My good friend Ari Weinzweig emailed me recently to say that he’s been thinking of stories in a surprising way:
“I had this flash the other day that "stories" in the organizational ecosystem should be [envisaged as] birds … I don't know if that's right but it's been in my mind . . different ecosystems of course attract different sorts of birds!”
I had been thinking something very similar just the couple of nights before Ari emailed. I was about a quarter of a mile from the house I grew up in near Belfast, and therefore I could hear the birds that sang me to sleep or sang me awake when I was a child. They are, of course, different to the birds I hear in North Carolina.
And there are also some warning birds, some healing birds, some broken birds; and in this metaphor there may even be some birds who are singing a function they were not made for.
The theologian Walter Wink might call them angels rather than birds. For Walter the “spirit” of a place or a community is sometimes helpfully understood as an angel with a personality, with gifts and needs, to be tended, listened to, sometimes reined in, sometimes simply undergone…
This leads me to think further about our lives as story ecosystems; and how they operate, unfold, can heal or break us. It might serve us well to seriously consider the place of story in the ecosystem of our organizations, communities, and personal lives; and who we are as a result. Questions we’ve been raising in The Porch for years are germane here, of course, but I also feel that we are in the middle of a discovery that a better story may not be the ultimate goal. While more truthful and more helpful stories are also better stories for us to live by, the furthest aim and calling of all our searching is something beyond stories. There’s no perfect word for this goal, but I think we can just call it “presence”. And one way to presence is to listen for the birds.
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The birds whose songs were given most attention when I was a child were the broken ones.
I grew up often feeling afraid, because the stories told the loudest where I come from were that we were in danger all the time, that our neighbors couldn’t be trusted, and that if you were different you better keep your head down.
There was some truth to this, of course - I was growing up in a northern Ireland overshadowed by civil conflict. But there are ways of talking about conflict that can make it worse, ways of expressing pain that merely repeats it, like hamsters on a wheel of anxiety. The antidote to crisis-driven storytelling is not to pretend the crisis isn’t real. It’s to change the frame, imagining another more true and more helpful narrative. There’s nothing new in that idea - it’s at the heart of all spiritual wisdom traditions, conflict transformation processes, therapy and healing journeys. But as long as we live in a world where crisis-driven storytelling is disproportionately loud, we have to keep rehearsing and enacting a reorientation of the content, context, and meaning of what we say.
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The animating principle of The Porch is that as we live by stories we must seek the wisest ones.
Most of us are unconscious of this (most of the time), so part of what we’re called to in life is to discover and even co-create the truest and most helpful version of the stories we’re telling.
Stories can give life or kill, illuminate or cloud, heal or traumatize.
But we get to choose which stories we will lean into; and the practice of seeking life-giving stories is both a gift and a responsibility.
We all grew up surrounded by stories that claimed to tell us who we were, where we are from, and what we’re here for. Some of these stories are ugly and destructive - get them before they get you, be better than everyone else, we wouldn’t be in such a state if it wasn’t for what those people over there did to us so long ago (or this afternoon). And hopefully some of the stories are beautiful and creative - sharing your food is a good thing, you need to understand that she has a hard time at home, we’ll love you no matter what, do unto others (and yourself) as you’d want them to do to you.
Like you, I imagine, I was born into an environment permeated by both stories of separation and union, judgmentalism and acceptance, closing off and possibility. I was still pretty young when I started to question the stories I believed. I think I was lucky to have grown up often feeling on the outside of things - while it certainly felt lonely and confusing, it also enabled me to imagine things from a perspective beyond the binaries of politics, religion, and culture. For whatever reason, I saw that northern Ireland’s divisions were rooted in real injustices, but that did not justify the use of violence to overcome them; that religion should open the mind and heart to the ineffable, not close the boundaries of who is “in” and who is “out”; that creativity should not be judged based on whether it results in “high” or “low” art, but whether or not it is alive, and helps us become more alive ourselves.
I’ve always thought that story matters, but it’s only in recent years that I came to the view that the stories we tell might actually be the experiences we’re having. Or at least that our experiences may be almost indistinguishable from the experiences themselves. That was a revolutionary step forward in my life - but it wasn’t new, of course. Just new to me.
But in the past few months my mind is once again changing about story.
I’m not abandoning the idea that the way we think and tell about things may be as important as the things themselves; millennia of spiritual wisdom traditions have consistently shown that to be true. But I’m rethinking, or my thinking is evolving, about the goal of transformative storytelling.
I used to think that our aim was to find the best story, or at least the best version we can find. And that is absolutely part of what we should be doing - a truer and more helpful version of the story is always better than a less true and less helpful one. That should be obvious, but it’s not how most of us have been taught how to think, never mind how to be in the world.
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Despite what most of us have been raised to believe, once we are breathing, human beings are first and foremost storytellers. Not members of tribes, or economic units, or “failures” or “successes” - those are all functions of the stories we inherit and repeat, or question and transcend. We receive and co-create our identities from the stories we tell. Our names, family histories and the meaning of places, concerns and hopes are all such stories. Most of us don’t think about this, most of the time. Many of us never become conscious of the fact that whatever we think is real is also a story about reality.
