Story Paths

Watch the promo hereThe sales stuff:I'm offering this at an opening discount of 15 dollars.Buy it on Gum Road (free account).I'm also lowering the price on my three course bundle, which includes Story Shapes 1, and Brainstorming Story Ideas, for 30.Buy the bundle of all three courses.I'll hold that until the first week of April, then they'll go up.With these purchases, you’ll be able to either watch the videos online, or download them to your own computer.Buying these is a great way to learn an intuitive approach to stories, and to support me as a creator. I greatly appreciate it.Another Way to Watch ThemIf you're on Skillshare, those first two courses are available there, and the third one will come soon. If you'd like to try out Skillshare, here's a link for a free month.So either by buying one or more courses directly, or by watching them on Skillshare, I invite you to dive into birds’ eye view story-thinking.Happy creating!Until the next,Theo This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit storypaths.substack.com/subscribe

Read this as an article and share your thoughts hereBook one-on-one story sessions hereI’ll open with a passage penned by none other than the Dalai Lama, which appears in the preface of Coming Back to Life, the Updated Guide to the Work that Reconnects, by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown.The Dalai Lama writes:Although it is increasingly evident how interdependent we are in virtually every aspect of our lives, this seems to make little difference to the way we think about ourselves in relation to our fellow beings and our environment.We live in a time when human actions have developed a creative and destructive power that has become global in scope. And yet we fail to cultivate a corresponding sense of responsibility. Most of us are concerned only about people and property that are directly related to us. We naturally try to protect our family and friends from danger. Similarly, most people will struggle to defend their homes and land against destruction, whether the threat comes from enemies or natural disasters such as fire or flooding.We take the existence of clean air and water, the continued growth of crops and availability of raw materials, for granted. We know that these resources are finite, but because we only think of our own demands, we behave as if they are not. Our limited and self-centered attitudes fulfill neither the needs of the time nor the potential of which we are capable.Today, while many individuals grapple with misery and alienation, we are faced with global problems such as poverty, overpopulation, and the destruction of the environment. These are problems that we have to address together. No single community or nation can expect to solve them on its own. This indicates how small and interdependent our world has become.In ancient times, each village was more or less self-sufficient and independent. There was neither the need nor the expectation of cooperation with others outside the village. You survived by doing everything yourself.The situation now has completely changed. It is no longer appropriate to think only in terms of even my nation or my country, let alone my village. If we are to overcome the problems we face, we need what I have called a sense of universal responsibility, rooted in love and kindness for our human brothers and sisters, and the world.In our present state of affairs, the very survival of humankind depends on people developing concern for the whole of humanity, not just their own community or nation. The reality of our situation impels us to act and think more clearly. Narrow mindedness and self-centered thinking may have served us well in the past, but today will only lead to disaster.We can overcome such attitudes through the combination of education and trainingHis Holiness Tenzin GyatsoThe 14th Dalai Lama of TibetWritten on September 7th, 1998.Beyond our SensesAs I write this, I am sitting beside a pond filled with cat tails and reeds, and I'm listening to the calls of frogs and ravens.I touch this water. Run my hand over these ferns. Caress this moss, and run my fingernails over this alder bark. If something were to happen to this pond, these trees, these ferns, these creatures… if a great industrial force with chainsaws and log lifters were to careen through here, I would know it, for I am here. The smells and tastes and sounds, sights and textures of this place surround me. My body and these bodies share the same space. My senses and the senses of these others overlap.And yet, if I were to leave here, I might find this land for sale on a property board somewhere on the internet, and if I had enough currency tokens, I might purchase it, and decide to log it. All this I could do from a distance, without bringing my senses into this space, without being culpable before the creatures who call this place home.This scenario, in miniature, is perhaps our species’ greatest challenge when writ large. It is a strange thing to purchase land and direct its destruction ,without ever seeing it; I must apologize for this land here for even imagining such things. Yet we are involved in directing such remote violence with every purchase at the grocery store, or the gas pump, or the airport, or a shop selling digital devices.Our everyday actions affect sensory environments that we may never sense with our bodies. This is something we haven't before faced as a species, at least not to this magnitude. We are attempting to come to terms with our consequence on the planet, and this attempt is showing our shortcomings. We in First World countries have the greatest impact, not because we have different natures, but because we have more capacity.Three Spheres of EthicsI propose three spheres of ethics to consider.In the first two, we are quite accomplished. The first is ethics to oneself eating well, exercising well, being careful not to take in disturbing sights and sounds. Being careful who we let into our lives. Being careful, in short, to be good to ourselves. Now, whether you or we always get this right is another question, but most of us are quite aware of it and working on it.The second sphere of ethics is in relation with our friends ,children, parents, colleagues, people in our demographic, people in our city, people in our country. In short, people whom we consider to be our people. Whether we get it right or not, most of us are aware that it's important to be in good relations with these people: to not steal, to not be violent, to respect their ways of living a dignified life.Then there is the third ethics. This ethics relates with ecosystems and people who are outside our sensory range, but who are impacted by what we do in our sensory range: by filling the gas tank, buying