Hi Friend,

Often when I listen to clients and students during our phone calls, my body is in motion.

Usually walking. Or pacing. Sometimes washing dishes (usually by hand).

I find I listen better that way.

Or rather, I find that my body is such an active part of how I know, including how I listen, that letting myself be in motion generally serves the purpose of our work together.

Such was the case several times this past week, when I was talking to people who are in the midst of the current Origin Stories cohort, or thinking about the questions of Origin Stories and other Deep Meaningful Stories/Myths with me. It is that point in the course where I offer 1-1 calls. It is almost always a powerful conversation that really serves the participants.

We are starting the next Origin Stories cohort this week. It would be great to have you join us.

One participant was telling me the story he was working on, some of which he had shared a bit in the class. I was listening while paying a lot of attention to what was going on around me as I was walking.

And then something shifted in his voice.

Of its own accord, my gait shifted. My head tilted. I slowed down. And then I stopped, nodding my head vigorously, there, in the middle, as it happened, a parking lot at the corner of a busy area of town. As I talked to him, I started waving my hands around vigorously, and then pacing, not to get anywhere, but as part of letting the energy flow through me. As part of finding the words to share with him, of letting the images come through me.

Back in the pre-cell-phone days, I'm sure a passerby would have thought I looked really weird. Fortunately, Californians are used to such things, and all sorts of people talk and gestulate to people on the other side of the country/world/town who are not physically present.

The distance doesn't mean that our bodies and the nature around us isn't being influenced by and can influence the calls we are having.

My body stopped walking because the person I was talking with was getting into this really important part of his story, the scene - I could feel the energy of the scene as he talked about it - where someone was dying, and his life was changing, and eternity and generations of suffering and his future grandchild were somehow all part of this one long moment of multidimensional time. Yes, I thought to myself. This is a key part of the story that he needs to tell.

Before that - well, ok, some of that was necessary. But that was the moment to engage with. It happened to be one of those moments that is both an origin and an ending on multiple levels. Sometimes that happens. Rarely is anything as simple as a straight line with a super clear beginning, middle, and end. Time travel is part of our human experience, which is, perhaps, why it is such an important part of our stories.

Later that day, he wrote me an email with this basic message - The whole course has been good, but that conversation today and the insights I've had since then have made the whole course a really good investment.

And this, I thought to myself when I read his email, is why I'm offering this next cohort....

At another moment, another participant was telling me her story - of how her understanding of her own ecological family history is shifting as she has been reconnecting with a now-deceased family member who engaged in something that today we might call #landback, though in those days it was the donation of a farm to an Indigenous community.... and that land has had a huge impact on what that community is doing today. As the participant is connecting with this largely hidden family story, her own sense of her family's identity is shifting. As she said, she's realizing how much, in just one generation, the meaning of "inheritance" and "legacy" can dramatically change.

I'm so excited about you telling this story, I told her. I was pacing in front of my house as we talked, picking up twigs and branches that had fallen after a recent wind storm, a big smile on my face as I listened to so many pieces of her life and her family's life and a much bigger movement than herself coming together in this story. Life and time and lineage can be so freakin' cool. Twigs in my hand, we talked about what it means to pick up some of the pieces that her family member has left her - including all the absences, the things she doesn't know and might never know about this story.

And then there was that call the other day that wasn't, officially, about Origin Stories at all, and someone on the call said (approximately ) - I was reading all of these grant applications for a grant focused on narrative change, and I realized how almost none of them had any kind of real Origin Story. I kept thinking about what you taught us in the ReMembering Course... about the Indigenous influence on the West and on democracy, and I saw so clearly how much we are caught up in our current stories. But people don't know where to go. And then they try create something new from scratch... and that's really missing the point. We really, really need these new/old origin stories.... and its just not being done, its just not happening.

I was tidying the kitchen when she told me that, and I stopped, pot lid in hand, thinking, my brain moving in so many different directions about the implications of what she was saying that for a half a moment I couldn't even say anything, and the pot lid just stayed in my hand, hovering in the middle of the air, for a while. At some point, I started moving again, and the words came, with something that resembled articulation. Yes.

If you want to be part of that kind of a conversation, the kind that sets the conditions where I (and maybe others) stop what they are doing and really listen and let something bigger flow through us and around us - then you might be ready for this potent work.

The next Origin Story cohort starts this Thursday.

May 28. 11am est/8am pst/4pm bst.

We'll be done by August.

It's gonna be fun.

You can sign up here.

You can also reach out if you have other questions.

Just FYI I am planning to not offer another Origin Stories Course cohort this year. There might be something specifically on origin stories for America, democracy, etc., but not this course where you have so much freedom in what stories you want to be engaging with.

I hope you let the energy of listening and engaging find ways to flow through you, and to listen to whatever bodies - perhaps your own body, perhaps the wind, the trees, and the twigs, the hawks and the kitchen chores and the dailiness of life and bodies, wherein lies so much wonder and so much wisdom, if we but give ourselves a chance to hear it.

Sara Jolena

ps-

It's Memorial Day weekend in the U.S., and I always like the question: what are we memorializing, and what does that mean for us? Not just what state officials do. But what do every day events and gatherings and parades and BBQs and music shows - what are we, in our actions, in our bodies, memorializing. So maybe that's a question that you might want to take with you this weekend and ask at whatever social gatherings you are looking to find some interesting questions for....