The Myth Weavers

Special episode with just Willem Larsen and Jason Godesky, chatting about rewilding, stories and story games: what they have to do with each other, and why The Myth Weavers exist.

 

 The Myth Weavers, episode 5 [56:56m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (48)

Every relationship tells a story, and every story traces a relationship. We regularly mistake the most common bundles of relationships for “objects,” with their “essence” and “nature,” but even our own physics tells us that this simply indulges a linguistic illusion, a projection of our noun-rich language, itself an epiphenomenon of the literacy that trains us to see every word as an object on the page, and directs us to look for the smallest components, the elements and atoms that build up our world like the letters of the alphabet build up our thoughts—a quest the first Greek writers embarked upon that has led us, in our own time, to quantum physics and the slowly dawning realization that all those nouns make up the punchline of a 5,000 year long practical joke. We don’t live in a universe of objects, but a universe of relationships. Stories give us life. Stories tell everything the universe has in it.

Most of us have a dysfunctional relationship with story these days, though. We get our stories from story professionals. Writers, authors, TV executives, directors, movie producers, they know how to make story. We don’t participate with story, we don’t wrestle with story and chase story and embrace story. We just sit back and consume story, along with a bag of potato chips and an extra large bottle of pop.

I rewild, and a big part of that means going into counseling with story. I prefer ecopsychology therapy, naturally, but I want story back in my life. I want to rediscover what it means to “storyjam.” To quote my fellow weaver, Willem:

Story games, relying on each other’s support to create new stories together, to collaborate, to form story groups in the exact same way musicians form bands, and jam together. Then the issues become ones of trust, willingness to listen and respond, making each other sound good, and one-mindedness that comes from all of that. Rather than a rock band, we form a Story Band.

I want to begin moving towards the creation of our own, authentic oral traditions, something alive and real and deep, rooted in our bioregional experience, something that speaks to our experience rewilding, moving towards that grand reunion of family and land. By the same token, I know that no simple cultural appropriation can answer those needs. It has to come from us. Put like that, it becomes all too easy to fall into despair, and from despair, to simply accept that we can’t do it, that we’ll just have to rely on books and comics and TV and movies for our story, because we can’t do this ourselves. We need to leave it to the professionals.

But we also have the tools to resuscitate home-grown story: story games. Most people just play them because they make for a good time (which they do!). But if Coyote ever taught us anything, he taught us that play makes for some serious work. You learn how to live by playing, and story tells you everything life has to offer. From our dysfunctional relationship with story, we dismiss these things as light and frivolous, but I don’t think I could find anything more serious. Story games provide the perfect tool to find our own oral traditions.

Unfortunately, some of us have had a little trouble finding like-minded souls from our own bioregion, so we banded together online to try to push this forward as much as we could, a remedial story band on the way to rehabilitating our relationship with story. We meet online to exercise our storytelling muscles and experiment with how we can use story games to begin our own, feral oral traditions. We record our experiments, and put them out there for others to listen to, whether you enjoy them as entertainment or mine them for inspiration, or anything in between.

Mostly, though, we get together as a support group of broken-hearted poets, writing love songs to our long-lost darling, and begging she’ll come back into our lives. Please, Story, baby, give us another chance!