Stories About Stories

Unconscious. Subconscious. Pre-conscious. Shadowed consciousness. Altered consciousness. Just look at all the ways we can not be conscious. To get at this, there are a lot of methods to approach what we know - but don’t...

Meaning. Purpose. Passion. Impact. These are the story elements we all want. They are what makes the story of our lives worthwhile. More and more, though, I’ve noticed most want them in a drug-store greeting card way. A...

Risk is defined, quite simply, as the possibility of something bad happening. An exposure to danger. A threat. Sounds doomed from the start, doesn’t it? Sure, bad things can and do happen. Very bad things. Worse things...

Science describes energy as the ability to do stuff. Move stuff. Change stuff. Transform stuff. Heat. Light. Motion. Gravity pulls down. Steam engines chug-chug forward. There is potential, or stored, energy. But also...

Home is not a place. It’s a story. A feeling. A sense of arrival. A need met. A recognition. A resting. A safety. A knowing. A Mecca of the heart. A satisfaction of the soul. To be honest, I’ve been trying to write...

As a fiction writer, we must know what our characters want. As a non-fiction writer, we must know what our audience wants. As the master storyteller of our life, we must know what we want. Let me be clear, the me of...

One of the first courses I taught was called The Second Half Of The Mountain. It alternated between lessons on daily life as it related to Shamanism, Taoism, and Alchemy. When one path failed to help, one of the others...

Storytellers play god with their stories. They bless and they curse. They create and destroy. They let people die, or live, maybe healthy, maybe maimed. It’s all up to the story’s author. There are a few safeguards...

Land has a story. As does sky. And sea. But land, especially, for this is where we make our homes, find our people, raise our children and in many cultures, bury our dead. The land is the soil our stories grow from and...

Travel changes us, or at least it should. To see others living out a different story from our own, in ways astonishingly foreign to us, is to grow. Lately, there has been a lot of buzz about privilege, and who has it...

We hear a lot about self-esteem and self-image. We have entire sections of the bookstore devoted to self-help. We may uproot our lives to go “find ourselves.” Theoretically, our “self” is that part of us that tells us...

Once upon a time. Past tense, future tense, present tense. (So tense!) Our stories about the mysteries of life may require us to think in a way that transcends time—but that is also a reference to time. The timeless in...

When it comes to stories, there is one skill that—with no exaggeration—will make or break our lives. This skill is a choice that shows up every day, in every interaction, and through everything we create. When the...

Not all stories are created equal. Rather, not all stories hold equal weight in our lives. I have long explained this through the metaphor of a very, very expensive cake. Imagine you have a roommate and you have just...

Imagine a box. A story box. Everything in your life fits in this story box, and as time passes, some things fall out, while new things are put in. The new shapes the memories of the old so that a sense of incongruence...