Storyteller's Diary: An Old Friend, Part 1

Story Paths

Here's the link to the article with pictures and prompts: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/9d6551a9-bd4d-48dc-b50c-1b33337d19c9

An Old Friend Part I: Crossing a River

Welcome to the Story Paths newsletter and podcast. This is a Storyteller’s diary edition.

I met an old friend of my father last night. As a teenager, he was also my friend, and a mentor.

We met and spoke in the lounge of a hotel where he was staying, helping with a charity event for a couple of days. His name is Wayne, and he lives in the badlands of Drumheller. He's in his seventies now, still spry, sharp and well-spoken. His hearing is going, so he passed me a thin microphone connected to his hearing aid, which I hung around my neck so it was close to my mouth, and my voice. A clever device.

He and my father had been in a men's group for many years, and when I was a teenager, I had been in that men's group too. It was good to be among older men talking as real as they could, and supporting one another as best as as we could. To gather around a fire in a city park and challenge each other to be real and accountable, to go into the wilderness and try our fumbling best to connect with the land in a ceremonial way. Perhaps that’s how culture reweaves. By trying.

Sitting there in the lounge of the hotel, twenty unspoken years flowed between us. We saw each other from opposite banks of this river.

We began crossing toward an island in the center by speaking first not of what had happened after we last met, but of what was happening now. He was there helping with a charity event at the hotel, as a runner of bingo chips. It was in support of helping addiction, and he acknowledged the irony of a gambling fundraiser raising money for addiction. I was staying in the city with my sister, who dropped me off and briefly met Wayne as well. I'm staying in her tent trailer, as the house is crowded,. It’s getting cold to be out there, but we just got the propane heat going.

This was a level of detail we couldn't hope to get into for two decades worth of moments. But the words were ropes that we tossed across to each other. We staked these ropes in the ground so we could begin to cross toward the island in the center.

He asked me what was important to me now, what I'm creating.

I replied with a story from my life. When I was at the Ada’itsx (Fairy Creek) land defence camp on the West Coast, I spent some time on the front lines, with the national police on one side and the defenders of the forest on the other. A soon to be indigenous elder named Chiyokten was drumming and leading songs, keeping us enlivened and inspirited, as he often did. He paused sometimes to call across to the police, challenging them to step into integrity with the Earth, for their children and grandchildren.

Knowing as I did that he had been at many such actions throughout the continent—trying to stop the logging, mining, pipelines and other invasions of indigenous territory; and knowing that most of his efforts had been overpowered by military force—I asked him a question.

I asked him, how do you stay strong enough to do this?

He spoke of a fire that he saw: a warm, smouldering fire nourishing all with its heat. As he spoke, I saw the fire glowing there between our feet, beneath the pebbles and pine needles of the forest.

“That world is already there,” he said. “I’m feeding it wood to bring us closer. Some call this manifestation. It's true. It's all going to s**t around us. But I feed that fire. And that's what gives me strength.”

And so, there in a hotel lobby, I passed this recollection on my father's old friend.

“For me,” I said, “most things are in confusion. So I'm giving wood to what feels real and substantial. I want to help the people who are living into a better world, one on the far side of colonialism and extraction from this planet. Much of my contribution is in stories. As I see it, we humans make sense of the world in patterns of stories: events and people woven together into cohesive shapes. And perhaps this story-weaving tendency is not some isolated human thing, but is rather intrinsic to the cosmos who created us. Stories of who I am, who my people are. Of our relationship to other people, to animals, to hills filled with trees. These stories cast us in the roles of competitors, or kin, or both. When we learn to speak our own stories in simple and clear ways, we will see how they are framing our experience like stained-glass windows, filtering the incoming sunlight into particular colours and shapes. That sunlight of reality comes through the windows of our stories. And in this way, we come to understand the world, and we can learn to melt and remold these stained-glass windows to better perceive what is beyond them.”

I’m called to this work so we can perceive reality in different and helpful ways. We might sidle over and look through another stained-glass window, and another and another. And in this way, looking through different stories from different people, we might get a fuller sense of what this world is, and who we are.

I'm called to this work, and this is why I'm stepping out of my door and offering this to you, my readers, my neighbors in this place and time. May it be helpful for you in your story-seeing and story-forming.

In a couple weeks I'll share more of this conversation with Wayne, my friend and mentor. I shared with him how the death of my father led me into an underworld descent,. This descent was aborted by a seeking for spirit, and continued some twenty years later. I’ll tell you this as I told him, who did his best to support me in the grief-fueled commencement of that descent, along with the other men surrounding me at that time.

I'll tell you of why they failed, and how life is now completing this arc.

And how about you? Which fire are you feeling? What is the look and feel of the life you're living into—both for yourself and for the world? How do you perceive that better world from where you are now? And which fuel-food do you feed that fire?

You might choose a personal future fire, a vocational one, or both.

Another prompt: consider a time when you encountered a viewpoint very different from your own. Another shade and texture of stained glass that you hadn't experienced before. How did your perspective shift? What was your experience of this shift? Was there discomfort, a sense of revelation? Both.. more?

I'd love it if you share your thoughts in the comments.

Until next time.Theo

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