Story Paths

Read this as an article, and share your thoughts here Book one-on-one story sessions here Let’s open with a poem A power outage, is not an aberration. It is the old normal world poking through into the aberration of tech depending on tech depending on tech depending on the world. Wind, water, weather, creature. This wild wild world. What is it to be cut off from ancestral stories? When gaps to app...

Read this as an article and reply here Book one-on-one story sessions here Bringing Distant Ones Close A Spiritual Approach How might I connect with the water in Nigeria, Alberta, Costa Rica, Australia? How can I come to understand that this water may well come into my own body? We learn from many spiritual teachings that all beings are in interrelation with each other. We are, as Martin Luther Ki...

Watch the promo here The sales stuff: I'm offering this at an opening discount of 15 dollars. Buy it on Gum Road (free account). I'm also lowering the price on my three course bundle, which includes Story Shapes 1, and Brainstorming Story Ideas, for 30. Buy the bundle of all three courses. I'll hold that until the first week of April, then they'll go up. With these purchases, you’ll be able to eit...

Read this as an article and share your thoughts here Book one-on-one story sessions here I’ll open with a passage penned by none other than the Dalai Lama, which appears in the preface of Coming Back to Life, the Updated Guide to the Work that Reconnects, by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown. The Dalai Lama writes: Although it is increasingly evident how interdependent we are in virtually every aspect o...

For story workshops: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/06d77f86-cbe9-4c65-8486-2e723e2b33b4 It is a freestyle rhythmic meditation on borders. Because just as the stories in our minds become the stories we live, the borders in our minds become the borders we enforce. This one’s better listened to (see the audio link). In we go. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subs...

Workshop: Speak the Work you Love: Storytelling for Businesses with Soul Sign up for weekly story workshops here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/f3dbaab7-c9bf-463b-ad5d-bfc51651ccfe How might it feel to expand your psychic footprint back in time, to go back seven generations, with all the changes? How might it feel to go forward into the future? How would thinking in deep time change your vocat...

Here's a quick little episode to share a new story. That has been swirling into creation, a pattern in the center of a sandstorm, with flows of wind coming in from different directions. This story is in the form of a virtual comic. Read a preview here. Read the full comic here. And what is this story about? Hear me, for I whisper strange wonders. In a circular stone temple, a muskrat monk awaits t...

Sign up for weekly story playshops here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/f15d43a9-4e89-47d1-93e0-a40c0d03d546 There's a spectrum, with boring on one side and weird on the other. Let’s consider story beginnings, and tinker with the ratio between familiar and strange. Here's a way to consider beginnings. Here's a meditation. You are standing within grasslands stretching in every direction. By your...

Weekly story playshops here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/86acb049-61b0-4311-8dce-d0d833d6b76e If I had my life over again, I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectan...

Sign up for weekly story workshops here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/a599bdd3-d828-4b67-a036-f5f816bd56e1 In part one of our exploration of belief, we began by considering a system of beliefs as a system of scaffolding, crisscrossing above the waters of life. Across watery mystery. We finished by figuring that belief might be more like a liquid stain glass orb surrounding each person, that c...

Sign up for weekly story playshops here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/42ce63d7-a0b4-4231-88ac-0fe8861e55e3 I had a dream last night, in which my sister and I were guests in the house of a Shanghai family: card-carrying supporters of the Communist Party. I felt a gulf between us, that we could not speak across, because our brief conversations always stayed within a particular scaffolding of th...

Sign up for weekly story playshops here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/45d29452-ac79-4c0d-8d77-6991f90fbb8a Cosmology is a story of how all this came to be, which leads into what is real, or, in the words of our guest today, ‘what is allowed to be real.’ The world-view of a person and culture determines how they live in this world, and also the manner in which they die. Sarah Kerr sees the wor...

For weekly story playshops go on here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/9bdd1000-4d0d-4c15-ba88-a5ae692cea40 I'm writing this and reading this while I'm sitting by the ocean, and it feels a funny thing to talk about history here because it is, of course, such a human idea. Personal history is the story of my past, of my life. It could be the history of my ancestors, their journeys that led to me...

