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Story

This might be a thread of thinking and wondering that might go on for a while,  maybe,  we'll see.  It's not new to me,  but is different right now in ways i am still not quite conscious of.    But it's about how we ARE story.  We are Story.  Several "examples" of this have presented in the last several days and back to that thought a few posts ago,  how if we touch our finger to the pulse,  we are Given things.  Given things to "help us along".  whatever That means…..

So…many things coming to promote this train of thought,  magnetized and being pulled to it to offer even more to consider.   

For instance:  I am very interested in the Rachel Dolezal   "story".  The story  "about" her that is being presented daily in the news,  but really, more,  the Story she has created as a foundation of her life at this point….Where will she take this Now?   And even the story of the woman who aided the prison break in New York state….story again…her life was going along and she then DID some things that will forever change Her Story.  

and then i look again and again at Jude's post of 6/16  "Gone".  The image she chose to accompany this blog title….Gone.  and then her words she chose too…."I am needed elsewhere".   I love this.

Because Any of Us could say and then enact this at any given moment.  Gone.  I am needed elsewhere.   I could just post the same.  Gone.  I am elsewhere.  and the story of me that i have put here on this blog for the last i don't know how long would be over.  Would be a memory.  ONLY a memory…..for those who might CHOOSE to remember it.  For some,  it would be

Gone.

During the writing of the above,  a phone conversation with Granddaughter who is driving from Chico California to Sacramento to her class…and we talk about the difference between Story and Reality….What IS it?

Yesterday,  at Alz B's son's house,  while i was working,  i saw again the book The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls and i brought it home.   I had loved very much her memoir, Glass Castle.  This book, not a memoir, but fiction falls way short of it,  but….was so much an example of this thread of thought.  A story where One Story is being presented and many characters,  many characters could relate totally DIFFERENT stories of the One set of circumstances.  And it reminds me of something that Susan Whittig Albert wrote about Memoir,  about writing memoir…i will try to find what she wrote because it says precisely what i am looking at ….  about how the Same Story is experienced so differently…this,  but also

the more important thing here, to me is that we can CHANGE the story at any given moment, Entirely.  This story of me,  here with 17 Goats and 2 Dogs and a Cat

can CHANGE.  I can decide i cannot continue with them.  I can put up an ad on Craig's List:  Excellent purebred  herd of Nigerian Dwarf Dairy Goats.  13 does,  4 bucks,  fully tested.  Free to committed persons.  I could do that this week.   I could give Tay back to Jan the dog trainer to rehome.  I could move into town and go to school at the college studying Geology or Hydrology.  I could go back to Michigan to Detroit and live with my old friend Wendy.  I could go to California and set up housekeeping as the Great Grandma.  I could

CHANGE MY STORY.  To the extent that if i didn't TELL my present story to anyone,  in a certain way,  it would not exist anymore.

I LOVE THIS THOUGHT THREAD

really really love it.  It is energizing.   and really, very very Beauty FULL to me.

 

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this morning,  there was a really great pale blue color.  I put the pot outside in SUN…hot day,  it heated well,  but when i got back,  the blue was gone and there is a pale green.  Nice,  but not what i was hoping.  Pale green is easy for me to get.  That blue, not.  Hmmmm.

IMG_3593f

it think it's Kinnikinnick or Indian Tobacco

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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20 responses to “Story”

