Stories move in circles.Ā They don't move in straight lines.So it helps if you listen in circles. There are stories inside storiesĀ and stories between stories, and finding your way through themĀ is as easy and as hard as finding your way home.And part of the finding is the getting lost. And when you're lost,Ā you start to look around and to listen.Ā
āDeena Metzger, Writing for your Life
Image: Yazz Ahmed
Stories move in circles. Yesterday I was invited to be a guest facilitator of an online workshop with storyteller and author Tracy Chipman: Lost and Found: Orality, Imagination and the Written Word. Was weird and strange to discover thru a fb memory yesterday just before the workshop, that I was in a memoir/poetry/somatic theater performance called Lost and Found also on that day four years ago.
Do you notice the way story themes or metaphors cycle in your life year after year? I find myself in the themes of the cycle of year. I have discovered that specific fairytales or symbols find me cyclically. And help me find myself on a map.
Lost and found. An integral part of becoming. Of discovering self. Thinking over the span of losts and founds is a fun activity. Iāve been inviting participants in recent writing workshops to make a list of lostsā¦lost-ness. An apothecary of lost. One participant drew an apothecary of bottles and named all the lost things in each bottle.
Think about lost-ness. Material losses. Emotional losses. Spiritual lostness. Losing a game. Losing your homework. Lost on a map. Lost tooth. Lost sock. Lost earring. Lost keys. Lost in a relationship. Lost virginity. Lost mind. Lost voice. lost words. Lost a job. Lost a friend or relative or partner. Lost a community. Lost a home. Lost children. Lost traditions. Lost a sense of self. Lost in the forest. Lost in translation. Lost in a foreign culture.
I think of lost as an invaluable landscape inviting one somewhat subversively into finding, into found. Found-ness. I once lost my voice because of a story that swallowed me whole. 20 years later, I found my voice hidden inside of a nesting doll of stories. I dove into the past to retrieve numerous lost parts of my self. I found strength, resilience, voice, power, homecoming.
Foundness. Finding a shoe. Finding a bleached animal bone. Finding a hawk feather. Finding a shell, intact. Finding a four leaf clover. Finding a five dollar bill. Finding a new name. Finding a spiritual community. Finding a partner. Finding a new job, a new life, a new restaurant. Finding self.
Rebecca Solnit in her book āA Field Guide to Getting Lostā says:
Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.āĀ
I recently veered off a path that has been for me, a stable, middle way kind of a path. I felt outside pressure to leave the path, leave the known and venture into the path of the unknown. Of exploring possibility and the path of Story with a capital S.
Oh how I love being spun in story, lost in story, spinning story and facilitating the experience of lost and found in others inside of story. Itās a different kind of landscape, the lost in the liminal lands. Of finding meaning in Firebird feathers and walnuts containing gilded dresses.
Down, down, down the rabbit hole of story into the underlands. Wunderlands wonderlands of finding and losing oneās way, oneās life, oneās country, oneās wife. Oneās story for a new story.
Inside story I learn that it is normal to change many times in one day, thanks to Alice and the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. Where becoming is a process of finding and losing and losing and finding.
What have you found inside of lost? In life? In story?
and how have you lost yourself inside of a story, only to be found. Only to lose a mask, a persona. And find something mythic and authentic in the same breath.
Image: Ali Boozan
"(T)his need is like the Spiderās need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk"
āA.S. Byatt
Words are like the Spiderās need,
a thread spun out of her belly.
She never hesitates to fling
words into the web of story,
letting them float in the silent air,
held secure between the thorns.
And if a careless boy comes around
on an early morning walk, if he
unknowing breaks the strands as he passes,
it is no dark matter, for he has been touched
by the tale and its sticky contents.
And wonderāso like the traveling burr,
will be with him always.
Ā©2013 Jane Yolen in Sister Fox's Guide to Writing (Unsettling Wonder)