Stories: A Reflection about Connection.
My life is filled with stories. There’s the story of my old job, the story of my family, the story of my sister. I could spend all day telling stories, some about real people and some about imagined drama. We are all storytellers, whether or not we’re writers, painters, or speakers. Sometimes our favorite stories are woven silently in the mind.
In my life I’ve told stories of judgement and shame as I’ve told stories of victory and achievement. Stories of realization, epiphany, and enlightenment glitter along my long story of Yoga. Stories of joy, loss, and longing are the peaks and valleys of my love story. Stories of scars and thickened skin wrinkle around my story of maturation.
Can an existence be told in a story?
The word, powerful as it is in it’s creation, is a double-edged sword. As it’s used to convey meaning it is also untrue. The word is only a tool, like a signpost, it is not the thing itself. Our consciousness resides in a body that lives in a universe that is incomprehensible to us. How can we craft a story of truth without appropriate grammar, vocabulary, syntax? Perhaps art is a language of truth in its tendency to elicit feeling. But then, the art is only an arrow, just as the feeling that arises is another, more intimate arrow, pointing to the same thing - a truth which cannot be articulated.
Then, why all the stories?
Stories are used to connect, to co-create, to bind us to each other through wild seas.
Stories take us back to our roots.
They are the beacon of light in darkness.
They are the path to our higher self.
They are all these things and they can also be our weight, our baggage, and our shadows.
They can be old skeletons long buried, lying beneath our home.
In every story that exists, there is only ever the same story, and that is the story of creation. First, there was space, the empty field of consciousness, the observer. Then, there was the idea, the thought, the word, the matter, that took form within that conscious space. The word split into the many, dividing and dividing, expanding, mirror reflecting mirror until the entire universe was filled with tiny mirrors, all reflecting each other.
We, the observer, look into these mirrors and create the stories of our lives, but we are only ever looking at the same thing, only ever telling the same story: the story of creation, the story of life.
We are always singing life’s song.
About David:
I met Kula's Coby and Ananda on a surf trip to Troncones. They held my first cacao ceremony, but not my last. I returned to my job in San Francisco, but later after quitting, I'd meet back up with them in Peru for more ceremony. I help the Kula market their life-changing trainings and retreats - it's a perfect way to promote openness in the world and follow my internal compass towards the nomadic life.