Well met, fellow wanderer, I welcome your company, here at this riverside resting spot, with willows budding, moisture and pollen swirling in the air, and the sun arcing overhead. I must say, those are some fine tools you’re carrying in your pack. I’m curious how you learned to use them, and to hear of work that you’ve done. I’d like to know which paths brought you here, so I can get a sense of who you are. I wish to hear of your journey. Ahem. I was just speaking in story, but I’ll say an...

Watch this episode Dougie’s Pacific Northwest Coast Tour Dougie’s website: https://storyconnection.org Myth as Medicine course. Dougie’s podcast Instagram Comment on this episode You’re in for a treat. Today I get into all the good things with traditional Scottish storyteller Dougie Mackay. He’s a skilled storyteller deeply rooted in the rich heritage of Scottish folklore, who works with nature connection and inter-cultural exchange. Here’s some of what we get into: The Scottish Cèilidh,...

Book one-on-one story sessions here Read this as an article, and share your thoughts here Here’s a greate way to conceive stages of creative work. I learned this from a friend who used them in the hospitality industry, but they’re applicable in any project. Consider three layers: 1) Big picture thinking. 2) Big muscle moving. 3) Detailing. Let’s Say You’re Opening a Restaurant The big picture involves choices of menu, location, audience. The big muscle stage is finding a location, sourcing...

Links:Laura Burns' family constellation course.Isaac Fosl-Van Wyke's music.Welcome to Story Paths. Why stories? Because they help us imagine together, for one reason. They help us see possible pasts, possible futures. Welcome welcome, welcome. Today is a special issue. The audio version has music, so do have a listen. I’ll also share an amazing course that a friend and mentor of mine is putting on. Let's start with the music. I recently traveled southward to Kentucky to visit a dear friend....

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 appear between generations, between children and adolescents, adolescents and adults, adults and...

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 King said (in 1963 from the Birmingham jail) in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a...

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 either watch the videos online, or download them to your own computer. Buying these is a great way...

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 of our lives, this seems to make little difference to the way we think about ourselves in...

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 subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit storypaths.substack.com/subscribe

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 vocational work? How would you consider succession, and who are you inheriting understandings...

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 the coming of pilgrims. Various creatures make this journey to bring him their death-poems:...

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 feet, the land is familiar: the plants, the smell of it. But your eye follows a particular path,...

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 expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid, limp. You might as well live...

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 colors the way they see the world and the shapes they see through it, and even which parts they...

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 thought. Our hosts moved only within these thought structures, these bridges crossing troubled...

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 world as full of living beings, human and other than human, in physical bodies and in other states....

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 being here today. It could be the history of women obtaining the right to vote. So already we see...

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 exercises into those difficult, stifled places, helping people unlock their hearts. I've spoken with a...

(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 of self. Perhaps you’re on your own journey into ancestry. I am of the many beings who have walked...

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 creatures came to make their home there, and they endured through hot and cold spells, and then for a...

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 relations with indigenous people, there’s groundwork to be laid: a reckoning with history, both...

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 Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele-Keanaaina, we explore the lessons from migrating monarch butterflies. Together, we...

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 people, deeply connected to the river and its inhabitants, waged a prolonged battle against this...

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 years ago, falling into a descent after my father's death. My journey paused as I took a spiritual...