To apprentice with Story

Is to feed the soul

✴︎ To Apprentice with a Story

To apprentice with a story is to make yourself small and listening.

To kneel before it as you would kneel before an elder, or the entrance to a cave.

It is to feed the story before asking it to feed you.

Art: Brook Shaden

Stories are beings—old ones—buried in the soil of language, soul, land and heart.

They are wild medicines that do not reveal themselves until you have offered something of yourself first.

The old stories are hungry. Not for attention, but for reverence. For real relationship.

They long to be sung to, dreamed with, walked beside.

Art: Unknown

When you apprentice with a story, you do not ask, “What does this mean?”

You ask, “What does this require of me?”

You build an altar to the story.

You offer it honey, a bowl of river water, a strand of your hair. An unexpected gift.

You take it walking with you at dusk.

You tell it aloud to the trees.

You hum it into your belly as you fall asleep.

You let it change you. Because if the story doesn’t change you, you haven’t really met it.

A true story is like a compost pile—it ferments, it steams, it feeds.

But only if you bring your scraps, your gratitude, your humility and patience.

To apprentice with a story means you will walk with it for weeks, or moons, or years.

It means you may dream of it.

It means you may not understand it—until one day your bones do.

And here is the secret: The story is not just for you. You are not its end point.

You are its next mouth, its next breath, its next brief and luminous body.

So you feed it with memory, with longing, with questions and song. You feed it with grief and dance and silence.

Art: AI

And in return, the story will feed the parts of you that were starving in ways no human teacher ever could.

This is story medicine.

This is the apprenticeship.

This is the way we remember what it is to be fed by the wild and feed it in return.

✴︎ A Story Offering ✴︎

Thursday · 10:30 AM MT · Live on Zoom

A story is coming.

I don’t yet know which one. I thought I did. It is shifting Shape and shape shifting. It shows its true colors in living ways. It keeps me on my toes.

But it will speak to the fire in your chest

and the voice that’s been waiting to rise.

Come as you are.

No performance. No perfection.

Just story, body, breath, writing and the new moon.

We rite. We story. We write. We shape shift. We feed the story.

🌀 Replay available

For paid subscribers.

Zoom link below