03 Nov 2024 14 min read

Give Me Stories

Through working with my mom over the Samhain/her birthday season, I was transported back to a simpler, albeit more materially-difficult time, when it was just her, Alexa (my sister), and me. Yeah, we lived child support payment to child support payment, taking advantage of whatever Aldi was providing on deep discount, but we had library cards and paid for a dial-up internet connection that my mom used as her conduit to various new age philosophies that she engaged with. My mom used that connection to share her poetry with folx she knew on the web and pass down interesting tidbits of philosophy that were central to her emerging animist worldview.

You see, my mom was drenched in story. She wrote and illustrated little story books for our classes growing up. Right and wrong was never relayed as simple maxims. They were taught via fables of folx that had err’d and learned the hard way. The most famous maxim she taught me via these stories was how to keep my **** in my pants. Yes, I kid you not, dear reader. My mom used her brothers’ promiscuous nature when they were teens in her stories to me to show me why I didn’t want to get “jiggy” with the girls at too young an age. By the time I moved outta the house at 18, the story was as well worn as a saddlebag that has seen years of use on a horse. I don’t even think that I had to listen to each permutation she went through back in the day, because I knew well what she was getting at. The basic gist of the story remained the same. If I wanted to end up working on the line at Jeep with my uncles, then I could be as sexually active as I wanted. Contrarily, if I wanted to make something out of myself, I would keep my **** in my pants and not be like her brothers. Crassness and social class bias aside (I would have been very lucky to work on the line with my uncles at Jeep), this example brings to life how, for her, telling a story was the best way to teach and shape her children.

As a PhD-trained sociologist who writes technical reports for a living, I don’t often get to write stories in this classical sense. I am paid to present the facts, and if the facts point to a problem, identify possible solutions. These sorts of reports are a far cry from the storybook worlds, built of demonstrating right and wrong, that I encountered in the stories my mom shared with me as a youth. Writing these reports pays the bills, but it doesn’t pull on my heart strings like my recollections of my mom’s stories do. My reports help inform bureaucratic decision-making, but they don’t keep me awake at night like reading my friend’s stories or the writing of someone who I hold in high esteem.

I want to overemphasize this dichotomy between story and information by drawing on my friend Sharon Arnold’s recent essay on information and story, because it really matters. I am lucky that I have fooled a bunch of very smart people whose work I respect greatly to be my friends. Yes, I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop.(hehehe I love self-deprecating dad jokes) As I was thinking on this issue of story, my friend Sharon Arnold was hive minding with me in story land and they wrote some wonderful words we can lean on to help us tell the difference between information and story. Sharon noted with flair the shortcomings of the sort of information that I create in my little cubicle:

“Information contains facts or opinions in isolation, out of context with larger circumstances, relationships, environments, or histories. What can be learned from this to change and shape our lives with what we’ve learned? This is a thing that happened. Or, This is an opinion or an idea I have. We consume. The next thing pops up. We consume. The next thing pops up. We consume. But when do we process? When do we integrate? When do we act to effect change?”

Sharon rightly notes that writing for this sort of system of bureaucratic consumption is a practice in compiling sets of information for folx to consume, without any deeper contextualization. This matters, because the issues that one can compile information on is like a never-ending stream. In the information age, we would be better served not asking questions on what to gather facts on, but listening to a good friend tell us a story that would help us interpreting all the information that is crammed into our noggins each day.

Now, when Sharon’s essay starts talking about what story is, it really takes off (Please go read their whole essay at the link above, will yah?!?). Their discussion is one of the most succinct and helpful ways to explain what story actually is and why it is the literal linchpin to all of the civilization that our species can credit for keeping us alive for millennia.

“Storytelling, on the other hand, contextualizes information to make it relational, circumstantial, inherently relevant to the human and everyone the human knows. A story is located in time, place, environment, culture, spirituality, language, and community. Stories take time to tell properly, they can't be rushed; they create space for silence, and reflection. As carriers of knowledge, wisdom, experience, and relativity storytelling requires active and meaningful participation from listeners, because they illustrate and demonstrate actions we can take towards right relationship and better ways of living and being together in the world. This relativity and relationality is why so many stories have lasted the test of thousands of years; why traditional ecological knowledge from around the world is still relevant; why global Indigenous lore, as well as European and diasporic European folklore, all contain animist wisdom about interacting with our world and the cosmos that can be understood today—even in the context of a world that has separated us from these ways of looking and seeing. Stories are an antidote to severance.”