imported food from the grocery store, or buying a new phone. Although these distant beings are impacted by our actions, we do not directly witness that impact.I think it's fair to say that our planet, and our time, are asking us to encompass these beings with our awareness. To include them in our considerations, though we may never encounter them with our senses, as one creature is used to encountering another.We are ConnectedWe are connected to them: through scientific reports from lands where sea levels are rising and topsoil is eroding, and perhaps from symptoms in our own land, like smoke in the sky as forest fire season worsens, or coral bleaching when we go out to swim. We know that our actions have consequences not only in distant places, but everywhere in this world we call home. We know, and yet many of us, and most of us some of the time, act as if we don't know. Why is this?Perhaps it is due to some shortcoming in our makeup as a species, that we did not evolve to consider the worldwide implications of our actions. Perhaps it is because we are more socially, culturally and ecologically woven into the places where we live than to distant places, so we don't feel those other places through the web of being we do those near us. Because our cultural/spiritual/social web gets thinner as it extends from us. Or seems to.Whatever the reason, I find myself looking for ways of bringing those distant places close: ways that we as individuals and groups can feel our remote impact, so that when I consider whether to get a car, for example, I consider not just the price of the car, not just whether those I know personally would be okay with me getting a car, but also the costs to the mycelium crushed by tarmac, the First Nations folks in Alberta poisoned by tar sands, or those in Nigeria and South America pushed off their land by corporations I'm helping to fund.My choices may make sense within the first and second spheres. A journey to a distant land for self-discovery is good for me. Getting a big four-wheel-drive vehicle is good for the safety of my family. But what is the impact on the locals in the place that I'm traveling? How does my vehicle affect the air we all breathe? The fuel it uses is destructive in both its extraction and its burning, as is the mining and melting of the virgin metal used to make the chassis.These three spheres of ethics are deeply inter-related. I may act only for personal and inter-personal wellbeing, but there will come a time—and perhaps it comes subtly and immediately—when the health of the wider world will impinge upon my own well-being, and the well-being of those I know.How might I bring those larger implications into my decision making: with maturity, with grief, and with a willingness to face up for that which I am part of? How can I bring distant sensory environments into my own? Here's another way of asking this: given that my entire species evolved, as did all species, to interact with those in our sensory environments; given that I'm used to understanding what's in front of me, who's in front of me; given that I'm not very good yet at relating with ecosystems, creatures and people on other sides of the world, or even across the city I'm living in; how might I bring those beings closer to myself? How might I bring those beings, to whom I'm so consequential, into my sphere of awareness?Furthermore, how might we do this? In classes, companies, communities, workshops, churches, temples? You name it, in all the spaces that we gather.Dune’s Prophetic WitchesHere is a fictional example that indicates third ethics,. It’s a bit weirder and more scheming than what I really have in mind, but it helps to look from a fictional angle. So consider the Bene Gesserit, the Galactic Order of Witches in the Dune stories by Frank Herbert.In this story, there are various powerful houses that have been existing for hundreds or thousands of years. Sometimes they cooperate, and often they compete. There's a lot of vying for power going on in this galaxy, and all the while, there’s this order of witches. Some are married, some are not, some are young, some are eldresses, and these interwoven ladies are keeping an eye on the big picture.They may not always know whether this royal house will win, or whether that one will, and so they place bets on either side. They're not for or against any particular house, or any particular emperor. They move with the possibilities, and keep an eye out for the grand picture. They ensure stability. The Third Ethics is something like this. While other groups are vying for their benefit, there are those who are not invested in the victory of this side or that side, but who are instead considering the whole.It’s not perfect, but this illustrative, fictional example shows how we can look out for our own, while considering the wider picture that includes everyone, and not just humans.In the next issue, we’ll explore other approaches to come close to distant beings, namely spiritual, technological, and of course, stories. In particular, we’ll look into how the advent of the novel led to the human rights movement.Let’s continue this exploration in the next episode. There, well look into the power of stories. In particular, how the advent of the novel led to the human rights movement.Until the nexthappy creating,Theo This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit storypaths.substack.com/subscribe

For story workshops: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/06d77f86-cbe9-4c65-8486-2e723e2b33b4It is a freestyle rhythmic meditation on borders. Because just as the stories in our minds become the stories we live, the borders in our minds become the borders we enforce.This one’s better listened to (see the audio link).In we go. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit storypaths.substack.com/subscribe

Workshop: Speak the Work you Love: Storytelling for Businesses with Soul Sign up for weekly story workshops here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/f3dbaab7-c9bf-463b-ad5d-bfc51651ccfeHow might it feel to expand your psychic footprint back in time, to go back seven generations, with all the changes? How might it feel to go forward into the future?How would thinking in deep time change your vocational work? How would you consider succession, and who are you inheriting understandings from?In this guided meditation, you’re invited to spread yourself through time, to more fully inhabit the present. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit storypaths.substack.com/subscribe

