Dreaming the World

A too warm late February day. Another storm. this one rain, is promised for tonight and tomorrow. The snow from our last storm has melted. leaving increasingly green grass.

I have been fascinated by story for as long as I can remember. Being older, I can now, sometimes, hold many views of story simultaneously, or as close to that as one can get.

There are so many ways to view story! One can understand stories as having an existence spanning many human life spans, an arc in which our individual identities are part of a vast unfolding. For Jung stories lived through us as archetypes, which sometimes took over our lives, usually to ill effect. For the late ecologist, Hutchinson, all life is enacting a vast ecological drama on an even more grand geological stage.

From a shamanic point of view we are each expressions of a helix-like spiraling intersection of fate and choice, moved forward by a long line of ancestors, each with their own needs and desires. On the other end are beings awaiting birth who draw us onward by fueling desire and hope. In the middle lies us, with our own multitude of internal voices, points of view, and stories.

Then there is the shamanic idea that we are each living a multitude of lives simultaneously, our consciousness spread through the universe as a set of radiant points, each connected to a lifetime. Sometimes, when we slow down and focus on the moment, we may catch a glimpse of other selves and other contexts.

Of course, we are not alone in being storied stories. One can understand all evolving systems as having consciousness and living out story. If we set aside our imagined need to be unique and special (we are already), we may see ourselves in context, sharing a world with countless others, each of whom is in conscious and storied. In that moment, we are no longer alone and the fate of all others takes on immense importance, and we see the actions of Fate woven through all lives.

One can imagine a single lifetime as an arc from conception to death, as a wild dance of self and other carried out in a field of holy desire: the ongoing lives of our living companions, the ancestors, and those calling to be born shaping a life’s trajectory. Perhaps death is nothing more than a gateway to more stories.

What we call “history” may simply be the repeating patterns of story, patterns that wield immense power to shape our individual and collective lives. Surely we are in one of those patterns now.