Once again I have nothing for the newsletter. I have spent the last week in an agonizing exercise of futility trying to marry my pages word document to KDP’s publishing platform. My head hurts just thinking about it, but it may finally be bearing fruit.
‘The Ancient Book of Magic Secrets’ wants to enter the life of the world. It’s been 8 years since the project was born of fire and rain and a deep desire to say something to the people. This is what it looks like.
All of us are people and all of us have something to say. Don’t you feel that? I mean more than ‘good morning’ and good ‘evening’. Something to believe in. I believe in that.
My book is largely about storytelling, something we tend to neglect in our high paced media saturated electronic society Storytelling entertains and reveals our myths about who we are and who we want to be and how we plan to get there. Not just the stories on TV but the ones we actually tell each other in our casual conversation.
Storytelling can also be gossip - a form of communication as ancient as storytelling. Back in the day, sitting around the old campfire or out searching for edible roots and berries - we would share what we knew about our neighbors and friends and about our enemies too. In this way we were able to orient and enable ourselves. There was no news apart from what we shared with each other.
Now news is a business and so is storytelling. Everything is a business in our modern capitalistic world. And herein lies my point - maybe if we were able to become a little more intentional about our storytelling we could elevate the conversation to really benefit the common good. Yes there are wars and disasters. They will never end. I guess. Although in my story human beings do imagine and finally create a world without war. Without big wars atleast. The ones we budget the lion’s share of our expendable resources for. In my story the creative energy of the people is more valued than the destructive energy.
Well, anyways, I’m just preaching here. That’s different from story telling. In storytelling you have a hero and you have a triumph because you have a crisis. You have character development because you are human.
That’s what happened to me anyways. Publishing this book will be a triumph and I sure as hell have gone thru some character development.
I have discovered in my character development that nothing is as important as holding on to the feeling of being alive, being in rhythm, being in the simplicity, no matter what kind of distractions are happening in my mind. We have been separated from that feeling for so long, since we were children, and it’s not easy to do. It’s foreign to us. But that would be one of the highest triumphs to reunite with that feeling. Or atleast a pretty high one.
Am I wrong? Ask yourself, but I don’t think so. Isn’t it amazing that amidst all the diversity of our human species, and that includes all the opinions, all the philosophies and religions, there is a fundamental commonality? That feeling of simplicity and beauty is our commonality. It’s something we all feel or are trying to feel. That unerring, unending rhythm of life that started with our first breath and continues until the last.
So, thanks for listening. Back on the computer, trying to consummate this marriage. You’ll be the first to know if it works out.
storytelling