Soul Stories Recap
July came and went and so did the Soul Stories project. It seems much of what happened occurred on an intangible level, but I’ll try to highlight some of the more apparent aspects here.
There were two parts to the project — one personal and individual, and one archetypal and collective. I learned that planning for the individual stories pretty much stopped being effective at the level of intention. Meaning, setting the intention to hold space for individual stories was effective, but beyond that — when and where and how it would happen — seemed mostly out of my control. I would more often than not being sitting solitary in the park, reading a book or something, but then walking down the street, a totally random person would engage, I would listen, and the story would flow. Like this story. A Joe Campbell quote comes to mind: “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
On the other hand, the collective part drew lots of folks, and here careful planning (to an extent :)) did come in handy. One Saturday evening about a dozen of us gathered to share the “language of the soul” — poems, songs, and myths/stories. Everyone was asked to bring at least one piece to share, one of their own or someone else’s. There were personal poems shared, archetypal songs, mythical stories, moving stories, silly stories, and a bunch in between. Lots of energy around this. Who doesn’t love a good story?
Many beautiful moments bubbled up that night, and maybe some seeds planted. Rishi captured some of those moments in his first ever video experiment:
All this got me thinking about what John O’Donahue said about “indirect pedagogy” — that to approach a deep issue too directly sometimes doesn’t work as well as a more subtle approach. That seemed to be the case with music and story night. We love a good story, especially a mytho-poetic story because it evokes our imagination and facilitates what Michael Meade calls mythical acupuncture, piercing everyone differently depending on their individual experience and longing. But are we ready to speak our own mytho-poetic stories? To what extent can we be aware of them as they unfold and we embrace them, or not?
As usual, exploring one answer leads to more questions to be lived. :)
