Birthing A New Story

A myth is defined as a traditional story that aims at answering life’s overarching questions, such as the creation of the world, the mysteries of death, and the eternal return of life. And now, as our world turns more digital, I wonder - what new stories do we want to give birth to about humanity's next evolution?

I arrived at Baker's Creek campground on Sunday for the four shields of human wholeness training. The cycle of our true nature:

The Four Shields demonstrates that our lives move with the seasonal cycles and directions found in the natural world, and incorporate all aspects of our being: body, psyche, mind, and spirit towards wholeness and interconnection.???

Sitting in our first council gathering, the intention circle, I wondered - What is my intention? What am I here for? What am I going to say?

Thankfully the man to my left picked up the talking stick to go first, which meant I was going to be the last to go as the talking stick moved clockwise around the circle.

At first, I felt the relief of not going first, with no pressure on “what to say” right now. But then, after an hour or so, I began to feel the anxiety of going last. Why do I have to be last? I thought to myself. I like being in the middle. It is easy to hide in the middle because you can hide or get lost in the excitement around the edges.

Then I hear in my head “It’s time for you to live on the edge, step out of being safe hiding in the herd”. That voice tells me that I am to start living my life on the edge, that birth/death door of possibilities. Even if it doesn’t feel safe... there’s risk when there is so much attention on you... but the edge is the only place you can also feel fully alive!

Fuck!

For 3 hours I sat listening to other people's stories, feeling in my bones the sadness and grief of how hard it can be to bridge the gap between our expectations of our culture and the wild yearning in our soul’s calling.

Then it became my turn. What do I say?

But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even introduce myself. I just dropped to my hands and knees – running my fingers through the dirt. I couldn’t speak. I was begging Mother to help me, but no words. All I could “hear” was my mind racing through each person’s stories and my desire to join them in a manner of saying “I’m like you... I belong here with you”

But no words came.

In my mind, I recalled all the people who talked about their degrees and education and I wanted to share mine, to join them in the confusion of modern education’s inability to truly prepare someone for our world’s needs. But no words came.

The woman with a depressed, suicidal son. I wanted to share the story of my son who walked out on me Christmas Eve to commit suicide – and how hopeless I felt. Worse than hopeless, I felt myself as the cause of his life... and possibly his death. But no words came.

Or the queer person who shared the horrors of not fitting in the cultural checkbox of male or female, and my wanting to join their stories with my child’s experience of growing up in a culture of increasing discrimination and victimization. But no words came.

My capacity to feel now is so deep that I can feel in my bones their experiences of living a life denied of connection. I can feel the agony, grief, and anguish of not living fully human because we’ve been domesticated into a box of who we should be, how we should act, and what we should do.

Where do we go to fully belong, how do we rewild our human nature, and what do we need to do to re-root ourselves into the grounded nature of belonging and connection in our culture?

My body just wanted me to feel, to feel it all. That's what it means to be human. A sacred vessel that feels, contracts, and expands with life like the in-breath and out-breath of the universe flowing through me.

I can feel everyone’s eyes staring at me. ?

In my mind, I continue to hear all the stories of our world – and they are loud, noisy, and commanding my attention.

I drop to the ground to listen for her words, desperate to hear anything. But instead, I can only feel my heart beating as she is asking me to “talk” in a different way – not with words, but with my eyes – to see the person fully, not just react with words.

As she continues to render me incapable of speaking, she begins teaching me how to feel the stories of our world. To feel the need to join, to feel the need to connect in grief or accomplishments, whatever it is doesn’t matter - just to feel the need to speak and instead, drop into my heart and just feel.

That is the new language – feeling and seeing – our words have little value without these.

But it is so hard to feel – my mind and my words let me escape feeling the pain and suffering in our world.

“These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.” - Rumi

I ask once again – Whom am I being remembered to be?

Just then a dragonfly flies in front of me, I hear her reminding me of my last vision quest, a time of fasting out on the land 2 years ago, when she sat with me and I heard her call me Dreamweaver. She told me that I was to weave our stories to remember our collective dream of love.

This is who I am being remembered to be.

Storytelling is not just an expression of art or a form of entertainment for humans, it has been a science of living and instructions on how to live for mankind for hundreds of thousands of years. No one knows for sure when, where, or how it all began, but what we do know is that storytelling is one of the many things that defines and binds our humanity. Humans are perhaps the only animals that create and tell stories; storytelling and our obsession with myths are a dominant characteristic of every culture throughout time.

To be human is to have a story to tell – Isak Dinesen

As we move through our lives, we seek out those stories that provide meaning and shared experiences from which we can learn. When we bring our stories to life they become a part of a collective story. We live in a myth and we myth ourselves into our continually evolving human story of who we are, individually and collectively.

You see, stories aren’t just about entertainment and teaching future generations, it is our lineage from the dawn of time. And like a fire, our stories need to be kept alive – fostered, and flamed by every generation as they add their log to the proverbial fire of life.

But in the modern world we have made our stories, like our life, linear. The trouble with linear stories is that they have a beginning and an ending... and so everything dies at the end. The dilemma with this is that stories are our culture, stories are the fabric of our lives, individually and collectively. ?

Losing our story is an existential risk for us.

We aren't a human becoming human. We are humans remembering to feel our humanity... and to remember our capacity for love.

We gathered back in council once again and I asked to speak first this time. As I begin sharing my story from the day earlier, I become acutely aware that my body is once again feeling the pain of the world that I couldn't speak to a day earlier.

Dropping to my knees once again, I am now grasping the earth like a feral animal digging for food - when in truth I am barely hanging on. Then, I begin sobbing uncontrollably as I stare into each person’s eyes. This ache in my heart feels deep and ancestral... as if I am weeping for all our lost stories.

At some point, I catch my breath enough to stop crying, sit up, and begin to sing:

I can feel my heartbeat

Beating to the rhythm of the freedom song,

When I say yes to the beat in me, I can send my spirit free.

When I say yes to the beat in me, I can send my stories free.

I can feel my heartbeat

Beating to the rhythm of the freedom song,

When I say yes to the beat in you, I can let your light shine through.

When I say yes to the beat in you, I can let your life shine through.

What I realize is that for me, technologies that might extend a human's capabilities such as brain-computer interfaces, exoskeletons, genetic engineering, nano & biotechnology, or the plethora of other new inventions are not existential threats to humanity, at least not in and of themselves.

What is a threat to humanity are the stories we tell ourselves around our fears of being replaced or even eliminated by these emerging technologies, rather than being open to how they may increase our ability to bring about new, regenerative cultures in the future.

That existential risk of losing our story I mentioned above is real. Our humanity is not defined by our minds, our bodies, or our position in the world. Those have evolved and adapted for hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer.

Our story of who we are is that of our hearts - of our capacity for love. And our existential threat lies not in our fears of technology, but in our lost capacity to feel our hearts beat.