Toward the 10,000 Stories: A Manifesto
Part 2 of a series on shifting our culture toward ecological ways of being in the world.
The landscape is filled with stories. I’m aching to hear them.
I mean this in two ways: first, that any resilient and long-standing culture (in my home place, that includes the Odawa and Ojibwe) creates a landscape of stories, in the form of poems, jokes, songs, gossip, dance, theater, rumors, and rituals of all kinds: sacred, profane, and mundane. This accumulation of stories offer instruction for living in right-relationship with that place, as well as a sense of belonging deeper than a settler culture like mine could ever know.
More importantly, I also mean that the landscape is filled with people — non-human people, our more distant cousins, ravens and porcupines and morel mushrooms and white pines, not to mention the landscape writ large, the genius loci of a given place. These creatures and spirits have stories to tell, if we will learn to hear them. In learning to hear, we may find ourselves revisiting ageless conversations. Just as Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet, “forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair,” Gary Snyder might offer that the landscape and its inhabitants love us two-leggeds for our stories, a gift of art wherein “the place is offered to itself” in all of its complexity.
There are ten thousand ways to live in the world, each with its own economy and culture, its own spirit, its own poetry, mythology, and unique way of being. Let us not presume that we’ve already found the best one, nor that there is only one to be found. There are some truly desirable, well-drawn ideas out there — ways to restore the raucous chorus of wild places, to feed our communities while regenerating the land, and to move away from economies that exploit and dehumanize, toward cultures of reciprocity and care. As for the idea that there is a “best” way, I’m agnostic. I don’t know what it is and I don’t think anyone else does either. Let’s grow multitudes, one by one, place by place. The particulars of each are beautiful, embedded in these ten thousand ways through ten thousand x ten thousand stories.
These are not stories we need to invent, because they are already here, alive in the landscape. I am utterly convinced of the truth of this statement, but I’m wary of stating it so plainly. Some of these ideas need to be approached obliquely and looked at only out of the corners of our eyes, lest they take flight and leave us. The poet Robert Bringhurst has been circling these kinds of spirits for a long time; his thoughts on poetry (the source of our stories) resonate deeply with me.
Poetry is the name, in my dialect, of a constituent or property of being. Like shapeliness and grace, symmetry and love, it must be made as well as found, but it is made, it seems to me, by many creatures other than human beings, and found in countless contexts far from human language. I try not to use the word as the collective plural of poem, just as I refrain from using love as the plural of romance (or of copulation). If this usage is correct — if poetry is implicit in reality, and present in the lives of other creatures as well as in our own — then the genuine study of poetry might in fact be worth our while — more so, perhaps, than the study of any peculiarly human verbal artifice or tradition. Suppose, as a first step, we studied the human poetry found in our own language, place, and time in the context of the rest of human poetry — including Native American, African, Asian, Oceanic, and archaic European. Suppose we then began to study human poetry in the context of whatever we can learn about the poetry of other living creatures, and in the underlying context of the poetry of what-is. Is there any chance that this might do us any good? That it might help us, for example, to find out where we live, and how to live there, on the one and only planet that will ever be our home?
The quote above comes from his introduction to an eclectic collection of essays called Everywhere Being is Dancing. Alongside a companion volume, The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology, it explores this idea and many tangents from it in highly satisfying detail.
As is hopefully now clear, these stories are not just pleasant diversions exchanged around a campfire. Stories are the tools that shape our minds — the operating system (a metaphor from a popular current story) that runs the machine. In the words of the poet Ben Okri:
It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
Stories are the building blocks of how we understand the world, and by extension, how we work in the world. Yet few of us take the time to consider the stories we are letting in.
The story of progress interrupts to argue that we the modern world suffers no shortage of stories. One of the gifts of this so-called information age is a near-infinite offering of tales from all over the globe. One argument for the growth monster we call the industrial economy is that it connects us to the lives of people we would otherwise never know. I’m not here to argue against the exchange of ideas across the planet. Sadly, though, as long as the growth monster feeds, for every story we hear, a thousand are permanently erased from the world. For example, I am one of the first generations to easily access to the sounds of Khoomei — throat singing from Tuva, Mongolia, and Siberia — and my own life is deepened by learning something of those people who made such evocative art. The trade-off: in order to generate more electricity, a hydroelectric dam closes the mouth to the rapids that first inspired the warbling Borbangnadyr, and the surrounding landscape developed, causing the extirpation of a few bird and dragonfly species who called that place home. The poetry of the river is silenced; the poetry of the birds and dragonflies is lost. This is not simple cause and effect, but the question haunts me: can the system of blessings be separated from the system of curses, or are we complicit, no matter how far our removal, in these acts of erasure?
How do you erase stories? All too often, by erasing the storytellers — literally — through genocide or murder. This counts for humans, but it also includes erasing the stories of the landscape by denuding the land or covering it in corn and cows and hay. An extirpated species of any kind means the loss of countless stories.
Another tried and true method — because erasure is now, as it always has been, intentional — is to displace the storyteller from the landscape, trying to sever the bonds between the culture and the land. Or you can remove the language from the speaker, as with the Indian Schools in Canada and the United States, or the removal of Tibetan and Uyghur from learning apps in China.
Or, most insidiously, you can train the mind to not recognize the story it is hearing. The technique is more Mad Men than Manchurian Candidate; it’s something our advertising firms and schools have learned to do incredibly well. If you care to test it, just ask any elected official to define the word “sacred” as it relates to energy policy and land use. For that matter, check in with yourself on your relationship to “old wives tales” and creation myths from other cultures. Going further, what does the word “myth” mean to you? Would you say that you are currently holding any mythologies in such a way that they shape your mind and your relationship to the world around you?