BOOM! I am pretty sure that Sharon deserves a mic drop moment for that. The biggest pearl of wisdom that I take away from this excerpt, aside from laying a perfect foundation for explaining what story is, is how Sharon talks about how story is relational, an antidote to severance. If I read between the lines enough, I am seeing Sharon say that readers are just as important as the writers. I am seeing them tell me that the story doesn’t truly matter until the listeners carry it forward into their lives, turn it’s lessons into practical codes to live by, and pass those codes on in their own stories. This makes sense to me, dear reader. All I ever hope to accomplish in this project is have my own little pearls of wisdom I have found by living somehow make their way into your life. Our stories we all share with one another are what weave us into an interconnected web.

Yes, you are hearing me reiterate for the 9,500th time in this project that you matter. This project is nothing without you. When you contact me with a little pearl of how something I said rang true to you, it is all I need to know that my story mattered. In the same way, I honor my mom by living by the code she passed down to me. I did keep my **** in my pants and spent my time pouring over records and books. This led me to be the absolute nerd that is on this page before you that devotes himself to his weekly essay writing as if its a solemn duty. Likewise, when we truly show up for our friends stories, we are practicing a form of devotional reading that is a direct attack on the barren, information-focused form of reading that Sharon explained in their essay. If we really want to honor our friends stories, we will pour over them and try to live their wisdom in our lives. A new maxim to live by: thou shall never skim thy friend’s stories!

That is the precise language that I have been trying to find to explain why I read the same chapter of Amy and Risa’s book “New Moon Magic” almost every night for a week before moving onto the next chapter. I don’t want to just read my friend’s book. I want to devote myself to “sucking the marrow out of” the wisdom it offers, to riff on that classic quote from Dead Poet’s Society. Because I know they poured themselves into that book, I want to pour myself into it as a way to honor and truly live up to the blessing that that book is. I can think of no better gift that any person could give me than to tell me that they read something I wrote twice. Consequently, I want to pay that forward to ever writer that I have in my own web.

I should also note that I have little interest in any “objective” determinations of the “quality” of any book by people who are cosplaying as “very serious, very important people of taste.” In fact, I immediately distrust anything anyone says who is trying to convince me of why I should trust their recommendations. Likewise, I couldn’t give two gerbil’s patoots if it has appeared as a “very important book” on someone’s “must read list,” No, it’s enough for me that Amy and Risa’s writing shimmers in the way that all words strung together into deep truths do for me. It’s enough for me that Risa and Amy and our coven sent me healing wishes after I crashed my bike. It’s enough for me that we all have chosen to be woven together in this time we share together in this dimension on this hurtling rock. That is all enough reason for me to treat the book as a sacred tract. I need to start this practice with my friend’s self-published work FOR REAL. Think about how special of a jolt that would be the web you cohabit with you chosen kin to see them that clearly when no one else is seeing them in their work in our backward capitalist society that attributes worth to the published.

Last week, I talked about about how much use I found in Risa and Amy’s discussion of the needle and the knife in their first chapter: New Moon in Aries. Based on that storytelling, I made sure to keep my knife on my belt loop all this last week, a week marked by work to develop boundary magic for my home. This week I want to talk briefly about a section in their second chapter on the New Moon in Taurus. Specifically, I want to be brief, because I want to save time for myself on this saturn’s day to craft, cook, and be without devoting my whole day to the imaginarium that I create on this page. There is nothing wrong with cultivating imagination in a culture that seeks to pummel you into accepting the lowered horizons of our current moment, but I told myself that I would honor Amy and Risa’s chapter on the new moon in Taurus, a chapter where “we turn our attention to our bodies…how we move through the world and also how the world moves through us,” by leaving space for my body to also have its day (just as I leave space on Saturday for my mind to have its say).1

Not surprisingly, the excerpt that shimmered for me in Risa and Amy’s New Moon in Taurus chapter is precisely what led me down this pathway to talking about the importance of living out stories as a listener:

This is the perfect way to describe one of the key beliefs that my mom taught me. This is why I started this chapter with even more thoughts that I add to the altar space that I maintain for her in this digital space. My mom was very serious about telling me I am here to do important things (we shape the world) and I will be aided along my journey as I interact with others (we listen to what comes of bouncing of others). This was her distillation of the new age, self-help lessons offered in James Redfield’s “The Celestine Prophecy.” Yet, everyone should be so lucky to have someone to believe in them that much and tell them that the other people they meet on their journey will be key to their growth. We would be fools to not try to keep these bits of wisdom at the forefront of our minds as we enter each new day.

To try and live out what Risa and Amy shared and my mom taught me, I want to offer up two questions based on this wisdom that I want to try and bring to the forefront of my mind as I am entering each new day:

First, what can I do today to make the world in alignment with my values?
Second, what did I learn or what actions did I take based on the chance meetings that occurred while I was out in the world?

