| Tracking Your Own Story |
Why Story?“... That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion. “ Barry Holstun Lopez, poet, short story writer. Born 1945.
"It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story. Our traditional story of the universe sustained us for a long period of time. It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purposes, and energized action. It consecrated suffering and integrated knowledge. We awoke in the morning and knew where we were. We could answer questions of our children. We could identify crime, punish transgressors. Everything was taken care of because the story was there..." Thomas Berry, eco-theologian, author. Passionist priest 1917-2009 How Do You Find Your Story's Plot?“I asked myself, "What is the myth you are living?' and found that I did not know. so…I took it upon myself to get to know "my" myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks…I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me.” “How do you tell the story of your life — of how you were born, and the world you were born into, and the world that was born in you?” Frederick Buechner, minister, novelist. Born 1926. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends as do lives. Stories want to be enthusiastically told, as do lives. If our lives are stories waiting to be told, how do we find their authentic plots? Where do life plots come from? From our souls? From the dream that surrounds and informs us? From fate, chance, destiny? “The individual disposition is already a factor in childhood; it is innate, and not acquired in the course of a life.” “What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to what you should be doing in your worldly pursuits.” “I tried to tell my friends that we don't have to find our purpose, it is a current in our souls the way blood courses through our veins; that all we have to do is to let it find us.” Dawna Markova, educator, author “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” Rainer Maria Rilke, German poet, 1875-1926. “Imagine hearing just this much of a song, "Jingle bells, Jingle bells, Jingle all…"Imagine an itch in a very sensitive place that you cannot reach. Purpose, ultimately is that drive to close that circle, finish that song, scratch that itch, bridge that gap.”
"A hen's egg will bring forth a hen's chicken. A duck's egg will give birth to a duckling. An eagle's egg will bring an eagle into the world. Whatever you feel yourselves to be, that is what you will bring forth." The Ringing Cedar series, "Co-Creation" by Vladimir Megre' The Thread“Something is very gently “Where is That place where the call comes from? Chuna McIntyre says the word for that place in his own Yup' ik Eskimal language is imuken. "It's not a physical place – you can't touch it, you can only feel it. It's that place.” “Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into the realm beyond words.... It is like that small mirror in fairy tales - you glance in it and what you see is not yourself; for an instant you glimpse the Inaccessible, where no horse or magic carpet can take you. And the soul cries out for it.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn author, historian. 1918- “She comes to us through sound as well; through music which vibrates the sternum, excites the heart; it comes through the drum, the whistle, the call, and the cry. It comes through the written and the spoken word; sometimes a word, a sentence, or a poem, or a story, is so resonant, so right, it causes us to remember, at least for an instant, what substance we are really made from, and where is our true home.” Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves, 1992. “The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it….” “There is but one history, and that is the soul's.” William Butler Yeats, Irish poet Nobel Prize winner. 1865-1939 "…each one of us is faced with the challenge to evolve in the journey that we take during our lifetime, overcoming the negative and flowing with the positive, trusting our instincts and not getting caught up in our needs, desires or fears."The Nature of Personality" Bran Collingwood, 1996 Dreams As Openings“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens into that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was a conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.” “I'll tell you right now, the doors to the world of Wild Woman are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves, 1992. “There is a dream dreaming us…” Kalahari Bushman “Dreams are self-luminous: they shine of themselves, as gods do. Myths are public dreams. Dreams are private myths. By finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth world in which you live.” Joseph Campbell, mythologist, author. 1904-1987 Finding Your Story's Truth“I am not afraid…I was born to do this.” “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” “It's never too late –in fiction or in life– to revise.” Worn-out garments (Lord Krishna spoke the Bhagavad-Gita on the battlefield of Kuruksetra in 3102 B.C.. This date corresponds to 1700 years before Moses, 2500 years before Buddha, 3000 years before Jesus and 3800 years before Mohammed). “Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful… he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also… cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiseling your statue…” “Something hidden. Go and find it. “What is it in the end, that induces a person to go his/her own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise. What is it, then that inexorably tips the scales in favor of the extra-ordinary? It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a person to emancipate him/herself from the herd and from its well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as in God.... But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape... He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner person: he/she is called.” Your Life As Many Stories, Your Life As Myth“The organizing myth of any culture functions in ways that may be either creative or destructive, healthful or pathological. By providing a world picture and a set of stories that explain