Thankfully, short of genocide and murder, some of these methods of erasure are, to some extent, reversable. Gary Snyder has some ideas to help restore our connection to the hidden. First, he offers this testament to the power of staying where you are:
Sometime in the mid-seventies at a conference of Native American leaders and activists in Bozeman, Montana, I heard a Crow elder say something similar: “You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough — even white people — the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming up from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren’t lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them.
I think the spirits will speak, when we find ways to be quiet enough to hear them, but I also think that they can only speak to us using what’s in our own heads. If your head is full of modern-day myths about efficiency, hyper-individualism, and market-based solutions, there’s just not much there for them to use. Sometimes I think when we get an earworm like the Pepsi theme song (seriously, don’t click that) stuck in our heads, it’s the spirits of the place saying “look, if this is all you’re going to give us to work with, this is all you’re going to get.” If we want to hear more, let’s first learn from those traditions that view the world through a lens of relationship built on qualities like reciprocity, restoration, humility, frugality and care.
Second, Snyder offers this testament to, again, staying where you are — and then getting to work:
To restore the land one must live and work in a place. To work in a place is to work with others. People who work together in a place become a community, and a community, in time, grows a culture. To work on behalf of the wild is to restore culture.
Our local librarian, poet and mycologist, and deeply natural facilitator of good relationships Yvonne Stephens has put it even more succinctly: “we’re learning about a place and creating a place at the same time.” To begin listening for, learning, and then sharing these stories is part of this great work ahead of us, as well as part of that work’s reward.
We are in a wonderful moment when there are so many ways to learn about the places we live. Different branches of science offer us unprecedented insight into the nature of soils and our place among the stars. The science of ecology is still new, yet already helps us understand the ways our habitats work in concert, with or without us. Climate science creates methods for predicting how shifts in the global mean temperature or very small changes in atmospheric carbon will affect sea level rise, rainfall, and local weather temperature extremes. The stories we are telling through the sciences may help us assist our plant and tree cousins to move to higher ground or chase their hardiness zones north faster than their usual methods of reproduction and movement could ever allow.
At the same time, we are blessed with being a part of a larger conversation about other ways of knowing. Thanks to books like Robin Wall Kimmerers Braiding Sweetgrass and the work of other writers native to these places, we can see how Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) can prefigure and complement scientific understanding of a place.
The indigenous among us have many more stories to share, well beyond the writings of those books. Some of this knowledge is neither scientific nor ecological, but historical. Nowhere else has erasure been at work than at scrubbing the historical record. Look past the nostalgic face of the American past and you reveal a dark legacy of violence and horror. To call our history “imperfect” would be a great generosity to some and an insult to those who shouldered the brunt of slavery, Jim Crow, manifest destiny, and the genocide of indigenous people. Much of American popular history actively obscures the truth about those displaced and murdered, and those brought as slaves, and those beckoned with big promises of opportunity without disclosing that your skin tone and a host of other traits would lock that door. A part of the 10,000 stories in these places are about pain. The current story does its best to make that pain invisible, to keep those wounded by this way of life always wounded and ignored. In too many cases, these stories of oppression are still being written, and still being scrubbed away — not history but present fact. Understanding the scope and depth of these stories is part of the learning, and then, most essential is undertaking the practice of reconciliation and repair. That practice is well beyond the scope of this short essay.
Likewise, few histories (though there are a few) can tell us in detail how people actually lived here from day to day: what was graceful, thrifty and reciprocal, and what was exploitative and damaging. Just as we resist the longing for a bucolic rural past, scrubbed clean of our sins, we should also resist the modern call to discard anything with the odor of history still on it. There is wheat and there is chaff, and we have the skills to discern the two. Some of the best kernels of our history include thrift and neighborly interdependence. We can bring those forward. Knowledge of the local flora and fauna can be relearned, bracketed by an improved ecological understanding of how our economy supports or destroys the flourishing of the natural world.
Look at the foundational folk culture of any people and you’ll find food, craft and art (in the form of songs, dances and stories, in particular). Go further, to look at any long-sustaining, resilient culture, and you’ll see that all of those things all point back to a wisdom of caring for the place, with story after story of self-control, reciprocation, not taking too much, leaving plenty for others, and completing the generative exchange. These values are baked into the old stories, and into the poetry of place.
Just one more thing to say, as clearly as I can: this is one of the fundamental reasons why art matters. Scratch that: this is one of the fundamental reasons why artists matter. But that reasoning is for the next essay. I reached my word limit a few paragraphs back.
These are the 10,000 stories — a diverse ecology of place-based stories of all kinds. The modern condition puts us inside a singular modern myth about progress, full of spectacle and really top-notch special effects, pretending to be all the stories that ever could be, all in service to hide the growth monster and its trail of destruction. That story is infinitely tall with a solid base of adamantium. But look closer, and you’ll see billions of tiny cracks. In those cracks, strands of mycelia and wind-blown seeds, incredibly resilient, hide and bide their time. The earth never sleeps, and those cracks are growing imperceptibly wider. It’s time for those seeds to erupt into glorious flowers, their roots nosing into the old edifice and cracking it into dust. It’s time for wild local culture to return, their rioutous, raucous growth worming through the knotholes and twining around each other in complex geometries of relationship. Each seed and each shroom is a story, rooted in its own home place — a story about how to live well in that place, about what to hold sacred, how to repair the damage done, how to take care, and how to live and work in reciprocity, regeneration, and reconciliation with the living world and our fellow inhabitants.
The landscape is filled with stories. I’m aching to hear them.
