The Untapped Power of Narratives for Living Futures

“This, it seemed to me, was not merely premonitory but a dream that actually did something… a dream, in short, that was an act of learning.”

– Oliver Sacks

Many human tools for thriving have been neglected as the old, dark enchantments that brought us to the brink of extinction continue to command our attention and to consume life and time. We pause too long on the via negativa, the way of darkness in the warrior path as taught by the Rev. Matthew Fox. Completed by the via positiva, via creativa, and via transformativa, that path changes character and outlook and yields mature strengths. It supports an all-encompassing narrative of becoming that enables followers to create a life story that, as Jerome Bruner puts it, “permits us to hark back selectively to our past while shaping ourselves for the possibilities of an unimagined future.”

Champions of New Story are taking on the challenge of creating narratives for living futures. What is New Story? That’s up to each of us who is creating a living protagonist. For me, it is epics that pattern human thriving in and with the body of life that gives us life. One example of a new storyteller would be Tristan Gooley, who in The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Sign notes that now only artists, indigenous people, and professional soldiers know how to read the land, and who shares these perennial but neglected skills with readers. Another is the late Oliver Sacks, whose syncretic thinking is revealed in his posthumous book The River of Consciousness, and whose new observations of ages-old human experiences—such as sleep—conclude with Everything in its Place.

For the information junkie, acquiring knowledge by reading a long, syncretic, life- and time-contextualized story may be difficult—or impossible. For the publisher, such ‘products’ may fail to meet expectations. The olden-time small publishers who balance the potential losses of virtuous publishing with the book-as-drug blockbuster have all but disappeared. Will creative writers with useful funds of knowledge create new narratives that share knowledge and wisdom about life? They are already doing it. Examples include Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gary Snyder, Scott Freeman, Jennifer Ackerman, Jonathan Weiner, Bruce Pascoe, and Jack Nisbet. Get a good book, hunker down, and get some wisdom—from someone else’s blood, sweat, and tears! Or… write your own to inspire others to love wild life while they can.