Reflecting on these questions each day allows me to honors my mom’s memory and do the sort of devotional reading that tries to make my reading of New Moon Magic into a practice for each week. The second question is one that I have been really trying to keep attuned to. My mom and I both believed that there are no coincidences and that one can read their lives like a sacred text for clues on what action to take next or what wisdom to take from a situation. Just like Amy and Risa said, “Witches listen,” so I have been trying to listen closer to life as it passes by. I have been trying to take action to change how I show up in the world in alignment with what I am hearing is needed.

The most notable thing I have been working on is heeding the numerous calls for ensuring I have adequate boundaries set up around my home. In my own personal oracle deck readings and the readings I have gotten from my kin, I have been guided to focus on the boundaries I can put up. Again, as I pulled three cards for what to focus on this Samhain season on all hallow’s eve from Tonja Reichley’s Way of the Wild Oracle deck, I saw the Blackberry “Boundaries” card staring back at me for the umpteen time this year. This work has taken on a life of its own. From weaving boundary weavings for my front and back doors, purchasing blackberry branches, and making little herbal amulets of rue and angelica to put over my windows, I am out here living out what the magical thread of life has told me to do. Am I little nervous about why I have been told to up my boundary protection? Abso-flocking-lutely, but I trust that whatever it is I can handle if I keep my head on right by honoring my code.

All this to say, please vote. You matter. Your vote matters. The horror-show of national politics aside. In Denver, we voted on removing a ban on gay marriage from the state constitution, making abortion health care services a state constitutional right, a tax to fund public health services at Denver Health, a tax for an affordable health care fund, among other things. These are all insane positives amongst a sea of difficulty that is hard to see unless you are looking for them. It all may seem pointless to be engaged, but as Amy and Risa said above, “how we interact with the world shapes it.” I am glad my vote will be counted for these items that are near and dear to my values and kinfolk. OKAY! I have to go roast some tomatillos, make my angelica and rue herb bundles for the windows, and weave! Happy living in a body day to you! Thanks for being here. AGAIN, I am nothing without your attention, care, and concern for these stories I tell.

Photo Essay

I have been too darn busy at work and got sick this week to boot, so I am behind on my photos. The only shot I got out in the world this week was when I went to pick up my new Steve Roach “Structures From Silence” LP stickers from Artist Proof. It was some chalk art for the “Scum of the Earth Church,” which I thought was one of them new-fangled psychedelic churches that people have developed in response to voters decriminalizing the use of psychedelics in Colorado in 2022 (again another fine reason to look at all the items you may be voting on down ballot). I was all excited to look it up to see if I was right. When I got home, I was bummed to find out that it was just another of the many non-denominational christian churches in the Denver metro area jockeying to bring people back into the fold. I am not sending any shade their way for doing their thing. I am just a beardo, polytheistic wizard, so not interested.

Interestingly, I did a bunch of altar work before I started writing today, including burning some rosemary, lighting my candles, refreshing the pink roses on each of my altars, refreshing my rose water basins, and sharing some coffee with my mom. I usually never get the OK to take a picture of my altars. Today though, I had my polaroid camera, and it was a definite yes when I approached my altars. So, I scanned in the polaroid snaps to share with y’all. Hell, I even used my flash to capture the photo, which I never do. I usually always rely on natural light.

Well, that’s actually not entirely true. I took two of the best photos of juju that I have ever gotten this week. Uncharacteristically, I took a photo of juju at night, while she was in the middle of her treat-or-treat feasting with my flash on and it came out literally perfect. I am not sharing that or the picture from her class parade though. Those pictures will just remain like so many albums that will never be available on the internet, only on CD, cassette, or LP. Lily and I want juju to consent to her visage being on the internet. Maybe that is overkill, but it just feels right to us for her to be able to have the final say over how visible she will be on the net, especially given our hurtling toward an uncertain A I future. So I get to just hoard this little treasures of the memories we have of this age, just like I do with all my old photo albums now.

Ok, final note, I am going to be sending out the first batch of Steve Roach stickers in the mail today. They are just wee little 3 inch circular stickers printed by one of the only union print shops in the front range (Artist Proof Collective) that you can slap on a water bottle, your car, or anywhere you want to remind people of “Structures from Silence.” I am giving them away for free, because it makes me happy to send mail and gift people things. If you want one and insist on economic exchange, send some money to a mutual aid or hunger relief org and I will send you a free sticker for being so rad. Seriously, I got a mountain of stamps saved and ordered 200+stickers to get to the minimum. So get in here hosses! Take advantage of me being an anti-capitalist luddite You can even listen to the record for the first time today, decide you think its amazing, and then ask me to send you a sticker. Just shoot me a message in the comments below or on IG to make arrangements for sending me your address. AND, yes, I am a super fan of this record. I own three copies! I am a lost cause!