Volume XXXV – Story and Soul

Dear Dream Tending and Imagination Community,

Recently I had yet another occasion to share dream as story and offer story as dream. I discovered yet again that when I am not in such a hurry to interpret or analyze, both story and dream stir the wellsprings of soul. The innate genius that informs both arises from the soul’s desire to be known and told.

Dreams and story ask to be written, or better, spoken. In the telling, we feel connected to psyche’s presence in our life. When open to what comes forward in the telling, rather than in the reciting, we become animated with what lives between and around the lines. We discover what, as Marion Woodman offers, “is at the heart of life.” Storytelling and dream sharing in community awakens both our soul’s yearning and, too, our community’s longing for deep belonging. Together, let’s support one another in telling the stories that are moving through our lives, as beautiful, challenging, and revealing as they are.

Exercise:

• Identify an experience moving through your life, either a remembrance from the past or circumstances of the present time.
• Using a kind of “automatic writing” (no need for this to be “perfect” prose), write out a few paragraphs describing your experience.
• Read aloud what you have written and underline what captivates your curiosity, not what seems to fit a scripted narrative.
• Place the underlined passages/sentences on the page, but not necessarily in the order in which they were first recorded. Let each find their own place in the arrangement.
• Now read aloud what has been orchestrated. Like a jazz musician, allow for riffs of what comes alive between lines to be told.
• Imagine what it would be like to share your emerging story with another, even in a community receptive to listening. . .

Notice how storytelling becomes soul-making.

Until next Tuesday . . .

Warmly,

Steve