Here's a quick little episode to share a new story. That has been swirling into creation, a pattern in the center of a sandstorm, with flows of wind coming in from different directions. This story is in the form of a virtual comic.Read a preview here.Read the full comic here.And what is this story about?Hear me, for I whisper strange wonders.In a circular stone temple, a muskrat monk awaits the coming of pilgrims. Various creatures make this journey to bring him their death-poems: condensed lifetimes of wisdom, glimpses of the beyond, in the form of scrolls.These they entrust to the monk. His duty is to burn these prayers so that they may be heard in the Otherworld, to herald the arrival of those who wrote them.However, instead of burning these verses, this monk keeps them, reads them, and places them in a miniature labyrinth hidden below the temple.He arranges and rearranges these scrolls meticulously, trying to find a pattern to satisfy him. But the core of his maze is empty. You see, he has no poem to herald his own death.This story, this comic, is both funny and philosophical, quirky and evocative. And you, O thoughtful listener, are invited inside.Here are some previews of the pages; you can purchase the virtual comic on the vendor gum road for a very reasonable rate. It’s also a good way to support this publication. Thanks!Until next time,Theo This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit storypaths.substack.com/subscribe

Sign up for weekly story playshops here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/f15d43a9-4e89-47d1-93e0-a40c0d03d546There's a spectrum, with boring on one side and weird on the other.Let’s consider story beginnings, and tinker with the ratio between familiar and strange.Here's a way to consider beginnings.Here's a meditation.You are standing within grasslands stretching in every direction. By your feet, the land is familiar: the plants, the smell of it. But your eye follows a particular path, where you see that the land grows stranger. Out in the distance there are strange caverns that you wonder about, with curiosity and worry.All between where you stand and those distant, strange lands, there are holes in the ground. Some are burrows, and each burrow has been dug out by a different creature. Each burrow is an entrance into a story. Some burrows are close, some further away, some familiar, and some strange.Which burrow will you enter? Where will you begin your story?Perhaps you’ll start with one nearby: a tale of a character who is much like most of us, in the times in which we live. Whose life and way of thinking resembles our own, a starting point for a story that is just like slipping on a familiar sweater and stepping out the door.Or will the starting point of your story be deeper into that strange terrain, into a hole burrowed by an unfamiliar creature?That starting point might be a time in the past, not terribly far from our own time, but perhaps a hundred years back. Or a hundred and fifty, or two hundred, into a time that is connected to our own through many visible threads. Perhaps that is the starting point of the story. Or you go further back into times that are difficult for you to imagine, and will be difficult to imagine for those hearing your tale. Difficult, but possible, if you find ways to imagine them deeply, and inhabit those times.Your story may start a thousand years back. Two thousand! In another world, where people think very differently from ourselves. Or perhaps the characters of your story are not human people. Where does your tale begin? How strange is the burrow’s entrance?And here is the other question. As you go into that burrow, how quickly and to what degree does the journey become strange?A story may start with a character who is much like most of your audience, but who quickly steps into an otherworldly world. Or a story may start with someone unfamiliar to us, and then continue more deeply into strange and unfamiliar territory, while hopefully giving us enough details that we can relate with—smells and tastes and feels—that are relatable to us, in our time, with our bodies. Not so different from the bodies in that tale. With enough detail, hopefully, that we can follow this strange character deeper into this strange world.Not that we all have the same experience now.How strange is the beginning of your tale to the sensibilities of your listeners? And as the tale deepens, can you bring them with you? If you can, they may be in for the most unusual, deepening, expanding, weirding journey that they've been on since God made platypuses.Let’s hope so.For your beginning, you might choose a frame story: a story in which another story takes place.For example, I’m to a friend, and I begin to tell him about something that happened to me a week ago. The main narration moves to this story from a week ago, but we know we are still within this conversation of me talking with a friend.There are lots of examples of this. In The Neverending Story, a boy hears his grandfather read a story from a very special book. Within that book is the main story.Then there's the question of how deeply we go into the frame story. The frame story could be brief, a flitting thought around the main story, where we spend most of our time. In the example of me talking to my friend, we could have a brief conversation between me and my friend, but then most of the narrative is about this story that I'm telling about what happened to me a week ago.Or, let’s say there's plenty of story going on between me and my friend. We are journeying across the ocean, experiencing various trials and revelations as we go. In the course of all this, time to time I continue telling them about what happened to me a week ago: the story within the frame. In that case, the main emphasis is placed on the frame story and the story within it is not as deeply described.You can also ask about the relationship between the story that's being framed, and the story that's framing. For example, as we cross the ocean and experience various trials, and I tell my friend about this thing that happened to me a week ago, it could turn out that this thing that happened to me a week ago has a great deal of relevance to what's happening now. It might be just the key to overcoming a particular trial, or convincing him to go a certain direction on the ocean, when we have that chance.There are different kinds of frame stories. Can you think of some?Reading a book could be a frame, or a dream, a meditation, a vision, a memory, a letter, or back-and-forth correspondence , a storyteller.A song could be a frame, and I'm thinking especially of a song with much story in it, like a ballad, those long songs that are histories.I'm curious if you can think of any more frames for stories. If so, please share them in the comments.I’ll say one more thing before we close for this session, and it's something you may have been thinking about as I go along, is that stories are not necessarily just one layer