why things are as they are, it creates consensus, sanctifies the social order, and gives the individual an authorized map of the path of a life. A myth creates the plotline that organizes the diverse experiences of a person or a community into a single story. … We gain personal authority and power in the measure that we question the myth that is upheld by "the authorities" and discover and create a personal myth that illuminates and informs us.” “Not I - not anyone else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself .” “…the goal of the middle years is not merely to resolve childhood problems or relieve private torment. Men and women are called at this time to become fully human – to break from traditional social roles and embrace the whole of human life, light and dark, masculine and feminine. And it is usually only from midlife onward that individuals have the strength and wisdom to deal with the dark side of life and to balance opposites.” Allan B. Chinnen, M.D. Once Upon A Midlife, 1992. “The universe is made of stories – not atoms” Muriel Rukeyser, poet 1930- “Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” “The challenge is to learn to respond immediately to whatever it is time for.” Benedictine saying “Then some years ago, vivid images began filling my mind when I was jogging, meditating, or walking alone on the beach – images of dragons and castles, kings and queens. These visions were archetypal in intensity and often moved me to tears. Although they were similar to dreams, they demanded something more than interpretation. I soon realized that the images were the endings to different stories. The tales cried out for elaboration, so I started writing them down…” “Think of the world you carry within you… Be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. What goes on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love and attention. You must somehow keep listening and responding to the inner call.” Rainier Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 2000. Of What Use Is Your Story?“Our work is to show we have been breathed upon – to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live out in the topside world what we have received though our sudden knowings from story, from body, from dreams and journeys of all sorts.” “I know we begin and end in authenticity, and in between, our task is to find ways to make that authenticity relevant to the world.” Dawna Markova, author, I Will Not Die An Unlived Life, 2000. “Purpose is the place where your deep gladness meets the world's needs.” Frederick Buechner, award-winning author, priest, born 1926. “People who linger in the shadow, leading unfulfilled lives, would burst into the sunlight of Possibilities and Power. (were they to make the effort to examine "who they are", and "what they're really about"). Laurie Beth Jones, The Path. 1996. “In this moment of revelation, Brunnhilde knows that the ring of power that had set the cycle in motion has to be purified and returned to the Rhine. She accepts this as her destiny, knowing that she will have to face pain and death and go into the fire. By this act of immolation and sacrifice, Brunnhilde will bring an end to the era of the gods. Valhalla and Wotan will go up in flames, and a new era can begin.” Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., Ring of Power, 1992. But by you, My sisters, Only by you We know, because we have always known Serenly holding our candles It's hot where we are going, And this is why we let ourselves be pulled in to Her Drawn in for facing For standing at the molten globe As one we transcend glowing breast. Caught, From serpent's dark belly we arrive Queen, O Queen More deeply than you skin's beauty seek Shame, A Red Dress Re-dress the red dress
Call forth your soul Call in the pieces left behind
“The soul is it’s own source of unfolding.” 5th century BCE presocratic Greek sage, Heraclitus. "You will not find the boundaries of soul by traveling in any direction, so deep is the measure of it." Writings on the Grail Castle "With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?" Henry David Thoreau "Is there anyone in Christendom who has not heard of the sacred relic known as the Holy Grail? Anyone who has not sorrowed for its loss? The stories of the Holy Grail stir us with a poignant memory of something vastly precious, now tragically lost. The land is a wasteland now, the plants stunted, the rivers of living water reduced to a trickle. Only the return of the Grail can heal the wounded Fisher-King and restore his domain. The myth of the lost vessel inspired the knights of medieval Europe to set out on their quests and bold adventures described in the various legends of the Holy Grail.… "He was alone, lying on a surfboard beyond the lines of breakers, being gently raised and lowered on the swell. A bright morning sun was creating beads of glittering light on the rippling surface of the sea. He looked up, and shoreward, and noticed an ominous cloud bank looming over the darkening hills of the Otway Ranges. It threatened the blue and green and brilliance of the sea and sky around him. At that moment he was flooded with awareness, with an overwhelming sense of being and of connectedness, with a consciousness of light and dark, of good and evil. He was transported. The experience was vivid again as he recalled it. It was a profound spiritual experience. In the language of our western culture's Myth of Parsifal it was a Grail Castle experience, a brief residence in that place which holds life to the full. It is in the inner rooms of the Grail Castle that the Grail King lives, that person whom we call in our religious language "God". "In that moment of arrival and exhaustion and being greeted by these vistas laid out before me I was transported. I had an overwhelming sense that I was deeply a part of all things. That I belonged in the universe. I felt wonderfully free, and enjoyed a profound sense of well-being. And these feelings have continued to be never far from my awareness. It was a spiritual experience, a transformative moment. I have no doubt that this was the second Grail Castle experience of my life." Safe within my castle wall |