“The World Is Made of Stories” by Rev. Zenshin Florence Caplow

The limits of my language are the limits of my world. – Wittgenstein. 

In these times of uncertainty, how can we find some peace and equanimity? One powerful way is to start to see how our minds are like “storytelling machines”, and most of the time we believe the stories our minds tell us, whether those stories are true or not. The Buddhist ecophilosopher David Loy has written a book called The World Is Made of Stories.  In this service we will explore some spiritual practices to loosen up the stories that can bind us, so we can better meet and respond to these times.

Enjoy thematic music by Ellen Stapenhorst, Micha Schoepe, and Paul Dankers

Good morning from snowy Central Illinois! Yesterday I skied from my house on a lovely bluebird morning on new snow. The cross country skis I have used to belong to Tillie  – she gave them to me when I was living in Basalt because, in her 70’s she had decided she preferred downhill!

So I was thinking of her, and you all, fondly, remembering how I learned to love the snow in the winter I was there. Before living in Colorado, all I knew about snow was that it was wet white stuff that hindered getting from one place to another and made my toes very cold. You taught me a better story!

My neighbor from across the street joined me yesterday. He has lived here perhaps 10 years longer than I have and he told me there used to be storms that brough a foot or more of snow here, and I haven’t seen that at all. My neighbor is an agroecologist so even without saying anything we were both thinking about climate change and the morning seemed to get a little dimmer.

Today I want to talk about stories, and how thoroughly stories shape our lives and our possibilities, and how perhaps we could work more skillfully with the stories we take in, tell ourselves, and believe.

When I was in junior high school I had an inspired teacher, and she introduced us to an educational game called Propaganda  that I wish every American schoolchild learned to play, In it, players learn to recognize 55  propaganda techniques, used in everything from marketing to religion and politics. And when you play, you find some freedom from being taken in by Propganda – I can still remember some of the techniques I learned, and I see them used all the time. Because  propaganda is essentially story-telling, using our human propensity to story tell in order to get us to buy something or do something.

I remember wondering, as a teenager, what is it that makes us human? We learn in school that it might be our opposable thumbs, but that’s never been very satisfying. Is it our intelligence? It seems every week or two an article comes out explaining a recent scientific study on animal intelligence. I just read one last week about cuttlefish being able to pass the marshmallow test which is given to small children to test cognitive capacity – somewhere between 4 and 6 years old a child can pass this test, and so can cuttlefish. That wasn’t what was most shocking –I discovered that part of how they did the test was using the cuttlegfish’s capacity to recognize and remember symbols. OK< now I’m scared.

One of the best ways to open your mind to possible stories outside the ones we believe are real is to read science fiction, or speculative fiction as it’s sometimes called, and one of the masters of speculative fiction was Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. In his world, humans were the THIRD most intelligent species on earth. The second most intelligent were dolphins. But the most intelligent species on earth was – wait for it – mice. Here’s a quote: They are in fact hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional creatures whose rodent aspect represents merely a three-dimensional projection of their actual form, and who spend a lot of their time in behavioural research laboratories running around inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on use.The fact that once again we completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures’ plans.”

End digression

So what DOES make us human, if it’s not our intelligence? It may be our storytelling. One of my favorite books is a collection of essays by Gary Snyder, called The Practice of the Wild, and in it he describes humans as the animal who for millennia has been telling stories around the fire, much to the amusement and pleasure of other animals, listening just back at the edge of the firelight. Somehow that seems right to me.

So there’s nothing wrong with storytelling. In fact, it’s quite wonderful, it’s at the heard of our creativity. But it gets us in SO MUCH TROUBLE. Let me repeat that. Not the stories themselves, but the way we believe them.

From David Loy: The limits of my stories are the limits of my world. Like the proverbial fish that cannot see the water they swim in, we do not notice the medium we dwell within. Unaware that our stories are stories, we experience them as the world.