deep. You may have a frame story within a frame story, within a frame story…You might be thinking of the film Inception, in which the frame story is of people trying to get inside the head of someone, to get particular memories. To do this, they share dreams together, and within those dreams they go layers and layers deeper.For each of the examples I've given, there could be multiple layers of depth. In a conversation, I could be telling my friend about a conversation I had, and how within that conversation another friend was telling me about a conversation they had with a shop-keeper, who was telling about where they got a particular medallion.You can go as deep as you want.There's a scripture in India called the Srimad Bhagavatam. The story goes some twelve layers deep: conversations within conversations within conversations within conversations.And each conversation has some context. We were considering before about how fleshed out the frame story is. So in this case, the first layer is someone who's heard a conversation between the sage and a king, where the sage delivered many teachings. The second layer is the main story in which the king is cursed to die; he goes to the banks of a holy river and prays for guidance.Many sages gather to him, and one sage in particular comes to speak wisdom to him. Within that story, the sage speaks of other conversations between sages and students. And within those conversations, the sages often quote other sages, because they're not just making it all up. So from sage to sage to sage, it goes twelve layers deep, and some of these layers have more context than others. Some are briefly mentioned, like, ‘Once there was a sage who spoke this to a king, and here is what he spoke.’ Others have more context: ‘There was a battle, and many people had died, and the king was heartbroken, and then the sage appeared to him and spoke the following words…’So in all these examples of frame stories, these layers can all have relationship with each other, like different floors of the same building, or strata of soil, or layers of a tree with different kinds of branches, or layers of clouds, or perhaps some other metaphor.If you have started a small business, you might consider the story of how you created that business, the story of why you created that business. You might consider that story to be within the story of your life. So your life is the frame story and the business is the story within it.If you're helping clients, you might consider which stories are nested within the stories of their lives.And so…I couldn't speak about frame stories without coming back to where we started. Let’s come back out of that hole in the ground.Usually at the end of frame stories, we come out and out of however many frames in we are in, coming back to the first one, which follows the principle of a cycle, of returning to the beginning of a story. Not that it's necessary to return to the beginning of a story, but there is a certain neatness in at least harkening back to the beginning of a story, from the end, of touching back on what brought us into that hole in the ground in the first place.So as we come out, you may want to reflect on your life as a frame story: around this article, and around all the stories you hear.That’s one way to think about it.Story Prompts:Here are some story prompts regarding the beginning of stories, how normal they are, how quickly they get weird, and how weird they get.Take a look at a story you're writing and consider that ratio: how weird it starts, how weird it gets, and how weird it finishes. You could try adjusting the recipe to see what happens.Have it start really weird. Tell it to people. How does it land? Is it intriguing? Do people lean in, or away?If it starts really normal, is it just boring? How about if it starts normal, then gets really weird… does it throw people off? You can actually get pretty weird if you start normal.So that's the prompt: to fiddle around with that recipe.In regards to business, if you have some unusual offering, think about the pathway into it.And here's some props about frame stories.The first one is simple: have a conversation with somebody about another conversation. The first one is a frame story. For the second one, if you want to go further it, talk to somebody about what somebody else told you within a conversation that they heard from somebody else, then you're already a couple layers deep into stories.It's surprising how often we do that in day to day life.For a frame story within business, you might consider your initial touch with the person to be a kind of frame story. If you're putting on an introductory workshop, this workshop could give a good sense of what your work is like, if you go further and further into it. This workshop could be considered as a frame story, with your customer’s further explorations within that framework being the main story. Kind of like the table of contents and the main book.You might adjust that first contact so that there's more of the DNA of what's to come in it.And so here we are, resting in a warm cabin after our journey together.You can take this time to consider what's alive in you after hearing this talk and to reflect on the story prompts.Now these prompts art homework. But possibilities. You might respond by journaling, by speaking about them with a friend or colleague, or speaking about them with yourself, while you're walking or driving.You might push back against these prompts or come up with better ones.You can share your thoughts in the comments on Substack. Or even better, if you'd like to explore these prompts together, I'm hosting weekly gatherings where we play with stories for an hour that's included for premium subscribers at just $5 a month.Or you might just want to let this all go and roll along with whatever's coming next in your life.Happy creating. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit storypaths.substack.com/subscribe

