Note: I just published a podcast around this subject: you can listen on Fountain or Spotify!
Dearest Creative Friends,
I'm aware that the title of this post might not translate so well in all the cultures of the world, so will add a contextualising note here; 'telling stories' is a potent phrase of my childhood in a wee village on a Scottish island: it relates to lies, exaggerating, drama, catastrophising. It is an accusation, a judgement, a blaming... whereas, telling our story might refer to an actual, more honest narration, portrayal, expression of what is going on, has happened, or will unfold. I make this caveat, to create a polemic in the discourse, which I hope will be useful to the point I wish to illustrate. At the same time, I'm aware that this is also a form of telling stories: bringing drama into words, and making something more black-and-white than it needs to be!
Story-telling has become controvertial, drama-filled, and distorted in the last century or so, before which - at least in my own interpretation - stories were stories: fairy tales were one thing, distinct from news stories (it appeared at the time), celebrity and rich people were documented at the ends of their lives rather than surveilled day and night, and our own sense of our purpose and trajectory were written for us. How much has changed. Even as a child, when I got occasional immersions in TV and modern magazines, it was clear that - though we were being punished at home and school for 'telling stories', culture was attepting to wash over us with a veneer of glossy, titillating fiction, that was similar to the sweeties and fizzy pop we were being exposed to in the village shop. It was becoming clearer too, that telling tales was rewarded with protection from adults, or even prizes at school, whereas the Truth was becoming a more hazy, hidden reality that sat below everyday life.
I sense that this might have been similar for many folks, who have grown up in the cult-ure of the modern 'western' world, where everything has been adjusted before it gets to us; sugar added, contrast turned up, waxed and jabbed, traits embellished, merits enhanced. And not just our food! It would appear, if we don't super-pro-actively opt out, turn away, that all which is pure and raw will be made less so, under the filter of 'norm'alisation.
This can only happen if we're already invested deeply in following a story rather than living our own, or in writing a story for reward/ attention/ accolade, rather than for the need to express it with the force of it naturally welling up from source - out into the collective conscious, where it is needed. Most of us now are way down the rabbit hole and invested in fable, rather than fact. And those of us who have been telling the truth all this time - the creatives, the thinkers, whistleblowers and lone wolves; we are censored and relegated to the decentralised edges of human attention - avoided in the street and not invited to parties any more.
So what value has telling our story, if no-one is listening, or can hear it? What value has Art. any more, if the fiction is louder and is projected onto the canvas - stopping the will of the maker from emanating fully? What purpose is there in our uniqueness and biodiversity, our magic and the gloriously inimitable lens through which we see-feel-know the world, if the world's senses are so over-stimulated that they literally cannot digest a single grain of truth?
Not to get all biblical about it, but we plant seeds. We keep painting and writing. We find the tools of expression, and we make original Art. We find even one other being on the planet, and we speak openly and freely to them. We develop our story organically and slowly, over a lifetime, and we perhaps save it as a legacy, for times when there might be more attention-span in the collective imaginal realm.
Whether or not to write/ paint/ sing, etc. one's story should never be in question: the force of it alone should be welling up and coming out, unstoppable. But who has that kind of vitality, sureness of being and flow any more? The major part of our beingness - frankly - is numb, dampened down, shamed into inaction, static and state-controlled. The majority are lapping up AI-constructed images and movies, injesting buckets of propaganda daily, and are wholly resistant to a wider view. Original creators have been elbowed out as cheaper versions of their Art. are sold in shabby-chic shops and mega-warehouses for home decor, or online via the biggest, most corrupted, slave-driving corporations in existence.
How do we tell a real story, amongst all that? The simple answer is, we don't; we are not 'amongst all that', and a real story - by default - cannot exist within a fabric of falsity: it needs its own sacred space, a protected dimension, uncontaminated by 'all that'. In the same way that a natural funghi requires a super-specific microclimate, and a particularlissimo moment where elements collaborate to call the fruiting body up from the mycellium - we need a safe house, a writing chamber, an undisturbed workspace and thinking-feeling-knowing space. We need an uncluttered aura, and perhaps even a secret notebook: we need time, space, emptiness, to fully tell our story into. Just that; the sacred vessel of that which is not full, distracting and overstimulated. Quiet mornings before the collective conscious is aroused into its mechanical, relentless forwards-progress. Natural silence; ambient sounds, to accompany the symbiotic outpouring of our narrative. Wholeness and not separation, to let the thing well up that Is - not a fragment or an anecdote, but something whole and wholly Real - the transcribing of our holistic imprint on Reality.
It might not be an epic novel or a set of scrolls that will be used as future scripture for the masses. It might be one sentence, honestly expressed. A page, openly and spontaneously handwritten in the first light and dawn chorus. If it is truly part of us, our story will fit into the fabric of the world, and it will not matter if cult-ure ignores it. The magic of our words will flow outwards nevertheless, into the wider world, and they will be heard, witnessed, by Creation.
From the perspective of an entrained mind, the concept of a Co-Creative Living Cosmos is literally alien: relegated to 'otherworldly', the wider reality and our deeper sentience of it is taboo. Occulted. Hidden behind flustered denials and emotional rebuttals-without-evidence. Locked away in the 'sub'conscious and the numbed fleshbonebloodnerves. However; the mastery of one's craft, day on day, season on season, year upon year, has a might and a vitality, a capacity to navigate and strategise, that can break through almost all barriers. Collectively, our body of work also has exponential power to penetrate and transform, to activate. Again, to be hierarchical or religious about this, but the power of a true story, honestly told, really can change the world. It won't change it in the blockbuster, viral influencer, celebrity way: it will change it like rain wears away a mountain and a glen, and the way waves carve out new shorelines. It will touch the core of people and it will be passed around, like a tattered note-filled over-loved paperback, from hand to hand - from heartmind to heartmind - with such intention and embodied enthusiasm, that the next woman or man picking it up will be inspired to know it.
There's such a vast difference between 'telling stories' and birthing a work of Art. that is a genuine Gift to the World. I am optimistic that eventually, folks will get bored with the commercialised, the formatted, the less-truth-full 'truth'. Once one has seen a million CGI films, and heard a million hours of gossip/ propoganda, surely they will be tired of it? Maybe after a few generation, like where we are now, of being jibjabbed and dulled down and conformised and quelled, the grass will start pushing up through the tar-macadam. Either way, there will always be Truth, being written and spoken, and this Truth will always find ears and eyes that are hungry for it.
Note: I have been recording a spoken book, a non-written story, of how I came to my magical Italian Arthouse - on a mostly non-existent budget, and surmounting myriad challenges internally and externally: how it was to immerse myself in a random, semi-abandoned medieval quarter and the rural culture of south Italy - and the explosion of house-hunting that our TV show seeded... How everything blew up in drama and controversy... and then settled down beautifully, into La Vita Agrodolce - and then, eventually, how it all healed into the thriving natural life I now Am Living... This story will be being published on my Patreon and the Hive blockchain.
