As a storyteller, you are working on your life as much as you are working in it.

 

Throughout this journey, you have learnt to open yourself to life; to cultivate a presence and awareness; to be attuned and orient where you are; to follow the path of a true character; and to tell a story of your past and future that will make you more resilient.  This last module is a step of definitive action towards living like a Story Hunter. 

 

 

 

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, writes about the work of story at the end of her novel, Women Who Run With the Wolves. She writes:

“Look to your people, your life. It is not by accident that this advise is the same among great healers and great writers as well.  Look to the real that you yourself live.  The kinds of tales found there can never come from books.  They come from eyewitness accounts.

The authentic mining of stories from one’s own life and the lives of ones own people, and the modern world as it relates to ones own life are on the right path if you have experienced these:  the scraped knuckles, the sleeping on cold ground – not once, but over and over again – the groping in the dark, the walking in circles in the night, the bone-chilling revelations, and the hair-raising adventures on the way – these are worth everything.  There must be a little, and in many cases, a good deal of blood spilled on every story, on every aspect of your own life, if it is to carry the numen, if a person is to carry a true medicine.

I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories from your life – your life – not someone else’s life – water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.  That is the work.  The only work.”

 

Start now.