wanted: storytellers
Jul. 10th, 2006 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelidonA comment I made to a series of excellent articles by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
marys_daughter which can be found here.
We need some new stories, a whole lot of them, in fact. Can you tell them, spread them, teach them, sing them, live them? Some of you already are. The world is changing, and the stories must, too. You don't need to figure out the whole meaning of life to have something valuable to say. All you need to do is find a story that makes sense to you, that you are passionate about, and then tell it, and live it. You are the storyteller, you are the meaning-maker, you are the weaver of reality. All of you.
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Yes, and yes yes yes!. To your whole series of articles. We need not just new stories, but new stories (and re-claimed old ones) that genuinely resonate with people, right now, in this world at this time, that genuinely inspire, that help people make sense of their lives.
There will always be a few people who respond positively to being harrangued or browbeaten. And a few more who will want to "do the right thing," even if that requires major, inconvenient changes to their lives. And a much larger number that simply want to get by, live in peace, enjoy living, and feel, perhaps, that there is some kind of meaningful reason for that life. Some people will be motivated by appeal to guilt, but many more by greed. Some will hunger and perhaps even fight for "justice" in the abstract, but many more for food, for security, for safety, in concrete and tangible ways, here and now. This is human nature. The key, it seems to me, is to find the stories that actually help make people's lives more meaningful, without perpetuating those self-destructive patterns which do not serve us well as a people, as a planet. It's really quite simple...what is the meaning/meanings of life? ;>
And the answer is large and small. Part of it is a shared laugh, a cold beer or glass of sweet water, and good times with friends and family. And part of it is a way to address the eternal questions -- mortality, love, connection, contention, conflict and strife, our relationships to each other and the world around us, and perhaps some sense that our lives have at least some small grains of significance to them.
But there's a crisis. Many of the stories, old, and new, no longer satisfy -- in part because they never really did -- plastic spiritual food that fills without nourishing, that looks good but doesn't sustain. And part of the problem is that the world is once again changing, in part due to our living on it according to stories that no longer are remotely true: the ever-expanding frontier, for one. There is no new "west" to move into, to exploit, to offer freedom and opportunity to some, while taking it from others.
The easy, "free" space, and the easy, almost-free energy is rapidly coming to an end, and we can no longer escape from the consequences of our lives and our choices by simply moving elsewhere, moving on, picking and consuming the low-hanging fruit.. The low-hanging fruit is gone, and now, something akin to locusts, we're sitting here and consuming every leaf, bud and twig, and the life of the whole damn tree is in jeopardy, and us along with it. Entropy is coming to claim its due.
We need new stories, ones which are true, and useful, and which appeal to elements of basic human nature, even as they allow us to grow and change, and survive in a world that is going to be getting harder and harder for all of us.
I don't know what those stories are, but I know we need them.
marys_daughter which can be found here. We need some new stories, a whole lot of them, in fact. Can you tell them, spread them, teach them, sing them, live them? Some of you already are. The world is changing, and the stories must, too. You don't need to figure out the whole meaning of life to have something valuable to say. All you need to do is find a story that makes sense to you, that you are passionate about, and then tell it, and live it. You are the storyteller, you are the meaning-maker, you are the weaver of reality. All of you.
-------
Yes, and yes yes yes!. To your whole series of articles. We need not just new stories, but new stories (and re-claimed old ones) that genuinely resonate with people, right now, in this world at this time, that genuinely inspire, that help people make sense of their lives.
There will always be a few people who respond positively to being harrangued or browbeaten. And a few more who will want to "do the right thing," even if that requires major, inconvenient changes to their lives. And a much larger number that simply want to get by, live in peace, enjoy living, and feel, perhaps, that there is some kind of meaningful reason for that life. Some people will be motivated by appeal to guilt, but many more by greed. Some will hunger and perhaps even fight for "justice" in the abstract, but many more for food, for security, for safety, in concrete and tangible ways, here and now. This is human nature. The key, it seems to me, is to find the stories that actually help make people's lives more meaningful, without perpetuating those self-destructive patterns which do not serve us well as a people, as a planet. It's really quite simple...what is the meaning/meanings of life? ;>
And the answer is large and small. Part of it is a shared laugh, a cold beer or glass of sweet water, and good times with friends and family. And part of it is a way to address the eternal questions -- mortality, love, connection, contention, conflict and strife, our relationships to each other and the world around us, and perhaps some sense that our lives have at least some small grains of significance to them.
But there's a crisis. Many of the stories, old, and new, no longer satisfy -- in part because they never really did -- plastic spiritual food that fills without nourishing, that looks good but doesn't sustain. And part of the problem is that the world is once again changing, in part due to our living on it according to stories that no longer are remotely true: the ever-expanding frontier, for one. There is no new "west" to move into, to exploit, to offer freedom and opportunity to some, while taking it from others.
The easy, "free" space, and the easy, almost-free energy is rapidly coming to an end, and we can no longer escape from the consequences of our lives and our choices by simply moving elsewhere, moving on, picking and consuming the low-hanging fruit.. The low-hanging fruit is gone, and now, something akin to locusts, we're sitting here and consuming every leaf, bud and twig, and the life of the whole damn tree is in jeopardy, and us along with it. Entropy is coming to claim its due.
We need new stories, ones which are true, and useful, and which appeal to elements of basic human nature, even as they allow us to grow and change, and survive in a world that is going to be getting harder and harder for all of us.
I don't know what those stories are, but I know we need them.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-07-10 07:05 pm (UTC)(And, hey, speaking of stories -- wasn't there some class you and I were talking about way back in the dark ages in the lobby of the Vortex?)
no subject
Date: 2006-07-10 08:19 pm (UTC)How 'bout we chat more on email and see what interests us, what our schedules are like, etc, and see what we can create?
no subject
Date: 2006-07-10 09:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-11 01:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-11 11:55 am (UTC)Consider that the movie "First Monday in October" (Jill Clayburgh in the Sandra Day O'Connor spot) appeared just a few months BEFORE O'Connor's appointment. Now we have the absurdly brief network play of the award-winning TV series "Commander in Chief" (Gina Davis as the first female President of the US) at the same time that both Hilary Clinton and Condoleeza Rice are receiving pundit comment about presidential possibility.
The old ones were useful, too -- in limiting and shaping us perhaps unfairly.
Students of the history of journalism report that US magazines published far more articles about the 'joys' of 'labor-saving devices' for the 'stay-home' wife in 'her' own home during 1945-1950 than during any five-year period in the 50 years prior ... and John Kenneth Galbraith, whose career as a national economist was just beginning with his appointment to the price-control boards of the early 1940s, acknowledged that this was deliberate -- a focused intentional campaign to persuade 'Rosie the Riveter' (the home-front heroine of American war-production industry) to 'go back to her kitchen' so the returning GIs could have something to do.
I see this is becoming a rant (sorry) ... what I mean to point out is that, while WE need new stories, we also need to be aware that THEY are using THEIR new stories far too effectively.
Yikes.