I come from a place where two large groups fought each other for centuries over a story about land and justice. There are other times and places to delve into the complexities of that conflict, but the main point I want to make here is that for centuries the story held by each of those communities insisted that only the total defeat of the other would suffice. And then, the story changed. For lots of reasons, but one of which really is the fact that some of the leaders and the communities themselves sincerely did not want to see more suffering, and our divided communities started to imagine that there could be a solution in which everybody wins. Or at least one in which nobody completely loses. The story evolved - it was still about land and justice, but justice became defined not as a zero sum game; and land could be shared. It was now a story about belonging - about having a sense of meaningful connection to the society itself, and the chance for all of us to make a life free from discrimination based on our freely received or chosen identities.
That reframe of the story was hard-won, and while the embodiment of the story is slow it is now generally accepted that no one wants to go back to the old story. A movement toward each other is not just believed to be better than separation, but it’s actually what our society practices on a daily basis. I don’t mean this in a sentimental way, nor would I suggest that it’s all one direction, all the time. But northern Irish society has a fundamental agreement that we cannot veto each other into stability. If we are to build an interdependent, whole society free of toxic polarization and inequity the legitimate needs of all our people must be listened to and met, even if only part of the way.
This is the dream for us all, right? This dream is a story too.
Here are some principles that can help us get there.
1: Refuse to kill, even with words.
We do need spaces where our anger and resentments can be expressed without harming others or driving a further wedge between us - but that’s what therapy or a punch bag in a gym are for. Not Facebook. If you truly believe in Beloved Community, or even if you just want to build some bridges it’s best not to publish your resentment in a place where your opponents can see it. Mocking our opponents can feel good, but it doesn’t help transform separation stories for the better.
Making some contact with our political opponents from a place of respect for their human dignity and their legitimate needs may be unpleasant, difficult, or even risky. But we can’t have a healthy society without it.
2: Embrace reality as best as you can experience it. This must include questioning stories as we explore the possibilities of discovering a more true and a more helpful vision of life. Speak from that place.
Don’t confuse anecdotes or individual instances (whether beautiful or terrible) with trends. Having said that, because our brains are wired to the negative and the fearful, we should certainly share more anecdotes and stories of individual incidents that point toward connection and interdependency among humans and the ecosystem than stories of individual horror and separation.
And for the sake of our mental and spiritual health, not to mention the need to inspire action for the common good, we need to speak more stories of courage and creativity than stories of despair and repetition of the myth of redemptive violence.
3: Consider that the ultimate goal may not be merely a better, or even the best, story.
Merely looking for “the best” story is not far from saying that if only we could find the “right” beliefs we would have everything we need. But that’s not enough. Our friend Dan Snyder says that beliefs - or the stories we tell - are important, but what matters more is practice. And what “practice” means in this context is to consciously claim habits of mind and body that lead us toward something even better than a better story. We can use different words for what this better thing is, but I call it presence.
What we’re aiming for is presence.
Presence is what happens as a result of the reunion between childlike wonder and an adult discernment of what matters. The necessary practices to lead us to that reunion are incredibly simple.
The return of our minds, bodies, and spirits to the garden within is not a matter of money or status, social identity or privilege. It doesn’t depend on reading the right books or knowing the right people. It enables us to contend with all of reality - from the ecstatic to the lamentable, from the hopeful to the despairing.
It’s available to everyone reading this essay, right now.
It can be begun in a minute, but will take a lifetime.
It’s not difficult.
In fact, it may be the easiest thing of all.
To enter into the experiential reality of what the truer and more helpful story is for, all we need do is to let our breathing slow down, and with our minds sink into the earth. And then do it again.
Such sinking is best done (or at least best learned) by lying down, closing our eyes, and allowing the breath to slow. Then with our imagination we let ourselves descend into the place where dreams are found.
We are born with a magnificent advantage: given that we have to lie down for about a third of our lives, the very fact of sleep means that we have a daily opportunity to let ourselves be rediscovered in the world where stories come from. And when we emerge, we may discover that our experience of ourselves, and of the world, and the world’s experience of us has changed too. We will likely be experiencing the thing even better than the best story: simply being present.
I’m sitting a quarter of a mile from the place where I first remember hearing bird song. My mind is full with the memory of Peter Gabriel’s recent concert where a massive spectacle was unfolded around a small campfire, evoking the storytelling and shamanic traditions of wisdom communities. I can hear vehicles on the road outside, carrying people to commerce, education, play, sadness, community. The sun is drying the pavement, and making the air in this room a little muggier than I prefer. Our houseguest is whistling a little tune. My belly is satisfied with oatmeal and berries. My loved ones are celebrating, and in pain, and peaceful, and concerned, and our houseguest has returned to the room, this time humming. And I am breathing a little more slowly, feet on the floor, thinking of the people who will read this, with your own pains and joys, concerns and hopes. In a few minutes I will hit send, and I’ll lie down, imagining my body sinking into the earth where there is more of me to be found. Maybe I’ll see you there.
Gareth Higgins is an Irish writer and founder of The Porch.