Weekly story playshops here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/86acb049-61b0-4311-8dce-d0d833d6b76eIf I had my life over again, I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life.Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life.Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid, limp. You might as well live on just the whites of eggs.- Muriel SparkIn going to speak about death and story, there's no preparing for it. No way to get together an authoritative and comprehensive presentation on views of death. On what actually happens on the afterlife.And the reason there can't be a comprehensive presentation on this is that it is infused with mystery. The transition into death is mysterious. The fact that we must die is mysterious, as is our relationship with those who have died.I'm considering death these days because I realized that the altar within me that I have for death has become dusty. I used to think that having an altar to death in one's self would be strange and morbid.I feel now that death is accompanying life at all times. Death is a great teacher, perhaps the greatest, is the basis of life. We see predation, one animal consuming the life of another. And this is true for those who don't eat the flesh of other beings, for eggs and seeds and milk are also potential life.The seeds on the Himalayan Blackberry bush are intended to create more Himalayan Blackberry bushes. If I pick some of those berries and eat them myself, I'm taking that potential for life, and I'm using it for my own life, as when a snake steals a bird egg, or a wolf kills a baby caribou. Life continues, but is directed into other life.How can we live our lives to honour the lives who made it possible?Life comes from death, and death comes from life. Perhaps if we set aside these two different words, we might find that death and life are one.As we enter into this exploration of death and story, I invite you to consider your own altar for death. Who is there on the altar? Are there figures of deceased loved ones? Are there animals and plants? As you go through your life, what is your relationship with the potential death surrounding you?In many stories, the potential for death is the main driver of the story. This potential for death might be an invading army that the protagonists oppose. It might be the death of a loved one that they're striving to save. A dragon might be that potential death, raining down terror on a village. Or from the dragon's point of view, those little humans with their pointy swords coming out of the village could be the potential death. Avoiding death is a huge factor in stories and in our lives.Death accentuates life. Or rather, awareness of of death accentuates life. If a person knows they are going to die, then what life they have becomes that much more precious. Of course, we all know we are going to die, but it's possible to have this awareness all the time, and for this awareness to accentuate our lives.Even though our lives are relatively short, it can feel like a long time. Quite a lot happens in the span of eighty or a hundred years. Heck, a lot happens in a month, or a day, or an hour. It's easy to lose sight of death, of the end being present, of our lives being held in a particular container, because most of us don't know when we are going to die.However, some of us do.Or did.I've been listening recently to the David Bowie’s final album, called Blackstar. Now, David Bowie has gone through many different eras in his career, and I'm not familiar with most of them. Some of the early pop songs are cool and everything, but I never got so into them.This last album is remarkable, and I would say that this is because he wrote and recorded it while he knew he was dying.He had cancer, and his death was coming closer and closer. When a creative, expressive, deep-thinking person is served notice that they will soon die, they may well create something extraordinary.(Listen to the audio for a clip)I'm thinking also of Gord Downie. In this part of the world, he’s famous. He was the lead singer for the Tragically Hip, perhaps the most famous Canadian rock band.He got news that he had brain cancer, and an estimate of how many months he had to live. Not down to the day, but pretty close. In his last years, he redirected whatever attention came to him to indigenous rights in the far north, where situations are often dire.(Listen to the episode for an excerpt)In myth, I'm thinking of a famous example in India.A king, Maharaja Pariksit, was cursed by a young brahmin boy, to die in seven days by the bite of a winged serpent. This king was served notice: ‘Seven days from now, this curse will land on you, and you will be killed.’ He knew exactly how long he had, so he went down to the banks of the Yamuna, a holy river.He sat and he fasted, waited for his death, and prayed for guidance. Lo and behold, sages showed up, and more sages showed up, and more sages showed up, until there were hundreds and hundreds of them.A particular young sage, called Sukadeva Goswami, came last. All the sages there understood that Sukadeva was the one who would speak that day, and they too were keen to hear him.In those seven days, Sukadeva Goswami spoke day and night. Pariksit Maharaja listened and asked questions, and all this led up to the point of the king's death. He wanted to pass into that death as best as possible. Awareness of his death amplified his life.The presence of potential death, of oncoming death, amplifies a story. This death could be physical death, but it could also be other kinds of death: being parted from a person forever, the death of a relationship, the aging of a child into adolescence, the aging of that adolescent into adulthood, or the aging of an adult into elderhood.And as with all deaths, mythically speaking, and scientifically speaking, the fading life enters into what comes next. Death becomes new life, and death is therefore seen as a transformation.And what of old death?Death surrounds us: the death of previous civilizations that gave way to what we have now, the death of trees that form our buildings, our chairs, the paper, and the books we read. Old death. Mummies, graves.Many great stories have old death within them. The kings and queens of old built monuments that we still see around us, as ruins. It's always fascinating to see the layers of old cultures that still poke through into what's here in the present.If we look around the world, and dig into the history of the inventions that we use, into etymology, our own genetics, and the development of philosophy, we find that all of what we have today is nourished by beings who have lived, and entered into death, and in so doing have passed their generativity onto the next generations.There are small deaths throughout our lives.In French, sleep is sometimes called, ‘Le petit mort,’ or the little death: a forgetting of life and slipping into some other world, only to return changed. Even boredom is a kind of little death, a fertile absence of engagement from which deeper, fuller activities can be born. Sickness can be a small death. I'm feeling under the weather today, and so reminded of my mortality. I feel frail, older. It’s easier to imagine breathing my last. This remembrance can be a great companion.When I think of death in myth, with my upbringing in my part of the world, I think of the Grim Reaper: a skeletal being, hooded, dark, and cloaked. When he taps you on the shoulder, your time is up. You must go now to wherever you may go.And yet there are other ideas of death. In Buddhism and Hinduism, we have