Telling Our Stories

In the shamanic tradition, the hero/heroine's journey begins with the call to adventure and culminates in the return journey. There is a departure from the community, from the center to beyond the edges, and a return to the community into the center. A story is always a circle.

In all cosmology of storytelling, the return is complete once the story is shared, brought back to the community, seeded in the land, and digested by the ecosystem of all relations. It is not only our human kin that needs to hear our stories but the trees of our land, the river that flows through it, the soil we step on, the spiders that crawl on it, and the sky that watches upon us all. Even the dead leaves need to hear our stories, especially the dead leaves.

We embark on this journey through various means, whether traveling vast distances spiritually within our own consciousness or perception or physically undertaking a journey to distant lands. Each step of this journey is an opportunity for growth and transformation, but it is in telling the story that we find the ultimate healing and integration.

This touches on the fundamental roots of animism, shamanism, and ancient wisdom that nothing is truly "our own" nor is anything an individual process. Our pains and personal stories are always connected, weaved, entangled, and pulsing with the collective ones. We cannot find our stories without the collective echoes weaved by the cosmos, the ancestors, and the ancient stones. Our story cannot exist without the stories of others, and cannot live very long without sharing them.

Our stories are not just narratives; they are living, breathing entities that carry the wisdom and experiences of our souls; they are timeless parts of an infinite reality.

They are weaved with what we often call "the others ." They hold the potential to activate profound healing and transformation within ourselves and others. And we can only release these potent energies by telling our stories, allowing them to flow through us and into the world. And back from the world into ourselves. They never were ours to start with.

When we keep our stories hidden in the broken individualistic lie of the modern world, they fester and ferment within us, leading to soul loss and trauma and further delaying our return and collective healing.

Through the act of sharing, we can metabolize our stories, integrating their transformative capacities into our being. In the telling, we reclaim lost parts of ourselves, gather the fragmented pieces, and make ourselves whole once more, embodied once more, connected once more.

Even if the break in our story feels as vast as the grandest canyon, as wide as the distant stars, or as deep as a fault line, we work towards healing and integration through storytelling. The fracture that caused the original departure and the quest for a new story is mended by mycelium-mystic magic that sprouts into the canyon of despair, the bare land of hopelessness, and the burned forest of emotional pain.

Telling our story allows us to be seen and heard and genuinely feel the depths of our experiences; it will enable us to heal the soil to plant the new seeds we have brought back. Through this expression, we can activate the transformative power of our stories, both for ourselves and those who listen. Sharing our stories opens the door for reciprocal healing and growth as our narratives resonate and intertwine with others, creating a web of shared experience and understanding. It brings the hope of a new life back into our depleted and often broken shared narratives, communal lands, and tables.

As mystics, dreamers, poets, medicine people, or elders, we understand the immense power held within our stories. Our traditions and practices have long emphasized the importance of storytelling for healing, integration, and growth. There was always this vital season of winter, spent on the frozen soil and dead leaves around the fire to share the old and new stories. We knew that to prepare for a beautiful spring planting season, we had to seed the soil with our stories, dreams, and mystical journeys. We would sing to the land, tell them to the sacred tobacco, put them into the fire so they would remember our stories, and pass them down to the next generations after we were apparently all long gone.

I don't know about you, but the fire, the land, and the old trees have shared some of those stories with me. I am glad someone told them to remember and to pass them down.

Now, I can understand better why the seeming death of the winter season, the long shadows of the sun, and the endless nights were revered and understood as potent spaces of alchemy and medicine stories. I can feel in my bones why we always need to share our stories with our extended family of one-legged and crawling friends.

On this time of the full Wolf Moon, let us, once again, all come together to howl and share our stories with the world and with our communities, for in this crucial act of storytelling, we will find healing, integration, meaning, land-weaved-embodied-narratives, and the profound relevance and interconnectedness of our shared human experiences we were looking for when we departed.