Feed the Bird :

The Loss of Story and Why it Matters

In February, my Living in Color series focuses on desire, passion, and wanting. The color RED. The following is an essay of passion- my own. It may seem like a departure, but as I lean into my own wanting, I know I want to think deeper, speak stronger, and be braver than ever. Thank you for bearing witness here.

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Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees takes off his shoes.

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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I am in the stage of life where my children are old enough to galavant around town with a friend, but not old enough to drive themselves there. That is why I found myself on a Saturday morning, alone at a cafe I had never frequented- close enough for pick-up, far enough away not to impede on their burgeoning independence. I ordered a chai and settled in the window seat with Joseph Campbell’s “The Power of Myth”.

In my former life as a high school English teacher, my classroom was plastered with pictorials of the phases of The Hero’s Journey. The Odyssey was one of my favorite works to teach. Like most educators in the Arts fields, Joseph Campbell was the elder I turned to. It’s been five years since my body has graced the doorway of a classroom. Five years since I held Fagle’s translation in my hands, post-its fluttering like butterfly wings. But this past week has held all the heaviness of living in a country fraught with violence, racism, perpetuated rape and abuse culture, and I returned to where I always go when things are spiraling outside of my tightly clenched hands-

The story.

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No one gets the irony more than I do that I left the hallowed walls of shaping minds to wind up as a Storyteller/Content Manager in Marketing. I get to tell the story of businesses in ways that feel true to their vision, mission, and values. It is purposeful- dare I say, holy- work.

As a society, we are surrounded by content. Our social media feeds are full of “influencers” and “content creators”. Our Amazon carts are directly linked to some woman in a prairie dress gathering daisies in her Scottish Highland garden so that we can bring those exact brass knobs to our own kitchens.

We consume, we don’t actually “create”.

We are surrounded by content, but starved for meaning.

My tea grew cold as patrons walked in, newspapers tucked beneath arms and elbows, chattering about headlines and soccer schedules. The vestige of my past in tattered pages lay flat on my table, now littered with crumpled napkins, my scrawling script along the edges.

Could it be that our current cultural suffering is large in part consequential to our abandoning of The Story?

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When I began teaching in 2003, there was a Creation Myth Unit built into every prep. Genesis, Gilgamesh, Nun and Ra, Chaos and Gaia were all players in the daily story of the classroom. Students heard over and over, the same myth with different names, the trajectory of nothing into something, of darkness and of light, of water and earth, the power of shaping one’s own story and the contribution to a community one needs along the way.

I can’t remember when it was removed. I only know that by the time my last year as an educator rolled around in 2021, I hadn’t touched Joseph Campbell since my youngest daughter had been a thought, and my students had traded asking questions about the meaning of life for what percentage of their grade would be affected if they didn’t hand in this paper?

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David Brooks celebrated his 20+ year career at the NYT these last few weeks with a farewell article containing some commentary on The Story.

We haven’t just lost the plot, we’ve lost the story.

The erosion of basic human kindness and societal contribution, the flattening of an inner life without sharing our lunch to 1.2K strangers in a 30-second reel: this kind of narrative collapse has led us to where we are today: a society chasing optimization, individualistic goal posts, an intolerance and inability to consider multiple origin stories, in short:

We have traded away the wisdom of The Story.

Look where it has gotten us.

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Fiction is the truth inside the lie- Stephen King

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Myths and the stories that hold them are not escapist notions- they are maps. Maps for being human. The Arts have always taught us what it means to suffer, to grieve- and what it looks like to rise. Courage, betrayal, resistance, and assembly arcs place individuals inside of a story bigger than they could have imagined themselves. In Greek Literature, the term for when the hero returns home is, Nostos. But the return requires a former journey with a clear, shared purpose.

There can be no Nostos if there is no deeper connection to home itself, and to the people in it.

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There is an African myth about a little boy and a bird who sang the most beautiful song he had ever heard. The boy loved the bird’s song so much that he brought it home to feed and nourish it as a way of saying thank you for its offering. On the third day of bringing it home for food, the boy’s father, outraged by having to feed another living thing, killed the bird.

The father died on the spot.

Kill the bird, kill the song, and the people die.

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This is not solely the responsibility of our current political climate or technology.

Without a shared story-without a mutual admiration of the bird’s song and the commitment to nourish and protect it, we reduce life-saving maps to test prep. We use Art as “enrichment” and not as the roadmap. We are unmoored in our anxiety, identity, and anger. We turn on each other.

Without The Story- we’re not fully human.

Doesn’t that explain a lot?

I don’t believe it’s too late to silence the GPS, pick up a few friends in the backseat, and dig the map out of the glove box. I don’t believe we’re past the ability to create, to wrestle, to hope. If history has taught us anything, it’s that The Story endures.

It just may take a while to uncover it.

Maybe we can start by feeding the bird.