Yama Raj, the Lord of Death. He is not a skeletal cloaked man, but a king, and his responsibility is to make sure people coming through the door of death go where they’re meant to. He is conscientious, empathetic, aware, strong, and needed.Here’s a story about the goddess Kali.Early on in the creation, there was no death. This may sound good, but people were piling up. They kept being born, and without any death, there was less and less space for the living, so the demigods brought Kali in. She then brought death into the world, and things started flowing again.Life depends on death.You might also say that death depends on life. One passes into the other, and passes back. Physically, we know that decomposition is the basis for a new life. Internally, the death of one part of oneself is necessary for new life to come. Relationally, an idea of what a relationship should be—between brother and sister, child and parent, husband, wife—must die again and again, for that relationship to be alive.Can gods die? Perhaps they must, to compost and come again. If a god, or an idea, is held in stasis, this can be worse than death, an artificial holding, beyond the natural lifespan of that belief system, of that form of worship.To allow something to die is to allow it to be born again.And here's a meta point about death in stories: how about the death of a story itself? That is to say, a story’s ending.I think we all know novel series, television series, and comic series that were great in the beginning, and also really successful. But because they were successful, the people making them just kept making them. Milking that cow, getting that money. But gradually, the magic of the story drained away, and it kept going like an animated corpse.Other stories go out with dignity.Just recently, the television series, Reservation Dogs, wound up. It’s such an excellent show, tragic and hilarious. A big, wide story, and very personal as well.It was popular and could have kept going for a longer. Sterlin Harjo, the showrunner, said they wanted to tell the story of a group of young people at the cusp of adulthood, a time of great change. To explore the decisions they made, the changes that happened within them, and between them and their community. They told that story in three seasons, and wrapped it up.They could have kept going. You can always spin out some new story from a scenario and a group of characters, but it was the right time for the show to finish, so they did.Anyway, I’m sure I could string this out and say more about this meta death of stories themselves, of how they go out.But perhaps I’ve said all that needs to be said.In the old, old ways that are still on earth with us today, when a hunter takes the life of an animal, they do so with gratitude and ceremony.It might be a small ceremony, but an acknowledgment. A sense of wishing that being well on their journey, and acknowledging the pain they underwent in order to sustain the human hunter.Death supports life.What happens if a person does not give gratitude for the death that sustains them? What happens when we stop looking at death? When we stop giving back?Well, we still survive because of creatures dying. Whatever our diet is, land has been cleared for us; creatures have been killed. And yet, if we don't face the death, is it not ironic that the death multiplies? It’s strange that this violence spreads all over the world, outsourced so that we don't have to see it.It’s been the fate of cities, of civilisation, of first worlds. Outsourced death, outsourced violence greater than ever before. A massive shadow of paradise.Here are some prompts.Heavy topic. Heavy prompts.Consider the different deaths you've experienced, of those you've known in your life, and how that's felt different at different times. Perhaps as a child there was a grandparent, or even another child, that died. How did that land with you then? And then consider the later deaths, until you come to the most recent. How has your own relationship with death changed over the years?And here's another prompt.Which deaths are we living on? The oil that we pull from the ground is the deaths of old plants and creatures.And which recent deaths are we dependent on? This keyboard, this computer, the internet infrastructure: all has a cost to other beings.Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks about the honorable harvest. Most harvests these days are not honorable, but I feel it is important to face these harvests as well, and give gratitude even though they were wrongly taken,. In facing them and being in gratitude, we might return to good relation with those whose deaths depend on.That, in turn, might reduce the amount of needless death we are inflicting, externalizing, onto the living world.Here’s another prompt:In yourself, is there some era of your life that is tending towards death? If so, how might you hospice that part? It could be the part of you that was in a marriage, the part of you that was in a spiritual organization, the part of you that felt a different way about the world.How might you honor that part and be a death-doula for them?Here’s the same question for your business. Is there some part of your business, or your business as a whole, that is tending towards death? How might you hospice that, so that the energies contained within can go back into the system of your work, to create something new and vibrant?Feel free to share your thoughts on these in the comments.Special credits for the audio version of this episode go to David Bowie and his musicians, The Tragically Hip with Gord Downie as the lead singer, and Hannah Elise, who sang this beautiful rendition of I Just Want a Grieve. And thanks to Sterlin Harjo and the team at Reservation Dogs for making such a wonderful show.And so here we are, resting in a warm cabin after our journey together.You can take this time to consider what's alive in you after hearing this talk and to reflect on the story prompts.Now these prompts aren’t homework, but possibilities. You might respond by journaling, by speaking about them with a friend or colleague, or speaking about them with yourself, while you're walking or drivingYou might push back against these prompts or come up with better ones.You can share your thoughts in the comments on Substack.Or even better, if you'd like to explore these prompts together, I'm hosting weekly gatherings where we play with stories for an hour. That's included for premium subscribers at just $5 a month.Or you might just want to let this all go, and roll along with whatever's coming next in your life.Happy creating. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit storypaths.substack.com/subscribe

