White Thistle, White Raven
In a meadow of wildflowers, on the back of an unnamed mountain, under a blanket of moonless sky, lay three children. Black, shimmering purple like the raven, it is the kind of sky that makes you wonder whether you peer into it, or it peers into you. Nearby, the gentle stirrings of an alpine lake.
Tiers of emerald meadows are cobbled into the mountainside, like a giant’s wandering staircase, each with its unique ochre. Green, green, green, then yellow. A pea-sized flower that colors the face of a whole mountain. All of it now black.
I douse the flames and crawl through the night into my sleeping bag. I am one of the children. I am one of the fathers. Shree-widdlee-widdlee-widdlee sings the bird, whose face we know not. The sound belongs here, to the forest, sparkling like fireworks in the silence.
I hear. I see. Visions and sounds enter my pores like molecules of oxygen, and I breathe the humus of the earth. If you wish to tell stories, listen. There are tiny instruments in the wind. Be entered.
Earlier that day we had discovered a white thistle. It attracted us, because we had nothing on our minds, little to do but admire. Thorned and rasped, a million resplendent petals, it wasn’t purple. That was all. It lacked normalcy, which was enough to smile upon.
The rain came and soaked our clothing. It poured over the V-shaped cliffs, above the tall pine under which we sheltered, and into the gentle sound of that alpine lake. Thrumming. Every moment, a place. Every color, a shape. Your smiling eyes. The air cool on our skin.
This is the rule – when you crawl into a sleeping bag beside a wet and sticky child, do not hesitate. Do not, like the unnamed birds, refrain from giving your voice to the wilderness. The mountain calls to you, as surely as it calls all her creatures. Answer.
An elixir, that simple white thistle, an herb that heals through the eyes. It is enough to present an image to my instrument, and so I grasp it like the raven, black and purple, white like thistle. The form caresses the story to life, and me, the voice of each rain drop.
We are listening. We are all waiting for the words that press the moment into eternity, like flowers placed between pages of a book. The forest speaks in tongues.
Shree-widdlee-widdlee-widdlee… Boom! Crack! The voice between your lips. A moon-colored raven. Your sleeping child. Gentle waters pace quietly at the shore, while thunderstorms await you in the night.
--
Silke and I went camping with my daughter recently. Late one night, I told a story about a white raven that somehow fit the moment. This description is a bit poetic, but it captures some of the feeling of that day. I share it not to emphasize the story, but to give voice to what storytelling is for us – what it can be for you.
It’s funny, we teach storytelling, yet it remains simple and intimate for us. We’re constantly trying to express the essence of it – so that you too can share in these simple but enormous moments – but it’s easy to get lost in the words.
We teeter on a strange fulcrum. To entice, or call out, the storyteller in others, we have to share some of the magic of storytelling. We have to BE storytellers. But that’s not really our goal, not in a public way. Storytelling is a private experience for us. It’s intimate. We’re not drawn to the stage. We’re much more alive in the canyons and mountains near our home, speaking stories into life with our families and loved ones.
We think everyone can do this, and we don’t limit it to our taste for nature. We believe that storytelling is a fundamental aspect of the creature that we are, that all humans are. We’re storytellers. There is an abundance of research documenting this scientific point of view, and we share a lot of that to help others, and ourselves, recognize that this is normal. This is what humans do. We have experiences, and we speak them into stories. Real stories. Creative stories. There’s really not a huge difference.
When you look closely at a molecule, it becomes undefinable. Even the location of a piece of matter cannot be absolutely defined. Instead, its position in space is based largely on percentages or probabilities. The laws of physics themselves are usually told through stories, through metaphor. Even mathematics is a language, a metaphor that helps us call reality into a knowable space in our minds. We’re sculpting an image, a living image, of the earth.
It’s easy to doubt this, to laugh it off. Two plus two equals four, and everyone knows it. But when you look very, very close at the world, it defies this kind of objective description. The elements of story and reality blend together quite magnificently. And the two plainly influence each other. What’s more, we find stories at the heart of everything we see and do – culture, religion, science, family, God, food, philosophy, technology, entertainment, and on and on.
Stories are the way that we think. They are one way that we think, but a very important one. And it doesn’t exactly matter whether they are “true” or not. They are how our minds represent the world that we experience. We all know stories that are plainly false, yet have had major impacts in our lives. They become real in the physical behavior of our bodies. If you think Cinderella is make-believe, you’re sort of missing the point.
