Storytelling to Build Community & Create Change

 Story resonates deeply in our bones…it’s purpose is to illuminate, to shine a light in the cracks, to lead us to plumb the depths, to enter the deep forest, to explore the cold lands/the borderlands and the badlands, to slowly reveal within us the deepest truths, to allow us to enter our shadows in order to find the glimmering of our light. Stories provide a glimpse into the lives of others and into the places which we inhabit – they can bring us together and they may also divide us. Drawing on our perceptions and interpretations stories allow us to weave meaning. 

Human beings are storytellers – we tell stories of where we come from, what we are doing, how we understand what has happened to us. We imagine and create stories of where we would like to go/be/do. Stories are the way in which we make sense of our living, the way in which we create meaning and together explore our understandings. 

In this workshop we will explore the evolution and development of humans as storytellers and how we can work with stories in nurturing the communing that is an essential part of working with communities. Stories can help us to learn about people and their places, they can support people in coming to learn about and understand each other, they can help us to imagine and decide together about where we want to go and how we want to go into the future. 

Stories can overlap, interweave and interact and can also stand alone. All stories are ultimately bound into the story of people/s and their place/s. Even those which are imaginary and never verbally shared will subtly be told in a persons engagement with others. 

It is thought that modern humans originated in Africa. Imagine then a people wandering through the bush and across the savannah; spreading out for parts of the day and coming together for food and protection during the starlit nights. Perhaps they made grunts and gestures, in an attempt to tell of where they had been and what they had seen. Over time they evolved tools and it is speculated that perhaps language and tool making evolved in a complimentary manner. Recent research has demonstrated that the part of the brain engaged in tool making (in this instance chipping away at stone to make axes) and language are located side by side. 

Let us imagine then that as people moved across the plains, into the Nile Delta and across to what would be known as Europe they made sounds and gestures, mimicking animals and describing landscapes and making tools and they evolved language, song and dance as ways of expressing themselves and sharing experience. So storytelling evolved.

Join us to explore story as one of the ways in which we can restore our capabilities for relating, how we can explore the wisdom of the old myths, how we can construct stories that deepen our understandings and allow us glimpses and insights into the lives of others. We can also work with stories to imagine and enfold ourselves into futures.

Explore both the written and oral traditions and dip into film, voice and digital fields. 

LEARNIING GOALS:

The learning goals for this workshop are as follows:

• to enable participants to appreciate and explore the role of story in peoples’ lives and its role in ecologically responsive community development.
• to enable participants to appreciate how mythology came to be located ‘at the heart of ecology’
• for participants to gain an insight into how and why humans construct stories
• to explore together some possible ways in which participants can work with stories as they work towards ecologically informed, sustaining and regenerative communities