Sign up for weekly story workshops here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/a599bdd3-d828-4b67-a036-f5f816bd56e1In part one of our exploration of belief, we began by considering a system of beliefs as a system of scaffolding, crisscrossing above the waters of life.Across watery mystery.We finished by figuring that belief might be more like a liquid stain glass orb surrounding each person, that colors the way they see the world and the shapes they see through it, and even which parts they see at all. I like this model, but it’s visually centred. What about the other senses? Are there no metaphors for them?Well, using a little nimble creature empathy, I can sidle over and see belief in a different way. Yes, I'm a visually focused human, unlike many of my interspecies neighbors.Moving over to sound, I think of the many little birds in the forest around me as I'm writing this. Mostly the birds cannot see each other, and so they depend on sound. By sound, they know whether a predator bird is approaching. And this sound is called out throughout the treetops. Birds even recognize the language of other species. So this language travels throughout the treetops, and it is the bark and leaves filtering and reflecting this sound that are the ‘stained glass filters’ of their aural perception.Also, keeping with sound, we might dive underneath the water into the ocean that's in front of me as I'm writing this. In this case, sounds are filtered through water. The sounds of orcas moving, of gray whales migrating, of ships, of rockslides and sifting silt. It’s be easy to mistake one sound for another, muted and changed as they are by the heavy expanse of water.Going below ground, into the way moles and voles understand the world, we move mainly through scent. Scent of food and predator and everyone in between. And what is filtering these scents? Soil and seed, scat and secretions. This is their stained glass.These sensory conceptions are analogies, of course. Perhaps only humans have beliefs in science or religion, morality and such. Perhaps animals just go by signals, sensory signals and response, not a web of beliefs. Maybe. To me, this seems like a limiting belief, one that doesn't give animals much room to move, before they drop out of human sight.So how does all this connect with story?Well, belief determines which stories we see through.Now, it's often easier to see such things a step removed: in fictional beings, in characters. If a character is steeped in the belief that there is good and evil in the world, they see stories of good versus evil played out all around them. If they believe God is there and God is good, they will see miracles everywhere. And where they see bad, they'll try to somehow see it in the light of goodness. Or if they see bad everywhere, they'll see everything in the light of badness, as it were.Or they might not see good and bad at all, but see paradoxes everywhere.Here's a story prompt:Put two characters together with very different beliefs about the same situation. You might start by describing the situation and their differing beliefs about it, then set them in motion and see what they do.Here’s a business story prompt.Consider an individual or a business with whom you’re connected. This could be a partnership, or you may be their client, or they may be yours. This is a little easier if it's an individual, but if it's a business, you can consider that whole business as an individual. You'll see what I mean.How would you describe their beliefs? What are their guiding principles? These may be stated or implicit. They may be stating some guiding principles, and following others. Can their true guiding principles be seen through how they conduct their business?When you consider your own guiding principles, you can see how compatible you are with them, and what might be a fruitful arrangement between you.Until next time,Happy creatingTheo This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit storypaths.substack.com/subscribe

Sign up for weekly story playshops here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/42ce63d7-a0b4-4231-88ac-0fe8861e55e3I had a dream last night, in which my sister and I were guests in the house of a Shanghai family: card-carrying supporters of the Communist Party. I felt a gulf between us, that we could not speak across, because our brief conversations always stayed within a particular scaffolding of thought. Our hosts moved only within these thought structures, these bridges crossing troubled waters that they wished never to swim in.In the dream, my sister and I had been rescued from a downed craft somewhere in the north of China. Our rescuers had brought to this clean and pleasant home, to wait for our two governments to work out our journey back to Canada. We were ragged strangers in this house, and though our thoughts could easily question the Communist Party and just about anything else, we lacked what our hosts had: belonging.At first, I wondered why our hosts wouldn't dive off their bridges into the turbulent, wondrous waters of life. Then I came to understand that these bridges gave them what they needed. Not on the deepest level, perhaps, but could I say I had met those deep needs?We had freedom of thought, my sister and I, but we would remain outsiders even when we returned home, for ours was a nation of outsiders, of individuals unwilling to fit into a universal social system. Instead of families, we had spread-out units. Instead of dependable helpers and dependable roles, we had individuals struggling to work out their roles.At least our hosts, in some sense, belonged. At least, if they stayed on those bridges, they would receive the basic support they needed.I feel the interesting question here is not, ‘Is this or that belief true?’ but rather, ‘Why do people believe what they do?’Belonging, perhaps. A sense of safety, a kinship with the world. The assurance of a good afterlife.What will they lose if they lose that belief? And what might they stand to gain if they let go of that belief?Now, personally, I reckon that reality doesn't depend on our beliefs. If trees are sentient beings, they don't depend on my belief to become so. If gods are real, they don't need me to believe them into reality.But here's another way to look at belief. If a fir tree is a sentient being, in fact, then my belief that it is so may open the channel between us, so that I can perceive the fir tree in a deeper way. If I believe this fir tree is just wood, that channel may shut.The same goes for myself and other humans. If I hold the belief that this man across from me came to his decisions for good reasons, I'm open to hearing him. Those reasons may be mentally rational, or they could be more deeply rational: from within his emotions and psyche. Either way, my belief in the worth of his reasons keeps the channel