  1. Mo Crow Avatar
    Mo Crow

    Jorge Luis Borges write about how we can change the story in “Tlon, Uqbar & Orbis Tertius, here’s an excerpt-
    “Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality. In the most ancient regions of Tlön, the duplication of lost objects is not infrequent. Two persons look for a pencil; the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but closer to his expectations. These secondary objects are called hrönir and are, though awkward in form, somewhat longer. Until recently, the hrönir were the accidental products of distraction and forgetfulness. It seems unbelievable that their methodical production dates back scarcely a hundred years, but this is what the Eleventh Volume tells us. The first efforts were unsuccessful. However, the modus operandi merits description. The director of one of the state prisons told his inmates that there were certain tombs in an ancient river bed and promised freedom to whoever might make an important discovery. During the months preceding the excavation the inmates were shown photographs of what they were to find. This first effort proved that expectation and anxiety can be inhibitory; a week’s work with pick and shovel did not mange to unearth anything in the way of a hrön except a rusty wheel of a period posterior to the experiment. But this was kept in secret and the process was repeated later in four schools. In three of them failure was almost complete; in a fourth (whose director died accidentally during the first excavations) the students unearthed – or produced – a gold mask, an archaic sword, two or three clay urns and the moldy and mutilated torso of a king whose chest bore an inscription which it has not yet been possible to decipher. Thus was discovered the unreliability of witnesses who knew of the experimental nature of the search… Mass investigations produce contradictory objects; now individual and almost improvised jobs are preferred. The methodical fabrication of hrönir (says the Eleventh Volume) has performed prodigious services for archaeologists. It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past, which is now no less plastic and docile than the future. Curiously, the hrönir of second and third degree – the hrönir derived from another hrön, those derived from the hrön of a hrön – exaggerate the aberrations of the initial one; those of fifth degree are almost uniform; those of ninth degree become confused with those of the second; in those of the eleventh there is a purity of line not found in the original. The process is cyclical: the hrön of the twelfth degree begins to fall off in quality. Stranger and more pure than any hrön is, at times, the ur: the object produced through suggestion, educed by hope. The great golden mask I have mentioned is an illustrious example.”
    Isn’t that fabulous? I made an “11th degree hrön” when I was binding the run of catly ABC books, got to the 11th book and although it was a commission it was the perfect manifestation of that book, the best I could possibly make, perfectly crafted, so I gave it to Old Man Crow & explained to my friend that she would have to wait a few more weeks for her copy, fortunately she’s an artist too & could fully understand!

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  2. Tina Avatar
    Tina

    Not even we can change our story….it just is…..our story. One day to the next…this one life…this one story. It is all any of us have. Thank you Grace for sharing your story….always I am amazed at your abilities at finding the words so that people like me understand your story the way you tell it….the way you want us to see it….BLESSINGS Grace!!!

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  3. ² Avatar
    ²

    STORY ….. yes that it IS …. what you are to me …. i think a know you but…. you are just a story , the words i read , the toughts it make in my head in my heart , but there is MORE the tangible of the cloth the rag thing we have exhange, shared with eachother have make it more to be felt to be palpable by hands by eyes by smell by heart , This IS a story i’ll always remember i will remember i choose to ,
    a story i tell to my grandchildren a story i talk about with my friends
    a GRACE story , i read it understand it ( i think i do ,i smile, what an idea )a story i LIKE .it have changed somme of my live vision
    thank you for sharing that really story of somethings who happens in your live
    i know soon the story /book take an end to me
    i be needed somme where else
    but i know i look forward to read… the continuation of the Grace story ( i know i do )
    greets/blessings there will always be a connection M.

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  4. Michelle in NYC Avatar
    Michelle in NYC

    Woah and wowie, that is an amazing mind twister Mo! Would love to see that book you gave to old man Crow…maybe you will do a blog post about it?

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  5. Michelle in NYC Avatar
    Michelle in NYC

    My goodness Grace, you have touched a fertile nerve with this contemplation of “Story” – Yours – Ours. I can guarentee you if you said GONE one day we would (most of us) be the memory keepers of all you have told us. I know I would and that you would never be GONE from my memory until my memory was gone…if that’s even possible in the more esoteric sense, or even the Buddhist sense. So the other day, just before a ZEN sitting, a man I’ve sat with before but never really spoke to, and another center member I know were sitting around the table chatting before the bell. He has gone through all the training at the center (http://zencare.org/) and told me that he just quit his job, that his youngest daughter is in the final stages of cancer after a five year struggle in Oregon where she and his older daughter live, and that he was leaving his life of seventy years here in NY and going to be with her and minister to her in the final days. The move will be a permanent one. WOW I thought, how brave. Poof. Gone on to another chapter. He also said that he was tired of living his story and intends his new chapter to be free of story and just living in the now of each moment. Any one of us can change the script by adding on a new chapter of course. But, I still think of it as flow…continuous flow, even when it is dramatically shifting in a big way (like a river traveling through thick brush, cutting a new tributary)…these thoughts are HUGELY energizing.

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  6. julie Avatar
    julie

    Not changing the story but writing another chapter.
    I saw an exhibit on David Bowie in the Mtuseum of Contemporary Art in Chicago last winter and was struck by a piece of his art: he mimicked the map of the London Underground but it was his life–different lines gojng to different places, intersectiions, dead ends. I would love to try this.

