— I had spent four years teetering between the Real, the dream-, and the spirit worlds trying to explain life’s mysteries—my healing, the labyrinth, and now the bear and the raven. I no longer had any need to analyze or explain the wonders and tragedies that had embraced and buffeted me in their whirlwinds, like the storm clouds that danced across the heavens. Why would anyone want an explanation, anyway? Oleg had understood that the Real World and the Other World are the same, so he sent Misha and me into the tactile, tangible tundra to thank the transcendental spirit bird. Anytime I want to talk to Chris or need solace and support to find my own way, I can climb this mountain, or any other mountain, or go to sea in my kayak. Or I can sit by a quiet mountain stream as I had on the day of the memorial and sip some cool water from a tin cup hanging on a willow. I don’t need to be visited by a bear or a raven every time, because I’ve been honored enough to know that they have already visited me. They visited me on the day I carried Chris up the mountain to her final resting place and dusted her ashes into the storm.
— Moolynaut taught me to live inside a myth—not another person’s myth, or that of someone who lived thousands of years ago—but my own personal tapestry of Real World and Dream World, connected by magic that hovered on black outstretched wings. My first entry into myth, forty years ago, during that spring day with my dog, gave me the power and resolve to change my life. Barriers broke down and over the decades, new input rushed in, some wonderful and some scary. At one moment, a mysterious healing energy vaulted over the lowered barrier and mended my pelvis, and that changed my life again, guiding me toward new beginnings.
— A bear and a raven. Magic moments integrated with the greatest sadness, preaching acceptance. My animal friends were teaching me to heal by finding wonder within tragedy.
— “You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the World always works in circles … The sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round, like a ball … The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours … Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were.”
— We evolved to be a big-brained, social, mostly but not completely co-operative, storytelling animal. Which is where we are today. Your body is fixed in space and time; you are at work, riding the subway, washing the dishes, changing diapers, whatever. But your mind is free to roam into fairyland, or anger-land, to a promising future, or to relive that nasty confrontation with your boss two years ago. On average, each person flashes 2,000 short, self-invented daydreams through their heads every day. Most of these mini-narratives run 10 to 20 seconds before that diversion is diverted by something else – a red light in traffic, a ringing phone, a talking co-worker, a crying baby, or the realization that we should be doing what we were doing before the daydream started.
And when we are not inventing our own stories, we are entranced by the narratives that others feed us through books, the internet, TV, conversations, sermons, advertisements, politics, and any of the above all mixed together: conspiracy theories, tales of good and evil, heroes and villains, lovers and rapists, gods and devils. While stories can sometimes distract us from the present and the natural world, they also guide those aspiring to create real change through entrepreneurship. Understanding the Georgia LLC formation process can be a story in itself, illustrating a vital step towards grounding your business ideas in reality.
In 2018, the average American spent five hours a day in front of the TV, 31 minutes absorbing media on tablets, and 1 hour 39 minutes on phones. Add in radio and surfing the net, and Americans logged about 10 hours and 39 minutes each day consuming digital mythology. Intertwined with the sheer number of hours spent glued to gizmos, each person is exposed to 5,000 ads per day; that’s five per minute if we sleep eight hours. Each ad is a mini-narrative trying to convince us that we need to buy this or that to look good, feel good, smell good, attract mates, find a job, approach nirvana, stay slim, or become rich.
Eighty percent of conversations among adults are tales of other people’s lives: gossip. Dr. Nicholas Emler, professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics, argues that “swapping of juicy bits of information is fundamental to being human and separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Baboons and chimps have complex societies because individuals know a lot about each other. But because they cannot talk, they rely on direct observations and so they are limited to groups of around 50. The one thing that sets us apart is that we can talk to each other with complex syntax. We exchange social information. We form much larger and more complex societies than other animals because we effectively gossip (tell stories about one another).
Today, storytelling is so integral to our humanity that a 1-year-old toddler will create the fiction that his teddy bear is tired, put it to bed and gently tuck in the covers. At 2, a little girl will set chairs in a row to represent a car and drive her mom to school. When 3-year-old children gather to create mini-theatre, they pitch their voices differently when playing the king, the queen, the baby or the cat. Starved and half-dead, children play-acted imaginary scenes in the death camps at Auschwitz. When we grow up to become adults, we cry as the screen hero is adrift in the desert, sweat when a heroine faces the bad guy’s sword, and become aroused when the two meet and embrace, even though we know that these stories are fiction repeated by speeding electrons and photons. We also buy cosmetics when an advertising executive creates a narrative that we will be happier if we look or smell different, crave gizmos or exotic vacations when told to do so, and follow religious or political leaders who spin all sorts of mythologies about loving, hating or killing people we don’t know.
Adding to the negative, the stories in our heads form our often-damaging sense of ego, frequently create marital strife and allow us to amplify existing misery or wallow in imagined misery. Stories remove us from presence, the NOW.
In the United States, the most opulent country ever in the history of humankind, almost 750,000 people died from opioid overdoses between 1999 and 2017 – yes, because of lost jobs and whatnot, but more directly from the stories they generated in their heads about lost jobs and whatnot. Our think- too-much-know-it-all brains sure know how to spin stories that help us survive on the savannah, or that create wonder and awe, but the same brains are also quite proficient at generating confusion, anger, hatred, and misery.
