"The world is full of stories, and from birth to death, we are all living out our own mythologies."
Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell
"With a flicker of the fire, the Storyteller begins his tale, like all tales, with a simple invocation..." And so it begins. The opening card of this particular tarot deck highlights the power and potential of a story. A story arises out of nothing; open space, listening ears, pure potential. Out of that nothing, the Storyteller weaves a reality into being, leaving an indelible mark on all who hear the tale.
We are all living our stories, moment to moment, whether we know it or not. If you want to know what your life will look like in 5 years, look at the stories you're weaving today. Our worldview, our sense of self, and the meaning and purpose we find in life are simply a collection of lived stories; if we want to change our lives, we must begin by looking at our stories.
As a healer-therapist, my favorite session with a new client is our very first one. In that first, often-too-brief meeting, a person bravely meets their vulnerability and begins to tell you their story. When I'm listening to their stories of pain and joy, what I am most moved by, and most aware of, is not the things that have happened to them, but rather, how they tell the tale of the things that have happened to them. Like all good storytellers, people reveal themselves not through the words themselves but in the shape of the words, what is emphasized and avoided, the walls and wellsprings they color and foreshadow through their tale. As I listen to the way someone tells their story, I am hearing their mythology, and tucked inside the mythology are the keys to unlocking their suffering.
I love a good story. For those of you who love the stories of astrology, I've got Sagittarius rising conjunct Neptune, opposite a full Gemini line-up including sun and Mercury, all flavored with a Pisces moon in the house of the mind. Stories are my ultimate form of self-expression. They're how I understand myself and they're the divine alchemy I invoke to create change in my life. For years, I've longed to share these stories of change and evolution with a broader audience with the hope of helping people orient in their own stories. To enlighten some dark place and help them find their way, just as so many have been the light in my dark places. These writings will be the beginning of that. I've lamented in the past that I struggle to write because there's no one theme, no singular thread that feels particularly meaningful or authentic to the realities of my experience. So I've decided to experiment with vignettes. Tiny windows into my lived experience and the lessons that arose from that particular telling of the tale, highlighting the ways that healing that layer of reality changed my mythology, my lived story.
The truth is complex and nuanced. This is perhaps a hard reality that people seem to be really struggling with on the national level these days. Many things can be true simultaneously, sometimes even things that would seem to contradict one another. And so it is with these stories. The truth that each of them holds is but a single lens. As time goes by and more stories are told, you might begin to see the same event told through multiple lenses, with different truths emerging as the facet shifts. Each facet holds a set of lessons that are like a balm when applied appropriately, but take those lessons into a different facet, and they might feel like salt in a wound. True, but unhelpful, and probably painful.
I'll begin next time with the best kind of story, a love story.
We are all living our stories, moment to moment, whether we know it or not. If you want to know what your life will look like in 5 years, look at the stories you're weaving today. Our worldview, our sense of self, and the meaning and purpose we find in life are simply a collection of lived stories; if we want to change our lives, we must begin by looking at our stories.
As a healer-therapist, my favorite session with a new client is our very first one. In that first, often-too-brief meeting, a person bravely meets their vulnerability and begins to tell you their story. When I'm listening to their stories of pain and joy, what I am most moved by, and most aware of, is not the things that have happened to them, but rather, how they tell the tale of the things that have happened to them. Like all good storytellers, people reveal themselves not through the words themselves but in the shape of the words, what is emphasized and avoided, the walls and wellsprings they color and foreshadow through their tale. As I listen to the way someone tells their story, I am hearing their mythology, and tucked inside the mythology are the keys to unlocking their suffering.
I love a good story. For those of you who love the stories of astrology, I've got Sagittarius rising conjunct Neptune, opposite a full Gemini line-up including sun and Mercury, all flavored with a Pisces moon in the house of the mind. Stories are my ultimate form of self-expression. They're how I understand myself and they're the divine alchemy I invoke to create change in my life. For years, I've longed to share these stories of change and evolution with a broader audience with the hope of helping people orient in their own stories. To enlighten some dark place and help them find their way, just as so many have been the light in my dark places. These writings will be the beginning of that. I've lamented in the past that I struggle to write because there's no one theme, no singular thread that feels particularly meaningful or authentic to the realities of my experience. So I've decided to experiment with vignettes. Tiny windows into my lived experience and the lessons that arose from that particular telling of the tale, highlighting the ways that healing that layer of reality changed my mythology, my lived story.
The truth is complex and nuanced. This is perhaps a hard reality that people seem to be really struggling with on the national level these days. Many things can be true simultaneously, sometimes even things that would seem to contradict one another. And so it is with these stories. The truth that each of them holds is but a single lens. As time goes by and more stories are told, you might begin to see the same event told through multiple lenses, with different truths emerging as the facet shifts. Each facet holds a set of lessons that are like a balm when applied appropriately, but take those lessons into a different facet, and they might feel like salt in a wound. True, but unhelpful, and probably painful.
I'll begin next time with the best kind of story, a love story.
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