Once Upon A Time
Drag Queens are not our ONLY storytellers.
Once Upon A Time
Drag Queens Are Not Our ONLY Storytellers
She’s back - our regular guest - Muriel! Obviously not a drag queen. Maybe I should hold up on that conclusion. As James Thurber said, “. . . be careful of the conclusions you jump to, one of them may be your own.”
Can a female show up as a Drag Queen? Is there an exception for Lesbians? We live in complex times. T’was ever so, no? Courageously plowing ahead. . .
“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” ~Muriel Rukeyser
The plot thickens.
“Atoms are stories.” ~Dubin
We are mired in a slew of language dilemmas. While we’ve flirted with the impacts of language, we haven’t sufficiently chatted up the crucial distinction between story and narrative. Let’s fix that now, whaddya say?
STORY
Stories, like atoms, are naturally occurring phenomena. Every story and every atom is a system of related events in motion. We’ve been conditioned (taught) to see stories as a series of events that take place over time. Conveniently, the nature of time and events is tacitly assumed.
Assumptions, like conclusions, are slippery slopes fraught with dangerous ends.
“Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.” ~Adrienne Rich
Life stories (where ‘to story’ is a verb) without any intentional help from us. Put simply, life stories, we narrate. Everything is made of stories. It is the raw stuff of life. We use story to create narrative.
The idea that story happens in linear time is a Metaphoric Mammal thing. We have been conditioned to live in clock time. A persistent sense of forward motion occupies a default space in our minds. Life is, therefore, usually seen in linear time.
Storythink counts passing moments as if on a clock, ineluctably moving forward into the distance.
“Time is a circus. Always packing up and moving away.” ~Ben Hecht
We needn’t do anything but let go, stories, like a circuses, clouds, and ocean currents, will come and go in their own way and time. Our ‘proper work’ is simply to pay attention playfully, effortlessly - in harmony and at one with the experience.
To try hard, as dictated by the widely accepted - effort oriented - success seeking attitudes prominent in our culture, separates us from living experience. No time to waste.
"Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists in putting too high a value on time. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke." ~Hermann Hesse
With effortless awareness, each moment turns our ‘story’ in new directions. We are nurtured, humored in the ancient healing sense, and born anew in every lived moment.
Pay Attention, though decidedly not in the take notes there's going to be a test fashion we've been trained to do in school. Trust that story is unfolding (it is) and let it permeate as living experience. We are not collectors of experience, we are the experience itself.
As Sharon Salzberg says: “we are not stuck in traffic, we are the traffic.”
Let your fully lived unfiltered experience spark curiosity and imagination.
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” ~Plutarch
NARRATIVE
Prematurely imposed narratives construct a barrier to direct experience. We cut ourselves off from lived experience. Our curiosity and imagination is starved. We deprive ourselves of the raw material necessary for robust engagement in the process of intentional self creation.
Organic story material is killed by prematurely imposed narratives.
When common cultural constructions, embedded by institutions of society like school and media, tell us what the world is like, dictate behavior, and push us to fit into the commonplace scheme of things, a sticky web of ‘premature cognitive commitments’ forms to cut us off from life lived alive.
Naturally arising story, absent narrative inflection, plays a vital role in creative living.
It is incumbent on us as HUMAN ACTORS to practice the art of narrative, to use narrative, rather than permit powerful soul crushing cultural pressure that wants narrative to use us - unconsciously.
Fires ignite when raw experience roils in open minds. They light our way, we discover ourselves, warm, whole, and dynamically connected.
It is of the essence that we invite inspiration to flourish in our lives.
“Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry.” ~Muriel Rukeyser
Poetry suggests story at a high vibrational level. It transforms noise into music that encourages us to see our lives clearly as metaphor. We grok and feel life lived alive.
ACTING HUMAN connects our curiosity and imagination to self creation in an intentional and poetic way.
WHAT IS NARRATIVE?
Stories simply happen. Narrative is how we shape and tell stories.
If we don’t hone our ability to pay attention and don’t develop story sense through practice, we are prone to not see/feel this distinction.
Without an intimate feel for story/narrative distinction, we are apt to miss experience prior to language, thought, and concepts. As a consequence. . .
We deprive ourselves of phenomenal story that arises simultaneously with the WHOLE UNIVERSE.
We miss uncategorized events, experienced without definition. We are isolated and see the world strictly from a subject-object perspective.
“. . .everything is a story: every thought, every belief, every memory (every love, every bias). And every story is constructed by a certain projective quality of the mind. How do we know things about the world? The mind makes scale models, and we test them out. So, the quality of our scale-model-maker determines the relative accuracy of the resulting model which, in turn, determines how close to the truth we end up living. That is: how we tell and receive stories is central to how we think, which, in turn, determines how well (how lovingly, how fully) we live.” ~Geo. Saunders
Life Stories.
We Narrate.
Narratives sprout the stuff of identity. Storytelling is one important way we recognize and connect with each other.
How we metabolize the relationship between story and narrative is central to our creative process. As Saunders says, it is determinative of how truthfully, fully, and lovingly we live.
The quality of our narratives determine the quality of our social fabric.
“There is no selfhood where there’s no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in the relating to others.” ~James P. Carse
Much more (as in lots and lots) on story/narrative coming to fine posts near you soon.
Until next time..
Lights Up!
I like to surround myself with people who are smarter than I (I'm looking at you Richard Dubin) because I DO GET STUCK in the culturally crafted boxes. As a mystic, I fancy that I live "outside the box" but as a mystic trying to share what has been dropped into her awareness, I fumble. I fumble with words, with narrative, with beliefs about how communication and relationships work. Thank you for being the voice outside the box for me.