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  7. patriciaspangler47@gmail.com Avatar
    patriciaspangler47@gmail.com

    i wonder sometimes if truth is different from story. that story can be the way i frame an experience at any given point in time. and that tomorrow i might frame the same experience and with different words. might Feel completely differently about it although nothing obvious may have changed. and so i wonder about this. about truth. and then i think that perhaps truth/story is simply always in flux, floating around like a cloud and that underneath it all is ground. a ground that doesn’t shift. does this make sense? maybe not, but for me, especially when story embodies unsettling emotion or difficult moments, i try to hold onto this idea of ground. not just “earth” ground but that other, deeper place/space of nonshifting. so i’m thinking that perhaps my own story — the particulars of it–could be anything and nothing at the same time. could matter. or not. this is an interesting thread you’ve wiggled out of your life fabric. one i’ll continue to sit with.

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  8. Marti Avatar
    Marti

    Story, how words spoken long ago, rest inside a memory and are called out as a means of a map: when Rich and I sold our CA home and our business, we moved to Maui, a place that Rich loved and we thought would become our permanent home. We had visited many times on vacation but living there is a different story. I had no expectations of Maui and I wasn’t sure but was up for an adventure, a new chapter in my story.
    After a year, it became clear to Rich that he was on an island and had gone everywhere that he could and wanted out. My father’s words came rolling into my head and heart from that memory cell tucked away. A few months before he died, he told me to go and SEE America. He had done just that in 1923 when he came here under contract as a shepherd from Spain; had seen a lot of the West and some of New York, Ellis Island, Chicago, etc. So the memory seed that was planted grew and his story in a sense became my story became our story as we spent 11 years moving about this country, seeing America, (Washington, Texas, Tennessee and now New Mexico). As we did so, I wondered how I would change, if I would reinvent myself in a way that melded with place. What I found was that the core of me held but my sense of the land deepened in ways that would not have done so had we not become vagabonds. Coming into new places where you know no one and being somewhat of an introvert, it was the land that I looked to for familiarity and for newness, simultaneously. It was the land that led to meeting some fine people as well.
    Home anchors but when you carry your home inside of you, it allows you to expand in ways that are truly gifts. Now we live here in New Mexico where I have family and friends and who I am, my story, because of our travels has led me to feel so enriched by this place, so different from any landscape that I have lived in and yet so familiar. Thank you Papa for putting those words into my heart so long ago.

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  9. Mo Crow Avatar
    Mo Crow

    the 11th abecediary looks no different to the one in the photos on my website
    http://www.bluecatheaven.com.au/Mos%20art/BlueCatDreaming/anebookofcats.html
    it’s just that each detail was perfect!

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  10. kathy dorfer Avatar
    kathy dorfer

    i have learn in one moment it can all change … it is all up to me what i do with the change .so far so good .
    i love what you write about stories …. i think about what is a story and what is the truth .life is good … even when i think it is bad .
    i just keep rising like a phoenix .
    thank you grace, your a gold mine of stories .
    xxoo

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  11. Mo Crow Avatar
    Mo Crow

    living the stories, telling the stories and retelling the stories ’til they become embroidered memories of what really happened, that dream of the thing we will never know because each of us is/was there but remembers it all so differently coloured with our own perceptions, perspectives and emotions…
    just read this and wanted to add this in to the conversation-
    “The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we’re meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day.”
    – Rebecca Solnit
    The Faraway Nearby

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  12. grace Avatar
    grace

    oh do i love this. My Granddaughter will love this..will send to
    her. THANK YOU, Mo…thank you so much

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  13. grace Avatar
    grace

    we can change the “contents”

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  14. grace Avatar
    grace

    it is the sharing that Creates, i think….
    it makes Love
    and love is Real

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  15. grace Avatar
    grace

    This is truly BEAUTY FULL this man
    what he is doing
    so great that you share this with Us here…that it can CHANGE.
    the doing
    the Thread that he IS he carries with him and it vibrates at
    such a fine fine level

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  16. grace Avatar
    grace

    it would be wonderful to see this

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  17. grace Avatar
    grace

    i think this is true…Flux….
    but beneath it is the ground that is what we somehow Are which
    is the Ultimate Ground?????
    so much to wonder, so much to wonder

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  18. grace Avatar
    grace

    Self in Place., yes…
    but i am looking at Self uhhhh, well…..just Self. Floating.

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  19. grace Avatar
    grace

    it’s all just Wondering. Today, Thursday, it all shifted again

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  20. grace Avatar
    grace

    you have given enough quotes from this book that today, i finally
    succumbed to ordering it

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