And to illustrate this, I want to tell you a story. Or a story within a story. We’ve had several snowstorms over the last week, and during the storms I was reading a sweet little work of speculative fiction called the Raven and the Reindeer, about a girl named Gerta who goes far to the north to try to rescue her friend Kai, who has been stolen by the snow queen. Maybe some of you already know what I completely overlooked until the end of the book, that this was a re-imagining of Hans Christian Anderson’s story, The Snow Queen. In this version, Gerta ends up falling in love, not with Kai, who doesn’t even want to be rescued, but with a robber girl she meets on the way.  But anyway…

After finishing the book I looked up the original story. And I was shocked at how the story begins. Maybe you will hear the resonance with the tiger story we heard earlier:

Once upon a time there was a very, very bad hobgoblin, and he created a mirror which had this peculiar power: everything good and beautiful that was reflected in it seemed to dwindle to almost nothing at all, while everything that was worthless and ugly became most conspicuous and even uglier than ever. In this mirror the loveliest landscapes looked like boiled spinach, and the very best people became hideous.

All those who went to the hobgoblin’s school-for he had a school of his own-told everyone that a miracle had come to pass. Now, they asserted, for the very first time you could see how the world and its people really looked. They scurried about with the mirror until there was not a person alive nor a land on earth that had not been distorted.

He carried this mirror up to heaven itself, but then dropped it. . and it shattered into hundreds of millions of billions of bits, or perhaps even more. And now it caused more trouble than it did before it was broken, because some of the fragments were smaller than a grain of sand and Once they got in people’s eyes they would stay there. These bits of glass distorted everything the people saw, and made them see only the bad side of things, for every little bit of glass kept the same power that the whole mirror had possessed.

A few people even got a glass splinter in their hearts, and that was a terrible thing, for it turned their hearts into lumps of ice.

And THEN the story of the Ice Queen begins.

Now, they asserted, for the very first time you could see how the world and its people really looked.

And I think of something several people told me after the election, that the election had made them doubt the goodness of humanity, and this was the worst thing.

I have not had a television in my house since I left home at 17, and although this has made me culturally clueless, it does mean that when I see something on an actual television, like in a motel room, it’s painfully obvious to me that it’s not unlike that mirror. It is pretending to be reality, but actually what it is showing is what I called “the dark view” of the people creating the content – a world of violence, often against women, shallowness, and materialism. I don’t think this will deliberate on the part the creators – it is the world THEY see and live. But it’s pernicious. There are people in the political world who are also feeding us that story of who we are, for their own purposes, and it almost seems to me that we are believing this, no matter where we are on the political spectrum.

So stories can limit us, and convince us that this world, and humanity, is broken beyond repair. But I want to suggest another way to work with stories. David Loy again: When our accounts of the world become different, the world becomes different. We challenge a social arrangement by questioning the story that validates it. When people stop believing the stories that justify the social order, it begins to change. When French people no longer accepted the divine right of their king, the French Revolution ensued. “Change the stories individuals and nations tell themselves and live by,” writes the Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri, “and you change the individuals and nations.”

Another one of my favorite writers of speculative fiction, the late brilliant Ursula K LeGuin, wrote this: Storytelling [and telling multiple kinds of stories] is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary… We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.

This is precisely what Gandhi did in India, and Re, Martin Luther King Jr did in America. They held up a different kind of mirror, a mirror that said that another reality was possible, and another way of being human – not easy, but possible.

I think I’ve talked about Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Paradise Built in Hell, the aftermath of disasters, challenging the traditional narrative of chaos and mass panic with evidence that people typically respond to disaster with altruism, solidarity, and mutual aid. We can see that right now in the stories – stories again – coming out of the devastation of the Los Angeles fires, and the way people are leaping forward to help one another, to help animals, to be of support. It is always worthwhile to ay attention to the places where our stories about who we are break down and we see another, better possibility.

Can we have room within us for the possibility that each story about “the world” is a piece of the truth, always partial, but what really matters is how we choose to live, to respond, to treat others, to be in this world? That is the story we can write ourselves, and trust. This is the opposite of propaganda. This is radical revisioning. We will not be free until we imagine freedom.

I could say so much more about stories, this just feels like a beginning, and I know Aaron will be exploring this too, but I want to close with some words by the first women abbess of a Zen temple in America, Blanche Hartman, from her book of talks, Seeds for a Boundless Life:

In her poem “When Death Comes,” Mary Oliver has a few lines that say, “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”

This is beginner’s mind: Just how amazing the world is, how amazing our life is. How amazing that the sun comes up in the morning or that the wisteria blooms in the spring. “A bride married to amazement, . . . the bridegroom taking the world into my arms.” Can you live your life with that kind of wholeheartedness, with that kind of thoroughness? This is our work. Just to be here, ready to meet whatever is next without expectation or prejudice or preconceptions. Just “What is it? What is this, I wonder?”