Masterpiece. The passion of storytelling.

From as young as I can remember, I have always found a connection from reading stories. I'd lose myself completely in a book, heck I used to get in trouble for it in my primary school days. There was no sophistication in my taste whatsoever and some might argue not much has changed. Whilst I can and do appreciate literary form and tradition, like many boundaries and stylised spoliations of literature and language, I have little desire to dwell there and even less, any unction to conform and create from this place. In my early years, it was Enid Blyton and Judy Blume, Tolkien, King and Koontz. My taste in literature never refined, redeemed only by a smattering of the classics, but proudly to this day remains as eclectic as my music taste, a canopy of misfits.

Since having children and discovering their innate love for immersing themselves in storytime, I've been reminded of the mastery we can acquire for everyday living when we lend ourselves to a story. The heart and imagination of a child is a poignant reminder of our need for marvelling and revelling in the delight and mystery of a story. Adult living and responsibility can crowd out so much of this yearning for connection and yet we have the stories of our days dwelling within us, begging to be seen, to be known, to be heard. So rarely told except in fleeting passing moments of conversation, whole traditions of retelling and passing on stories have been lost to the modernity of our days.

“...the stories I have held on to are the stories that my infant self still relates to, by aspiration or by reality spent. It is the stories that lend themselves to possibility, often against all odds. It's what I've needed to hold on to life through the dark days.”

For a long time, it was mostly fiction, or near-fiction, the kind of pseudo-truths that reflected a realistic exposition into humanity. As the years have galloped by, the stories I have held on to are the stories that my infant self still relates to, by aspiration or by reality spent. It is the stories that lend themselves to possibility, often against all odds. It's what I've needed to hold on to life through the dark days. I realise now, dwelling hopefully right in the mid-way of my earth-days, it's the story threads that we all need, individual, collective, nuanced, unique and diverse, every story counts.

Unlike my early tastes, these stories are living breathing stories, the stories of humankind, the ones that draw breath from our flesh, that are scored off by our relationship successes and losses, the stories that live on in the lands we dwell in and compel us to write songs, dance and recite poems of the peoples.

Explications of humanity

Since these early beginnings, I have become both an observer and a collector of stories. When I'm feeling ballsy I extend my passion and compassion for humanity to carving out opportunity in the social media forum to be a storyteller of these times. Writing explications of humanity and speaking of the incursions to both our internal land, our corporal bodies and our umbilicus attachment to the physical lands that we hail from. Experiencing, exploring and recounting the healing profusion that abiding in nature offers to our beings has become my most recent expression of this. It is a pathway I traverse in pursuit of my own healing but it is too about holding space for all those in search of belonging, connection, reunification, peace and healing.

Observing this inextricably interwoven exchange between nature and situation, by virtue of our habitation within our surroundings, holds all the resources we need. There is no storytelling without paying attention to the reverberation of our existence from time gone by and time not yet eventualised. So the story continues, long after our attendance and in the many moments that preceded our entry into the world.

In reading and writing over the years, I have learned a great deal about meaningfully presencing myself in the moments we exist in. Leaning in intentionally to the season we are presented with and contending with life as it unfolds, rather than pausing for the wisdoms of hindsight. Some of the most brutal seasons of life have offered up a plethora of rich realisations of self and other, that would otherwise have remained undiscovered. With welcoming the wisdoms and creative intellect of great literary contributors, the authors and purveyors of our humanity, I too feel the significance of adding our evolving stories into the annals of our times. It is complex and yet spectacular to take stock of this rich tapestry that we belong to, knowing only that we can not create it independently. Our story is one of interdependency. Each part and person involved in our lives is needed in order for the majesty of it all to hold form and afford the witness the full spectrum of its significance.

Mary Oliver has been for so many, a compelling voice, a lioness of literature and poetry in the realm of living synergistically, with the gore and glory of nature. She, among many magnificent poets, was able to capture how nature calls us up and out and repetitiously offers its warnings, wisdoms and ways to our sum and substance. Affording us too a pathway by which we can find connection, meaning and belonging in it all.

