Dearest dancing monks, artists, and pilgrims,
This Friday, April 3rd, we are delighted to welcome award winning author, poet-storyteller, and public speaker Kaitlin Curtice to lead us in a retreat on journeying with story. Following the life cycle of a story, Kaitlin will guide us through how powerful stories become in the world and how we interact with and reclaim stories for love and kinship.
She offers this excerpt from her book Everything Is a Story.
Birth is the beginning of life, of everything that we know and understand as humans, so it makes sense that as we begin to imagine what a story actually is, we liken it to an acorn, seeing it as a seed, as a newly birthed being.
Five to seven months after pollination and fertilization, an acorn falls from an oak tree. Acorns lie dormant on the ground from fall to spring, so it takes time for acorns to become who they need to be, for their lives to begin and take form. So it is with a story. Some may lie dormant on the ground, waiting to grow, to become, to find out who they are one day going to be.
Just as acorns are their own beings that have agency but also need the surrounding world to thrive and grow, so it is with stories. Stories are alive, taking their own presence in the world. They are nurtured, every story that grows and becomes—even those that are detrimental to us.
I think of creation stories from cultures around the world when I hold an acorn, when I consider what exactly a story is. In the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee creation story, who is Skywoman, and why did she gently land on the backs of geese to come down to earth? How did the earth become Odin’s wife and daughter in Norse stories? Why are there multiple cycles of creation in the Aztecs’ story? And how did Esege from the Mongol creation story create the earth out of void darkness?
I’m a storyteller, so every time I learn about another way that humans try to make sense of the world, I get excited. This is what we do as humans! We enter into stories, tell those stories, live those stories, and sometimes we end up chasing those stories when they take on a whole life of their own. We use stories to affirm what we already believe, and sometimes we even use stories to confuse the truth, to spread lies, and to hurt others.
The best way we honor the origins of stories is with intention and curiosity, ready to ask questions of the stories themselves, questions like, What is this story teaching me here? What does this story teach me about the way I treat others? We can use stories to ground ourselves, or we can use them to keep breathing in and out the narratives that harm us and others. The courageous life is one where we keep leaning in, where we celebrate the complexity of a story and their origins and keep sifting along the way.
These words from my new book, Everything Is a Story, will guide us in our time together as we ask how stories journey with us. Following the sacred wisdom of the oak tree and the power of a story, in our workshop together we will be journeying with our stories, asking how they move and shapeshift throughout our lives, and how they also show us who we are in connection to ourselves, one another, and Mother Earth.
Below is a poem from the book for us to hold as we prepare for the journey, as we open ourselves up to the reality that stories are alive in us and around us:
You think you write the stories
until you realize that they have
written themselves, entire beings
with entire lives you’ve
yet to even imagine.
They’ve gone on ahead
to encounter the world,
to live in it, experience it,
making their way like all of us.
And sooner or later,
those stories find their way
back to us again, reminding us,
maybe, of who we were all along,
that we also began as a story,
grew up and grew out into the world,
only to return home to ourselves
to write our own life as we always
hoped it would be.
Please join us Friday to consider how story can liberate or limit, build compassion or create division and together ask which stories should we pass on to future generations–and which can we finally let go.
With great and growing love,
Christine
Christine Valters Paintner, OblSB, PhD, REACE
Image paid license with Canva