Learn more about Tamara Strijack’s offerings here. SIgn up for weekly playshops here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/acc68ea7-3583-4165-b74a-096dff09b74b This is the latest conversation in our Play Matters series. I've spoken with a board game designer about the theory of game design, and by extension, play-space design. I've spoken with a man who goes into prisons, who brings creative exercise...

(Art by Jessie White, Seeds of Spells ) Sign up for story workshops here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/b3e7ccb6-d735-4187-a4b6-221f1a6a0882 I've recently returned from an ancestry workshop, which was deeply moving. Combined with other ancestry work, and discussions about ancestry that have gone on in my life lately, this is opening up a channel for a deeper history of myself, a deeper sense o...

Which real-life story does this remind you of? Comments here (paid subscribers): https://storypaths.substack.com/p/67d05587-82ae-4533-bb51-fd1c1041e9c6 Termites of the garden. The first dawn in the garden was simple but intense. Intensely hot. And next came the torrential rain. Massive plants sprouted up, followed by great beasts lurching about the land. Gradually, many kinds and sizes of creature...

Pulxaneeks website, including upcoming events. I’m glad and grateful to be presenting the following guest. Her vocation is as an Indigenous relations consultant, which is to say she helps settler folks like myself learn to be in good relations with the original peoples of this land. This involves far more than introducing people and smoothing communications. For folks like myself to be in good rel...

Sign up for story workshops like this on Substack for just $5/month. Workshops are one hour weekly on Thursdays at 10-11 PST. https://storypaths.substack.com/p/7233d334-6564-4d50-bf60-2a022a34140c This episode captures the essence of our first story workshop, a weekly gathering exclusively available to our premium subscribers for just $5 per month. Joined by my friend Loke Keihanaikukauakahihulihe...

Write your guess on Substack here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/36b06c3f-ca37-4095-aa09-810f2e61f58d Can you guess which real-life story this is? A river once flowed freely, a source of abundant fish for the people, until a monstrous presence established its lair at the headwaters. This creature voraciously consumed the fish and discharged bolts of lightning that struck distant places. The pe...

Here's the associated article, with pictures. You can add your comments here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/9e7267ab-518f-4599-beff-0530e80208f6 Welcome to the Story Paths newsletter and podcast. This is a Storyteller’s diary edition. As I tell the tale of this one life, may it help you to tell your tales. If you missed the first parts, I spoke about why I abandoned my town and family twenty y...

Become a paid subscriber for $5 and get access to 4 workshops per month! https://storypaths.substack.com/ Welcome. This writing comes to you from the shore of the ocean in the Salish Sea. There's a woodpecker who's going at it on a Gary Oak just nearby, seeking some bugs. There are seagulls landing and strutting about on a rock outcropping, and I see a human walking back from that rock outcropping...

Which real-life story does this remind you of? Comments here (paid subscribers): https://storypaths.substack.com/p/18522076-40a8-4569-80b0-71ec20b9699c There is a boring plywood door, in a boring plywood room. Many people make their lives in this room, but if they were to open that door, then on the other side, they would find dozens more doors. Only these are not of plywood. They are of oak, rowa...

Reply to the story prompts in this episode here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/59ab0f86-2c8f-4168-bf08-7ec3eb672e75 (Available for paid Substack subscribers) You can learn more about Jennifer’s work here. Is ceremony a grave affair for adults, or can it be something playful which includes children? Or perhaps all of the above? Playful with adults, serious with children, and a mix of all these...

Share your stories on the newsletter here: https://storypaths.substack.com/ Welcome to the Story Path newsletter and podcast, a Story Elements Edition. Journeys: Part six: The Return. In the previous parts of this exploration of journeys, in story and in life, we looked at different possible destinations, the amazing journeys of different creatures, and considered how these journeys might help us...

Write your guess on Substack here: https://storypaths.substack.com/p/90569a1b-7787-4636-a3b4-27a969f6b513 Can you guess which real-life story this is? In the playground, two boys began to fight. It got intense, so the second boy ran off to perch at the top of a slide. It was there that a third boy found him and asked, "Do you know that you don't have to be close to fight?" "What?" asked the second...