Finding a story worth telling
Listening for the true note in your heart
Tell me a story oh muse! Bring to your lips what you will!
Once you have begun the road of apprenticeship to myth it is likely you will find a moment when story will try to leap from your tongue. Or you may try to throw it yourself. There are so many and we could tell them all and still not have enough they are so good! Making a home in your heart for the wordwork means falling in love with a shimmering image. Your heart must hold the whole to be in true communion with the wicked twisting shapes of dream-made-leap. If you want to be a storyteller you must surrender to the image. Show the story your courage.
Then shut the fuck up.
TO BEGIN TO SPEAK YOU MUST FIRST BE SILENT AND LISTEN
This may take a moment or a lifetime. For me it was many years and more. This apprenticeship begins with careful listening. Listening to your hearts voices and the rivers around you and the voice of the wind through long grass in a field nearby. Take in the ripple laughing chorus of a waterfall. Hear a great oak speak its groaning wisdom.
Live under a tree for a year and a day and listen to the days go by in slow symphony.
You are like a fisher-king listening to the depths below as above you hear the world in flow.
When you can hear your own heart beat you might be close to knowing your own song.
When you know what the wind is saying you might be close to knowing a secret name among many.
In between the future you is speaking both songs into being for story’s sake. When you know how to speak the song of the wind and your own heart’s song in the same voice you will be ready to tell.
Being ready to tell and having a story to tell are two different things.
How will I know when i have a story to tell?
This is hard walking space. Anyone can throw a tale together. Carrying a story with real weight can only be earned. There are no shortcuts on this road. We will all hear it what know how to listen.
A hollow note makes a different sound when weighed by the heart.
It doesn’t have to be earned in the apprenticeship, for grief’s storm will go where it will without regard. Without remorse or romance. Many routes through the underworld will lead to some truegold worth a note after the end of it. Just so long as you didn’t seek it out. And don’t forget. No marks for trying when you didn’t have to. We call that foolish, not a good look.
Never seek out trouble for the wrong reasons.
If you are looking for a story to tell you need to search your heart for what feels true. What are you sure enough you could tell the story with your eyes closed. You can spend all the time making the vessel for your work, for your art, for your story and craft. But somewhere inside of the THING must be the TRUTH and that must come from something earned so you know it the hard way. The body must have a spark. The fuel, a match.
Probably when you begin to open the door to this work some beings of ideas we call stories may seek you out or fall into your lap or appear at your side or catch you in the dance or call from a ditch or take the stage they may move close to know you and be known in turn.
A story may ride alongside you, they say.
If a story is riding beside you there is something sympathetic happening. You are living a shared moment - What is happening to you is happening in the story, what is happening to the story is happening in you. It wants you to know that it knows what you are going through. It wants to be told so that it can live what it goes through again on your tongue.
This is why listening is so important. Tell the story what it is or what it means and you’ve lost it. Surrender and admit when it’s not the bright moment you see across from you. Glimmers of grief and bad and dull and pain are what we live through too. If you leave a part out it won’t weigh right. In the deep turmoil of the heart is the truth too painful to admit otherwise. What haunts us is often shadow on shadow. Pushed aside trouble come back like a goblin.
Now we have warded off the ones who turned back we can talk with open honesty. We drink down all and the dregs.
When you know you have the means to tell a story but you are not sure what to tell you must search for some part of your own lived experience that feels solid - well-known, understood from many sides, hurt and forgiven. They say that when a grief is ready to be released it will die and tell itself through creation.
so, try this:
Listen to the story of your life told back to you and see which moments feel alive with complexity and earned truth.
Face the difficult with courage to find the gold worth sharing on the other side.
Never offer what you haven’t earned.
Stay humble
Be ICONIC
Let your ear find a story that rides alongside your own.
Let the story talk to your brittle batch of hard earned gold.
Be washed in waters of new beginnings.
Finish the initiation.
Try to avoid saying ‘Now I’ve got a story to tell’ until it’s ended.
When you have listened for long enough you may hear something of what you have to say.
Ursula K. Le Guin would ask you what are your gifts that you are trying to deserve?
And then remind you it takes your whole life, and its worth it.
You do not need to understand the story you are tracking or telling.
In fact we encourage confusion about the material you are working with.
Combine the confusion of a complex idea with true hearts knowing of your own lived life and you have a real thing happening.
Life by idea makes story.
Make sure you love it.
Let it explode of your tongue with nothing less than sheer delight.
Let it shake the minds and wake the bones of those who hear it.
Ask them like my teacher ‘What are you going to do with it?’
Let it rabblerouse and snikkersnack
Make so much trouble you get kicked out!
Tell them what its all about.
When you know, you know. Say ‘Now I’ve got a story to tell!’
We invite you to seek out something you want to know. Let your story take shape around a quest-ion. When you know what you seek you tell the world in a song.
Call down the rhythm that calls up the voice that brings vision in its wake.
Start simple - It is ok to live in the stories of others for a time. But do not stay too long or else you will lose your immediacy and we cannot see each other.
Find a story worth telling and live inside it. Learn the names of everyone in it by heart. Let it brush up against you and remind you of its movements as you move through your day. Tell the story worth telling to a tree, to a river, to a bird or a fog.
Let yourself be one of them for just a time.
As you tell it you’ll begin to feel where it feels fluid and where it feels hard to move forward with it. Maybe the image is out of reach, or the fullness of it is a wave you are riding with joy. More time with a joint makes it warm to work with. How it lands in the hearts of others will tell you what it weighs.
Can you run your finger all the way along the bottom of the story without lifting your hand up? Do you know every patch of dirt?
In every small detail is a world of infinite imagining ready to explode it is the righteous indignity that bows to no-one. Pay your attention to each specific piece of bone and hair, each eye and spiral shell. Do not abandon the hinging moments upon which the story turns its wheel.
If you haven’t yet found a story to tell you need to find the right kinds of trouble and hold on for dear life. Have you been vulnerable enough? Have you bet your life and lost it all? Have you chanced on a mystery and gained a friend? Have you tried to make beauty when no-one was watching? What is the song being sung by the tide? Why do we play and pretend that we’ll die?
In truth is a lie that shows its face. We see wisdom through falsehood. Beyond the reflection in the cave is the real thing we are seeing. We stand in the doorway and describe the world beyond. Idea comes close to being again and the dance is told anew.
This little river is just a sketch for perambulating the waypoints of make-being-come-close-again we call storytelling.
It is yours now to do with as you please. Please let the stories dance again.
The road ahead will give you something worth saying, follow only the voices who know the weight of things that matter.
Good luck, Pilgrim.
There are no passengers on this ship! If you haven’t got the coin let it be the gold on your tongue instead.
Thanks friends.
Found the coin?
I of course have to give me absolute gratitude to my dear man Dr Martin Shaw whose treatise concerning this journey in the back of a book long ago was the only thing I tasted for a year and a day while listening under the tree.
Wooh so much greatness here. I will need to read and Re read. Thank you