Whether it is like this for all beings is unknown. But that it is like this for humans is very well established. And there’s good reason for it – groups of humans have always survived better than individuals. Something needs to be the shared glue of those groups, a bond that keeps the social fabric together. Storytelling is one of those essential adhesives, remarkably more potent than sheer force.
In his influential book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari dedicates chapter two to this very point. What, he asks, is the substantial shift we made from ape-like primates with hands and big brains to world-explorers and technology buffs? “Fiction.” It is our ability to represent the world – and misrepresent it – through image, story, and metaphor.
Harari is just the tip of the iceberg. Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal lays out the science quite well (though, of course, science is just one door into this vast subject). Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist at Princeton, gives an excellent TED Talk about the neurological impact of storytelling on human brains. Jane Goodall is an advocate for storytelling as a form of social change, because, “it’s important to reach the heart, to let people feel.” But Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories is the most comprehensive resource to date, a book that puts the whole subject in perspective.
Point is, there is a wealth of evidence that we evolved to become storytellers – because it was an efficient way for our ancestors to share information and define social relationships. And it would be perfectly fine to say that we were created this way. Evolution and creation are themselves stories – descriptions of something unknowable. And if you’ve ever experienced the conflict between them, you have tasted the very real impact that stories have on our lives. We behave in accordance with the stories that occupy our minds.
But again, we can get lost in the science, or the description. So, I’d like to bring you back to the meadow where we were camped. What’s important about that evening wasn’t the knowledge, or the content, of the story. It’s the skill. That’s what we’re trying to communicate. You have this skill, and just like walking, which is also an evolved skill that requires skeletal apparatus, neurological tissue, and the chemical synthesis of digestion – you don’t need to know that, or listen to anyone’s dissertation on the subject, to do it quite magnificently.
Silke and I live in New Mexico, and we are very much creatures of the mountains. But that’s not where storytelling starts and stops. It’s in your home too. It’s in your technology, your Sunday services, your garage, your purse, your daily commute. It’s in the food you eat, the sweet moments with your children, and the arguments too. It’s all real. It’s all fodder for story, and the beautiful witnessing we do (the observations we make) turns all of it into valuable stories and metaphors. This is the storytelling animal that Gottschall is referring to. This is the creature that you are.
And this is what’s critical, the big reveal – what’s valuable isn’t the story itself (the content), it’s the intimate connection that it brings into our lives. This is something every human at every level and niche on our planet experiences.
We want you to have the sweetness of storytelling in your life. It matters not whether you walk the same mountains as us, or tell the same stories, or even have the same values. All that matters is that you recognize the beautiful creature that you are – and engage the skill. You will never lose. You will never fail. You will just slowly weave the beautiful connection with your children, your loved ones, your community into the fabric of your environment – one story at a time.
This is the essence of what we, the authors, wish to communicate. We are delighted to share some of our stories. We recognize that it helps some people awaken to the magic of the experience. So we write. We speak. But we are always most alive in our simple stories with our own students and families, because that is the root of the skill in our species. This is where storytelling is richest for us – not on a stage or in some virtual event. We want you to feel that same magic with your loved ones, that same sweet connection, because we know that you have everything it takes. It is the gift that our ancestors gave to each one of us.
—
“As they conversed with their new companions, the Englishmen learned that to walk across the land in southern New England was to travel in time. All along this narrow, hard-packed trail were circular foot-deep holes in the ground that had been dug where 'any remarkable act' had occurred. It was each person's responsibility to maintain the holes and to inform fellow travelers of what had once happened at that particular place so that 'many things of great antiquity are fresh in memory.' Winslow and Hopkins [Mayflower Pilgrims] began to see that they were traversing a mythic land...”
- Excerpted from The Mayflower by author and historian Nathaniel Philbrick. In it, Philbrick describes how, when Europeans first landed in New England, the earth was visibly and – here’s the important part – physically filled with stories.
“There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”
- Ursula K. Le Guin
“If you meet somebody who doesn’t agree with you. There’s no point confronting them, arguing with them, pointing fingers, telling them they’re bad or stupid, or whatever. Tell them stories. I feel it’s important to reach the heart, to let people feel. Because, if you want change, people’s change from within – that’s real change. Otherwise, you may argue with them, and they may kind of concede, but they’ll be angry and they won’t really have changed. They’ll be thinking inside themselves, ‘I’m going to prove how wrong. I don’t care what she says.’ Storytelling – that’s been my way of waking people up, and reaching into the heart.”
- Jane Goodall, speaking in April 2021
*Raven image by Mark Timberlake on UnSplash