between us open.And so this brings us to another way to look at beliefs: as a web of openings and closings surrounding us. The openings allow parts of reality in, and the closings keep parts out. By adjusting these beliefs, our experience of reality changes.By adjusting our beliefs, our experience of reality changes.Many character arcs track changes in this web of belief. A character may be hold racist views, with no channel open for the humanity of certain other humans. But by rubbing shoulders with such humans, a part of our character's web that was closed now opens, letting in sunlight bounced off this other human.Or, as the story progresses, an opening may close. This might be a tragedy, as events transpire to turn friends against each other as old prejudices cinch in to obscure their vision.Yet a closing need not be a tragedy; a closing could be a character's protector. Picture a mother and her child. The child was born a girl, but isn't so sure that's who she is inside. The mother is intent on fitting her child into the same gender role that she was put into, so much so that she becomes abusive to her child. The child was born open to her mother, believing her to be a source of love and support, but gradually, this opening closes. When the child is old enough, they pull away, believing their mother to be small-minded and cruel to the core.Well, the mother may not be cruel to the core, but this closing protects the child from further harm, and allows them to get some distance, to find some people who understand and support them. This closing, this belief that the mother is inherently bad, allows the child to step away and heal. Later, that belief may change and open, allowing the child to see their mother's own trauma, which formed her own belief web, her own shifting pattern of openings and closings. But in the meantime, the child has some space to heal.Now, in this exploration of belief, I feel us reaching the limits of this web analogy. There are either holes or webbing. Open or closed. There is no part-way, no translucent parts, and no varied colors.But belief is not just openness or closeness to reality. A fuller way to look at it might be this: beliefs are the stories that we tell about reality.Beliefs are the stories we tell ourselves.They are filters through which we see the world. They are prisms through which sunlight passes into our eyes.We see the world through stories. What is a tree? A person? Wood? An ancestor? Is the earth feminine, masculine, neither, both? Kind, cruel, or indifferent?What stories are your characters looking through? What stories are you looking through?And so, instead of a web surrounding a character, instead of an orb with simple openings and closings, imagine, if you will, a constantly shifting dance of stained-glass panels. Each panel is a belief, each angle of that glass an angle through which the character can see the world, each color within that prism the emotional tone of that belief.Picture a woman sitting in her living room. She sees a neighbor outside throwing a ball to his son. A red prism in her mind says this man is a bad father. A blue prism, another angle of her mind, reflects this man's fatherhood as another way of expressing his love for his son. A green angle of this prism reflects how a man can love his child in the same way that she herself loves her own child. A yellow angle of the prism tells her that this man is one of the good people in the world, a violet angle reflects on how she can come to love the man and his son, can appreciate their laughter, can open herself to feeling the joy between them, and all these colors twirl and twist as she leans back to peer at the neighbor and his son through a new angle, a new prism.As the character’s beliefs dance and twirl within her, the colors change. Openness becomes closeness. Green becomes red. Yellow softens to blue.Beliefs are fluid.There is a dance of belief that happens within each of us, and within each of our characters.Picture, if you will, a story in which a character opens themselves to a new belief. See them close off to an old belief. See them close off to the belief that they can never be loved, and open to the belief that they can. See them dance, twirl, and spin through all the colors and shades of the rainbow.Now, you might think this is a recipe for moral relativism, but it’s a call to see the world through the eyes of others, in all its infinite shades and hues. To see that even when someone acts in a way we find reprehensible, that person is likely dancing through their own prism of beliefs. Understanding their dance of belief can help us navigate the complex terrains of human behavior.And this, my friends, brings us to the power of stories, the power to shape beliefs, the power to challenge and transform beliefs. Stories are vehicles for empathy. They are journeys into the hearts and minds of characters who may be vastly different from ourselves. They invite us to step into someone else's gumboots, to see the world through their bifocals, to move our bones with their dance of belief.In doing so, stories have the power to expand our own prisms, to deepen our understanding of the human experience, and other experiences. So, let us tell stories that illuminate the dance of belief, that explore the complexity of consciousness, that challenge and transform the filters through which we see the world. Let us tell stories that open hearts and minds, that weave connections across diverse perspectives, and that celebrate the beautiful, intricate dance of belief that shapes the tapestry of our shared reality.Thank you for joining me on this exploration of the power of fictional and real faiths, the dance of belief.If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with others who might find it valuable. And if you're interested in joining the weekly story gatherings where we play with the prompts from these episodes, do sign up for the premium membership for just 5$/month. It’s quite a deal. Until next time, keep weaving your stories, keep exploring the dance of belief, and keep shaping the tapestry of our shared reality.Happy storytelling. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit storypaths.substack.com/subscribe

In this enlightening talk, Sarah Kerr, PhD, a sacred deathcare practitioner and death doula, dives into the transformative power of viewing death not as an end, but as a crossing over. She discusses the impact of differing worldviews on the dying process and how animistic cosmology offers a more enriching perspective. Sarah highlights the importance of rituals in aiding transitions and channeling communal energy. Listeners will find inspiration in her insights on trust, connection, and the role of death doulas in cultural change and healing.