Stories Make The World Go Round

The world is alive with stories.

I feel a huge part of collective liberation is examining stories - Who is writing them? Who is editing and shaping, erasing, controlling, timing, codifying, circulating, affirming, profiting, hiding, and setting stories on fire? 

Story work is the process of researching, gathering and sharing fuller stories. It is a practice of getting to know a person, place or thing. Story work is an act of recovering stories and bringing those to the surface that have been buried, ignored, erased, distorted over time and purposely misrepresented. When we do Story work, we shine a light on false, made up and manipulated stories, break story trances and balance who is telling stories (i.e. whose voice is being heard the most). What I am calling Story work isn’t new; people have been doing community work around narratives, perception, language, consciousness and memory for a very long time. 

This essay is the first in a series of essays I am writing as part of my Climate Justice Fellowship. This first essay is titled “Stories Make the World Go Round” or maybe it should be “Stories Run the World”. According to Dictionary.com, a story is “a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse or instruct the hearer or reader, a tale”. I found this on the internet after a quick Google search, but I want to be clear that people and cultures around the world have their own definitions of what a story is, and their own experiences of how stories express themselves in their lives and communities.  

Stories are everywhere; from who created the bowl you are eating from, to who built the subway system, to how a seed got from one place to another, to why climate change is happening. We wake up to stories on the news, we scroll through stories on social media, we are exposed to a plethora of stories from libraries, listen to stories in music, hear stories through the grapevine in our families, and we share stories over tea or a beer. We listen to our ancestors, children, elders and Griots, and we visit a tree or a river to hear stories. 

We all have stories to tell.  

In Chimamanda Ngozi’ Adichie’s TEDX Talk “The danger of a single story” she shares her experiences encountering single stories projected onto her as an African woman studying in the so called United States, and herself navigating the world with single stories about others. 

There are many tools, practices and maps a person can take on to navigate society, and Adichie’s presentation inspires me to navigate life developing a baseline understanding that 1) stories have many dimensions and I may be exposed to, hear or read one or a few of those dimensions 2) single stories live in the world, and can be predominately documented and shared in their singularity and 3) in many cases, just like it takes time to get to know a person, Story work is getting to know a story as best we can. 

In the next couple of decades and beyond, I imagine people supporting each other in story work, in pointing out missing pieces to each other, in saying, "here is another element or dimension of that story", or “you know what I think will add to the fullness of this story . . . is xyz". I imagine and hope that many of the buried, erased, false, distorted and manipulated stories that are circulating are healed, and that when people hear a story, an optional practice of asking questions can accompany that story. For example:

Is this a single story?

Is this story true? How do I know it's true?

Why is it that everytime I see a person or a group of people, this story is attached to them, and no other narratives are associated with this person or group? 

In an unspoken way, is this story telling me that no other possibilities exist to do or be xyz?

Who is writing, telling, sharing and affirming this story? 

What stories do I have about myself? About others? About other groups of people?

To be honest, when I think of Republicans I think about Trump, red states, racism, white supremacists and climate deniers. I can’t say I know any Republicans in my life, so it was refreshing to hear “Making Republicans Environmentalists Again” on “How to Save a Planet”,  a podcast with marine biologist, policy strategist and writer, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and journalist, Alex Blumberg. My point in writing this is to say as a Climate Justice Fellow I carry incomplete stories, whether they are about Republicans or my knowledge of the fossil fuel economy. Listening to this episode also makes me more curious about the element of perspective or angle in storytelling, and how it can open up space for more inquiry, exploration and understanding. I’m interested in this more than any pressure to know everything. I told a good friend that I believe learning is sacred, and that another way of looking at storywork is that it can create spaces for learning. This act of sharing stories, and gaining knowledge and skills can be really transformative. Have many of us not learned all our lives at home, school, in churches and different social groups, which informs our worldviews and lives in many ways? I wonder how people, organizations and communities can create spaces for different learners to hear the stories and complexities of climate change and how people are responding. Many folks are already doing this work. I am just reiterating the necessity of creating not only learning spaces, but accessible learning spaces, and I dare say spaces that are actually open to learning --- that means people who lack knowledge about a particular topic are truly welcomed. Imagine, from a learning space a story is born, and from the story a reality makes its way through the birth canal into our personal and collective lives. 

I ask you: how can we (co) create learning spaces that honor the sacredness of learning? How can we include more storytelling within our families, friendships, workplaces, places of worship and businesses? 

The world is so alive with stories.

Imagine if we navigated the world with the technology or practice of Perspective; being able to see out of or sense many different lenses and observing from different angles to come in contact with fuller pictures and fuller stories that otherwise wouldn’t even be known or considered? Sometimes I imagine a science fiction scenario where I have internal and external sensors that help me quickly scan a story to see if it is false and what is missing. I imagine wearing an object on my wrist similar to a watch, where holographic images burst forth, along with a voice that tells me all about the story emanating from this object. Without my sensors, or if the government (in this scenario) invests a lot of time and money in controlling these sensors, or making sure I don’t have these sensors, I may be accepting all sorts of stories. Anybody want to help me finish this story?

We are still in the beginning of this essay and we arrive at complexity; the complexity or vastness of history, learning and knowing. I recently attended “Sensing Memory” a workshop hosted by the Weeksville Heritage Center and I asked the folks in the Community Talk about how they ground themselves when there is so much information and so much history to know. And their response was to advise me to ground in myself first, in my stories and my community. I want to pass this on, that maybe a starting point for you in your own Story work is grounding in your own personal stories, your interests (water happens to be something I deeply want to continue grounding in), your (chosen) family, community and cultural stories. And still, we find more complexity here, but it is some kind of compass nonetheless. I also believe that in addition to grounding in stories, we really truly understand our ability to write or conjure up stories. There are so many word alchemists and storytellers around the world who give us examples of the creative power and medicine of stories.