(Read by: Mary Oliver Animation: Rita Cruz)

We all have a story

It is not okay to share my passion and fascination for stories of the peoples without expressing and exposing how utterly broken and threadbare our collective tapestry is. Great swathes of pieces missing because many voices are either silenced or absent. So many life accounts missing (present and past) that we can't make sense of the masterpiece because there is no mastery without all the pieces.

This is not a debate or reference for pro-life persuasions, nor is it solely to add my voice to the Black Lives Matters discussions that are necessary for every single one of us to participate in. It is overwhelming and devastating to embrace how devoid of diversity our tapestry is when white privilege is defining our understanding of belonging.

Whitewashing may seem less overt in this present day and yet the gatekeepers of stories untold are still defining which stories carry meaning and whether they are worthy of inclusion as if they hold an omnipotent authority to determine the existence of difference.

More prevalent is the de-humanising way stories not akin 'should' be presented and told and even experienced by the audience, just in case you are under any illusion that storytelling isn't still overtly dominated by appeasing white conscience. Why haven't we pursued a path of resolution out of this disturbing and pervasive reality already? We really haven't moved that far ahead have we? If you think we have, just pause for a moment and contemplate what evidence you are relying on to conclude that.

The honest reality of storytelling is that we are often only interested in those stories that edify ourselves, the stories that are most like us, the ones that we can relate to on some level, or at the very least speak of something that we long to express of ourselves or aspire to. We ignore the stories that at first glance appear most 'unlike us' because if we allowed ourselves to really lean in and listen, absorbing these stories can and do 'internally' expose ignorance, values and beliefs that we are ashamed to acknowledge. We distance, dismiss and absent ourselves from these stories and/or the existence of the story-holder, to avoid the cost and effort it takes to disentangle ourselves from the pain in the prose. The prose is real though and the prose is the process by which we become present with one another, the path by which we take honest stock of our beliefs. It is the prose by which we heal, hold accountability and honour one another.

No more 'I love you'

When I reflect upon my career within the Criminal Justice System I realise it was, to some extent, an awakening. Perhaps better described as an affirmation that the niggling pieces that make whole, and had been disbanded in my own story, were not so far removed, if not parallel at times, to some of the stories I bore witness to. I carry with me the knowledge that it is often only a fine line of grace that determines which side of the legal line we exist upon. It continues to be an ever-present reminder of how easy it can become to form an idea of a person around acceptability and validity based on a persons presentation of behaviours and choices. A judgement of character that exists beyond the perceived or actual crime and all too commonly without grasping or having empathy for why a person may have arrived at a point in their lives to be making choices and adopting behaviours that societally and culturally may appear reprehensible.

It is so easy to lean on the systems that we partner with in order for our notions of justice and order to contain our experiences of chaos and disorder. So often we do so though without sincerely questioning whether the system is really up to the task and capable of achieving and delivering justice for all. Certainly, the systems themselves are declarative sorters in their own right that reinforce a "no more I love you" out-casting.

Beyond the taboo of discussing and questioning how our own individual beliefs and values around acceptability exist, is a landscape that is made more readily accessible through the art of storytelling, a fundamental for our human ness, that promises to feed and resolve one of our most basic human needs. I am talking about our hard-wired yearning for belonging.

"A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don't function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick."

― Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and The Courage to Stand Alone

Yet despite our increased awareness of our own need for togetherness and our seeming solution-orientated approaches to pursuing connection and belonging, the ubiquitous rise of loneliness continues to accelerate. With the added weight of pandemic enforced lockdown measures huge swathes of us are feeling more physically, emotionally, psychologically and socially isolated than ever before.

Being distanced from physical community is almost synonymous now with the growth in digital recourse for global connectedness. The increasing polarity between opportunities to connect, through social media, virtual reality and artificially intelligent apps is countered by the upward trend in depression, anxiety disorders (especially those that limit and interfere with the capacity to engage in physical relationships) and deteriorating mental health arising from acute loneliness. Again our reliance and addiction for systems tipped to be a solution for togetherness, a space (such as this) for storytelling and hailed to deliver limitless opportunities for connection is failing us spectacularly and perpetuating our decline into sorted, separated and isolated existence. There is a story disconnect between reality and the portrayal of a life that earns likes, followers and influence.

