Hi Friend,

If you’ve been hanging out with us for a while, you’ve probably heard me talk about origin stories.

I admit that I didn’t use to understand the power of origin stories.

I just thought that Origin Stories were, well, cool.

I lumped them into the same category as Creation Stories: often fascinating mythological elements of the bigger theme of ‘humans are storytellers’/’storytelling is how we make meaning of the world around us.’ (These days, I see Creation Stories as a sub-genre of Origin Stories.)

I could tell you (as you might tell me?) that Origin Stories matter because “they tell us where we come from and how we got here and they help us orient ourselves and find our way in the world.”

But I don’t think I really understood what that means.

How much origin stories can shift our embodied and lived experiences of reality.

It wasn’t until some of my own origin stories were unexpectedly disrupted - and I felt very, very jolted - that I began to recognize how origin stories can shape our sense of reality.

I've witnessed myself, family members, students, colleagues, friends, and others go through variations of “wait, wait, WHAT????” when some version of an origin story that they might not have even known is such a deep part of them gets poked, prodded, and/or challenged in some way.

Recognizing that the origin story you hold (often in the background) is inaccurate can be immensely disorienting. Such as when I learned that the story, “Our family never owned slaves,” that my grandmother assured me was absolutely true, was … false. In the late 1600s, the Wolcotts owned people who were enslaved in Connecticut. Learning that was a deeply somatic, gut-wrenching moment. Did my grandmother purposefully lie to me, I wondered? These days, I think my father's family had systematically dis-membered that part of their own story - since at least the time of the Civil War.

Sometimes, the sense of changing origin stories can be wonderful. Such as when my mother learned that while her mother refused to tell her who her birth-father was, her grandmother (my great-grandmother) not only had met her birth-father but had a picture of him and knew what country (Holland) he was from. That led my mother on a multi-decade journey of connecting with the Netherlands (and Scandinavia more generally), finding her birth-father, and connecting with her half-siblings. She met her half-brothers for the first time - when she was in her seventies!

Both of those examples are from my own family, and origin stories are often critical to family history, but it is also true for larger stories. indeed, my entire ReMembering Course is based on the premise that re-originating the story of climate change into colonization/the Doctrine of Discovery, and it makes a really big difference for the solutions we create for ourselves now… and the visions of different kinds of climate solutions we can create for the future.

Or that democracy itself does not only (or even primarily) originate in ancient Greco-Roman times. The values of freedom, egalitarianism, of independence that arises from interdependence, and many of the structures and practices that became embedded in the formation of the United States were inspired by, learned from, and actively encouraged to be used by Indigenous nations on Turtle Island and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in particular. (If you are going to Bioneers, then I encourage you to attend the panel: Women at the Center: A Call to Interdependence, which highlights the contribution of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, a matriarchal society, to the formation of democracy and the United States. ). I think this is one of the most important and powerful origin stories we can re-tell right now, in the year of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That those dialogues used to exist helps us understand that they can be revitalized on many levels.... and just because my ancestors missed putting life (including Earth and women and children and elders) at the center of our circle 250 years ago, it does not mean we have to continue making that mistake.

In contemporary politics today, we are seeing fights over Origin Stories all the time, though it is not always named as such. It's often woven into something else. Such as the recent talks by Marco Rubio, at the EU, where he keeps talking about “Western Civilization”. If you listen between the lines, you see that he is uplifting Europe’s era of global Empire … and completely overstepping the causes of WWII (the fight against fascism). In doing so, he is telling a classic white supremacist history bound up in a very particular origin story of Western supremacy that we can trace back to, at least, the Doctrine of Discovery. (This podcast episode does a great job of going through some of what Rubio, in particular, is telling people, though it does not link to the Doctrine of Discovery.). Those stories are shape-shifting American conservative narratives which (as they are currently in power) is influencing national and international narratives of who America and 'the West' is.... and thus what kinds of actions can be expected from them.

Origin Stories are about attribution and causality; governance and politics. As well as mythopoetics and embodied consciousness and the nature of the embodied reality of Spirit.

Here’s an example from Christian sacred texts- The Gospel of John (which I’m preaching on this weekend at a local church!) starts out with re-narrating an Origin Story - “In the beginning was the Word (logos) and the Word was with God and the Logos was God.” This poetic phrase evoked the Origin Story of Genesis (In the beginning God created…). In doing so, the author of the gospel boldly places Christ (not just Jesus) into the beginning of all things. It’s often interpreted with a linear, superior perspective. But in the early Church, “logos” was often translated from Greek to Latin as “sermio” - meaning ‘conversation’, a term that conveys “logos” far better than our contemporary understanding of “word” does today.

So try this interpretation (which my colleague Rev Victoria Loorz does): In the beginning was the conversation, and the conversation was with God, and the conversation was God. This was with God in the beginning. All things came into being through this, and apart from this nothing came into being that has come into being…. And the conversation became flesh and dwelt among us.”

How does that change your read of the text?

At least for me, it opens up way of working with Christian texts that echoes … quantum physics, dialogic philosophy and pedagogies, ancient wisdom about the dynamic relational nature of reality … even the purpose of a sacred ‘text’ itself.

Change the origin story, and you can influence the nature of reality.

Which is why I’m teaching the Origin Stories course again.

Starting in just under four weeks.

Perhaps you would like to join us.