twenty feet from the fence, right out in the open, looking in at the scene, no doubt in search of breakfast. We live with three domestic ducks, who were splashing around in their little pond, no doubt a very appetizing scene. I opened the door to let out Ruby Dragon Chickadee (the littlest wolf), in hopes that she would let the coyote know that nothing over here in our little corner is on the Christmas Eve menu. But, in keeping with this not-ordinary morning, what happened instead is something I’ve not seen in my 58 years.

Ruby ran exuberantly across the yard, her tail whirling, her thick pelt rippling, and playfully pounced at the gate, snow spraying into the air in a kind of winter photo opportunity I imagine all outdoor nature photographers would kill for. Then, she simply sat down, brilliant and alert, nose gently protruding through the wire fencing, hackles down, tail still wagging back and forth making a kind of snow angle behind her. Her fur sparkled and shimmered at the tips. I don’t know who could have refused that invitation – the very opposite thing I was hoping Ruby Dragon Chickadee might pull off in defense of her little feathered family. The coyote, had taken a few steps back at first, then turned and stared at Ruby Dragon for a moment or two. And then, as if out a choreography of unpredictable proportion, came slowly but surely right up to the fence line, one tentative step at a time, until the coyote was just a few inches from Ruby, nothing but a wire fence between them. Ruby Dragon did not budge, her wet black nose still protruding through the fence until, from where I stood, it appeared their noses actually touched. Just a quiet, gentle hello. Two worlds bridging for the briefest of moments, to remind me that anything…yes, anything…is possible.

And that’s when it happened. The story unfurls just beyond the buzzing layer of numbing distraction we have decided is the world we ought to be giving our attention to. A story in keeping with all the stories, that are more like visions for how visceral, detailed and immersive they are. Stories that, okay I’ll admit it, are a bit fantastical. Certainly this is not the kind of imagination Diane di Prima is speaking of. But these kinds of stories that speak of a world in which anything can happen at any time, saved my life as a little girl growing up in the imaginative wasteland of Glastonbury Connecticut. Stories that don’t more firmly cement our cynicism but rather nurture our wonder, our awe, and our devotion thereby increasing our sense of responsibility and thoughtful participation. These kinds of stories are essential and radical.

So, on with it then! Because anything just did happen, as I watched the wet well-fed nose of the littlest wolf dog, and the twitching, deep-time smelling nose of a beautiful plump-tailed coyote, touch through a wire fence. No whining, no hackles, all curiosity and dare I say, even wonderment. Two wonders, wondering. Nostrils slightly flaring with each inhale as the smells of each other ignite millennia-old filaments of stories, of what their ancestors ate for Christmas five hundred years ago before Christmas, as we now know it, had even been invented. I’m transported though I haven’t gone anywhere. The 26 pound terrier, unfairly stuck on this side of the sliding glass door, realizing her fate as a mere witness of this once in a lifetime moment (even though surely she is the only one who would really know how to handle this situation). She sits at my feet leaning in to me with all her weight in more like an overly dramatic collapse. Out of her throat unfurls a thoroughly disappointed exhale of a whine as if this is going to be her very last breath, a death simply out of protest alone, that it was not she who was sent to the front lines to get this job done well.     

Suddenly, slowly but surely, the formerly chaotic to and fro of the multitude of birds flying around the backyard begins to take on a pattern. The chickadees, nuthatches, and finches begin flying in a clockwise pattern as the flickers, the blackbirds and the jays fly counter-clockwise all of their fluttering and flying stirring the powdery snow into a whirlwind of sparkles. We, the despondent 26-pound terrier and I, feel ourselves in the throes of enchantment, the pattern of rhythmic flying and the sparkling circling of snow, the two noses touching as a catalyst for it all, two worlds meeting to remind us that in fact it is simply one world. And that’s when the three ducks who live with us here began slowly waddling their way through it all, as if on a journey to somewhere important. Wide flat bills held high, as if tracking a beacon in the sky. Waddling and quacking their way through the whirling shimmering sparkling snow, crystals landing on their feathers, Gertrude the indomitable leading the way as the chickadees and finches circle and spiral one way and the flickers and jays the other. A cacophony of quacking and chirping and ear piercing wick-a, wick-a calls.

Even though I am on the other side of the sliding glass door I can feel the whirling, the icy snow crystal vortex and the magic of this moment. I can feel myself being transported to somewhere. Maybe I’m not transported to anywhere. Maybe it’s simply that I’m brought more fully right here. As if we needed anything other than a miracle that simply brings us more fully right here. I take a deep breath that feels like a kind of breath that is rare and necessary. Like I’m being breathed by The World. The 26 pound terrier mirrors my deep breath with a dramatic deep sigh of her own, leaning against my calf even more as she stares out at the magic and mystery. The three wise ducks have waddled over to Ruby Dragon and the coyote, who are simply staring at each other, about five inches apart. The ducks have planted themselves about five feet behind the canines, downy underbellies on the snow, prehistoric feet tucked in for warmth. Everyone in witness and wonderment at the wonders. With their bodies they simply say, pay attention to this. And I do. And I will. This is the story I want to give my attention to, the one that reminds me something miraculous is going on right here, right now. Within this moment and well beyond it. I am part of something that is miraculous. It is unfathomable in its beauty as well as in its horror. And of all the possible things I could do, the only thing that is unacceptable is that I refuse to see it because I’m too busy telling another story. Worse yet, one I do not even acknowledge I’m telling myself.

“what you find out for yourself is what you select
out of an infinite sea of possibility
no one can inhabit your world
yet it is not lonely,
the ground of imagination is fearlessness”  

Wonders all around us. Wonders within us. In a world so full of wonders how did we ever fall so far from this knowing? But in the blink of any eye, a story can transform us. It can serve to remind us of our place on this precious Earth or it can serve to undermine it. Stories are cunning and self-preservational, just like you and me. This holiday season I invite you to contemplate which stories you are so diligently telling yourself. There is always, always, room to begin telling ourselves a different story.