What a dark and despairing thread to have woven into our tapestry and yet much like a micro-perspective on our own individual journeys, light begets light and shines all the brighter in the darkest days. It's when the shit hits the fan that we reach for the true true story strands that will pull us through. Be it in song, in poetry, or in the stories of another being, the one thing which has the power to draw us back to life with one another again is the power of our own authentic living testimonials. This my friend, is the gold within your own story, made up of all the struggles, losses and brutalities and sometimes only barely made palatable by the knowledge and presence of truth that your existence matters and so too the story you are living. It's not the picture perfect post or a quippy cool status update but the mundane moments, the moods and motions of living, wanting to live, finding the will to live and pursuing the fire to burn.

The coexistence of fearing same and different

The most compelling antithesis for all our loneliness is our innate drive for our socio-relational being to experience belonging. Stories help us connect to each other, they help us reconnect with our history and our present. Stories help us belong to ourselves and make sense of our connection to the lands we inhabit. They help us too to understand life itself, through the eyes of another, if we are willing to see and listen. Listening always precedes understanding. Our comprehension of one another is so easily impeded by our rush to zoom all in with our own stories. This is the juggle we all face in our need to relate, to communicate, to connect, to share our likeness, to find similitude.

Story-sharing and story-telling can be delivered in so many ways but pausing to listen and to process is a universal challenge to all of us, especially if we hope to absorb and digest and co-exist. In the face of inscrutable and prolonged disconnection our aloneness and capacity to absorb another's story is depleted by the collective grief we feel from our Covid-imposed lacuna. We've not yet embedded Covid into our collective story, it's going to take time. If we are not careful though, so profound is our own internal need for story-sharing because of our compulsion for belonging, that competing for airtime takes over and we hustle one another for our own piece to paint, often abandoning our human decency and commonality in order to win favour, popularity, agreement, belonging, position and pseudo authority over or ahead of someone else.

When societal value is apportioned to belonging and this value presides over and above meaning, our pursuit of belonging drives us to subscribe to groups of similar and the same, despite nuance and diversity existing within all of us. The subduing of our 'true-true' voice is something that Glennon Doyle eloquently and impactfully addresses in her book 'Untamed' and further still Brené references this sifting and jostling as 'sorting'.

“You are not here to waste your time deciding whether my life is true and beautiful enough for you. You are here to decide whether your life, relationships, and world are beautiful enough for you.”

― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

When I referenced earlier our reluctance to embrace stories that are different from our own, it is sometimes because another very real primal wound is poked, the lament and self-sorrow that somebody else might be living a little more freer than we are, wearing our life as we had hoped. We are blinded to the nuance of their experiences, only witnessing for that moment the cruelty of our yearning for a seemingly unreachable sameness that we thought we were destined for. No two people land in the same spot though and if they do the path that got them there is often marked by similar and different. Saluting the story that could be is an act of freedom that releases you from the should have been and enables you to acquaint yourself with the immediacy of your own life. No less a reminder really, that we weren't designed to live a homogenous existence but that it is our diversity that draws us to one another, that we are fashioned to be many; co-existing, celebrating, championing, changing and ultimately living together and benefiting from our interchangeability and our divergence.

“I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

For me, I find the solitude of being a single parent, a very personal testing ground, as I am aware many fellow single parents do. The pull of stories different to my own, the ones where there is some semblance of Happy Ever After or perhaps Making It Work Ever After, can often punch me in the gut, out of the blue. It's not that the prospect of that isn't so impossible to conceive of, although to be honest the thought of weaving in a new thread into an already finely detailed tapestry is quite a doughty thought. The truth though, is that this just isn't my story, certainly not in this season or in the foreseeable seasons ahead and yet there is so much low hanging fruit and simplicity I can enjoy from how I'm positioned right now from the opportunities available to me. It doesn't detract from the waves of grief I still feel about my story not unfolding in the way I had hoped, not for me or for my girls and so I make my peace, most days, with the tension that exists within me, that grief and celebration can and do co-exist within me.

This is what I see over and over in all our stories, so the story in me honors the story in you. It's my passion to write about this. Not a schism of emotions from the battle wounds that mar us but an absolute masterpiece, marked singularly by brutality and beauty and wholly magnificent.

Originally posted on 22nd June 2021 @SjRossWrites

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