Story Webs

Our stories weave together – before we open our mouths, pick up our pens, books, instruments, art materials, or hands. I imagine you, my listener, my reader, my audience, my mirror, my receptor, my holder, receiving my story, hearing me.

I anticipate your lenses and filters. I imagine I know some of who you are in this moment, and set up my story accordingly. I want to be heard, seen, held, known.

In my mind, our stories toss and tangle – little threads getting snagged in unexpected places – knots tightening the harder I pull.

I am my complex web of stories - infinite, dynamic, constantly evolving. I live and relive them, most of them I cannot access. Each has light, shape, texture, depth, sound, motion, colour, taste and smell. I interact with them through a kaleidoscopic lens – shifting prisms of whirling perspectives – contaminated/enriched with bits and pieces, built up residue formed in the context of my colour, race, class, gender, age, ability, environment, family, school, relationships, work, mostly unprocessed nagging, haunting, shaming, energizing, festering, blistering scenes, snippets, narratives. I mostly live on the surface of these stories – as they whiz and whirl outside of my reach.

I try to use language (voice, gesture, writing) to translate whatever small part of this complexity I can pull out and offer - across a huge divide of diversity and difference – the doomed attempt to pass this whirling intangible energetic mist to other human beings – which, if we’re lucky, they genuinely try to pull through their own distorting lenses and filters – through their own kaleidoscope of stories. If any parts of this mist resonate enough, a few droplets of something might stick somewhere in their web. And so it goes…

In the story group we tried to place our attention on that complex journey from my web of stories to yours. A safe container and deep listening were the tools that we used to slacken the webs so we could move the strands, lift them up, look underneath, follow their paths – in our attempts to know and be known. We tried to notice, to slow down the process of that journey through focused, respectful listening, and, in many ways, through deep sharing that evolved through relationship building and trust. We held sacred mindfulness, reflection time, environment, ritual, spaciousness, open-endedness, flexibility, freedom from expectation of outcomes and pressure.

We used moments of discomfort as entry points, rich places to excavate – knots in our webs where the access was often more painful but a more direct route to the deeper complexity. We offered space and support for members to expose their knots, massage them, loosen them up, pick and pry at them, untangle a few threads, whatever they chose to do.

The tension I’m caught in at the moment is feeling like I can somehow make sense of and articulate both the content and process of our story group. It’s a kind of optimism, confidence, even arrogance to think that it can be done. Then I have moments of humility, wonder, awe, when I know that it can’t be expressed. Then I wonder if it’s a cop out to not even try. So, in my own clumsy way, I’ve been trying to “analyze the data”. I know that it’s gold that we have in the transcripts – and I want to sift through the strands, pull out the nuggets, take out the bits that I want to remember, that I want to integrate into my own life somehow.

My process, in some ways, has been contrary to the holistic, qualitative nature of our research. I haven’t been doing much breathing and stretching, singing, drawing, collaging, or even journaling my reflections. In angst, I resorted to a quantitative and linear approach: I read through the transcripts, highlighted the sections that resonated with me; read through those highlighted sections and listed them under participants’ names, read through each person’s “gems” and broke them up into themes or categories, all the time mulling over the different pieces and interweaving my own thoughts as I went. It wasn’t my original intention to sift through the transcripts in such a methodical way. I just didn’t know how to write a paragraph about my experience in the group – what could I possibly say that would do justice to such a rich process? – so I was pulled to do something more involved. I felt that I couldn’t narrow in or branch off until I’d held the whole thing. Imagine the audacity to think that I could somehow hold the whole thing?

In other ways, my process has been a microcosm of the story group - personally very rich, combing through the various strands of discussion, looking at the different sides through my own lenses and filters of identity and life experiences, sitting with them, interacting with them, changing their shape and context, draping them over pieces of my own life, my own current moments of discomfort, to see what I can learn. Like the group itself, this process has been helpful, reassuring, a reminder to stay open, to embrace the complexity, to be compassionate with myself. But I still agonized about what I would offer up as my reflection piece. My fourteen page list – a skeletal web, straightened up, polished? Or are my chunky lists of tensions, pitfalls, ways of relating to strive for, really only useful for me because I know the context of each written sound bite? Do I flesh out the whole thing into a manuscript? For whom? Or do I pull out one or two chunks or threads and try to talk about them? How do I pull out the different bits and strands and write about them? When I pull them apart, pare them down, look at them individually - out of relationship, they lose much of their richness. The complexity of their context and interconnectedness is not alchemized, but instead simplified, even lost. When I try to capture it, it morphs, the angles change, the other glimpses gone.

So I hold onto the reassuring words of others also struggling to express the inexpressible. There are no grand conclusions, no ways to capture the whole. Sheila talks about much of the complexity being beyond words. Jean Connon Unda talks about how we circum-ambulate the complexity with many different stories, how each piece is part of the greater whole. Maria talks about the oppressive politics behind simplifying the story. There clearly is no truth or static story about such a rich experience – that would contradict everything we’ve unearthed in our process.

So, this thinly-sliced, tiny corner of the web is my offering at this particular moment – my truth from where I am right now. An unpolished fragment, not even close to touching the infinite richness and complexity of the process – perhaps a small illustration of some of what we struggled with in the group. Maybe tomorrow, I will figure out how to write, draw, collage, sing or dance about other threads, other chunky bits in the web. I will again wrestle with what and how much to disclose and how to package it without undermining it. These are ongoing challenges.