“Why do people tell stories?” I asked the Grade 4 and 5 students.

    “For fun,” said one child.

    “Yes,” I agreed. “It is fun to tell stories, especially around a campfire. Why else?”

    “For entertainment,” suggested another.

    “Definitely. Stories are great entertainment. They can be full of adventures and magic. What might be another reason?”

    “To remember things that happened.”

    “Yes, I think that’s one of the main reasons we tell stories. Especially in cultures where there isn’t any other way of recording history. Why else might we tell stories?”

    “To teach lessons,” said another child.

    I nodded. “In fact, that’s how many cultures still teach important values – by telling stories.”

    They sat quietly at their desks while their teacher wrote their ideas on the board. It was a Thursday afternoon. Here was an unfamiliar teacher in their classroom, come to tell them a story. From my perspective I wondered if ten and eleven-year olds would consider themselves too old for storytelling. I began telling a story from India called “A Drum.” It’s one I have told many times.

When I was eight years old my music teacher gave some very simple homework—listening, but not to music. We were to go and sit quietly in some corner of our home or garden and listen to the sounds around us. Then, with pen and paper in hand, our assignment was to describe those sounds. (Actually, the assignment was to choose three different locations and listen to the different sounds in each one.) I remember vividly how wonderful it was to become conscious of listening in this way.

I first heard storyteller Melanie Ray perform many years ago at a storytelling festival on the Sechelt Peninsula. I only dimly remember the story—I know it featured a red hen—but what I do remember is the way Melanie told it. Time opened up when the story began. She did not hurry, even when the action speeded up. This easiness with the story is what I call “the teller’s delight”—that subtle quality of being engaged in the telling, while also enjoying the tale.

My taxi driver is from Pakistan. A large man, he swings my bag into the trunk of the cab. As we pull away from the airport I ask him if his first language is Urdu. Yes, he tells me, but he also speaks Punjabi and now English. Does he know anything about ghazals? I ask. I have been learning about Persian poetry, and in particular, the ghazal, a form that predates the sonnet. Oh, yes, he says. I see him smiling in the rear view mirror. Would he recite a few lines in Urdu for me?

It matters what stories we tell.  It matters what stories we subscribe to. Stories have an energetic force and that energy has an impact in the world. This was the idea behind The Story Field Conference: Invoking a New World through Story, a gathering held at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Colorado in August of 2007.  Dreamed into being by Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute in Oregon, and Peggy Holman, co-author of The Change Handbook, the conference included a wonderful assortment of young and old, change makers whose work is all about inviting a new narrative into existence while uncovering the stories and myths we live by, many of which no longer serve us or the planet.

My experience at that conference has richly informed my work. After being there I decided to create this blog as a space to explore the nature of the Story Field, which I think of as a dynamic and ever-changing field of energy where stories interweave and form the fabric of daily life.

What stories am I bringing into the world? What stories do I want to invite from others?

After lunch in the Grade Two classroom I was in today, children have a choice of silent reading or drawing. Several help themselves to large sheets of white paper from a drawer. When folded in half the paper perfectly mimics the dimensions of a laptop computer, with its fold-up screen and keyboard. At circle time some of the children show their products. Julius has a Toshiba. His keyboard has the letters in rows in alphabetical order, rather than qwerty, but he does have up-down and right-left arrows to one side. He demonstrates how his laptop folds up. I ask him if his Toshiba costs a lot. He thinks about it for a minute and decides to come clean: “A real one would be about $500. This one? Nothing.”

Thursday morning: a Grade One French Immersion class. The children have spent part of the previous day doing a collage on space. A sheet of shiny silver paper is suspended over one of the blackboards and their cutout drawings of space creatures and planets are taped on top. When it comes to journal-writing time the children suggest two topics: Les animaux and l’espace.  But what about “Les animaux dans l’espace”? This idea elicits a few chuckles as the children imagine horses in astronaut suits, or cows browsing on the moon. Then Ashton, sitting in the front row, reverses the combination and comes up with “L’espace dans les animaux.”

What did she say?

Every day at  Sir James Douglas, an elementary school in Victoria, the principal repeats three phrases after the announcements: “Work hard, learn lots, and do something kind for someone else.” At first, when I heard this gentle admonition coming out of the P.A. for the second or third time, I thought, “Who’s really listening to that message?” Perhaps our parents had similar words of advice or caution for us, which we received on countless occasions and did our best to ignore. It’s easy to tune out the familiar, even when we know it might be helpful. And yet, I think there’s a way that a message like “Do something kind for someone else”, repeated to the point of becoming just a series of sounds, devoid of meaning, actually does carry some latent energy. I don’t know if the principal recognizes the power of her words, but I suspect her intention in repeating the phrases is based on a hunch—an intuition that repetition takes words (and the ideas they represent) into the mind and body, past the conscious aspect of thinking, right into the heart.

I like to see eyebrows go up when unusual objects appear on the security screening at airports. I once traveled with a friend who had a dinosaur bone in his carry-on luggage. It was a real dinosaur bone, too. For the benefit of the security staff he unwrapped it and passed it around. My Hang drum is just about as odd. It resembles a mini-UFO and travels in a hard-shell case inside a specially designed backpack. At the Evers-Jackson Airport on my way home from Mississippi in May, I put my drum on the belt and watched to see the expression of the man standing besides the screen. His eyes widened.

“What's that?” He looked up to see who was going to claim this strange piece of luggage.

There is an apocryphal story about an anthropologist who leaves a television in a village in Africa. (We can presume that the village either has regular access to electricity or a generator.) For a while the community gathers around the talking box with great interest. But when the anthropologist returns some months later he finds his gift covered in dust and cobwebs. He asks the villagers why they haven’t been watching it. One of them replies, “Your box knows many stories, in fact many more than our storyteller, but the difference is, our storyteller knows us.”

This comment can be read and understood in a couple of different ways: the village storyteller knows what kinds of stories are most relevant and familiar to her listeners. She knows when and what to tell. Like a mirror, she reflects back to them their own world and their own history, as well as their own potential as moral agents. She sees who they are and she sees who they can be.