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​story is the protection of the earth

When the land has a story it is protected. When it does not it is destroyed.

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You are sitting here with us, but you
are also out walking in a field at dawn.
                                                          --Rumi
 
We dream awake. It happens easily, as when the smell of a freshly-​cut board returns us to a memory of summer camp, shouts and laughter, a wooden cabin beside a lake. As when standing in the grocery store beside bags of rice and bottles of teriyaki sauce we “dream up” an onion sizzling in a pan, that broccoli at the back of the fridge, the welcoming smell of garlic.
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What we call imagining is one of our ways of thinking. We remember the past or contemplate the future and are, for a moment, in two places at once, seeing what cannot be seen, hearing what cannot be heard. It is a power intrinsic to being human, and therefore to the earth itself.

The Aranda people of Central Australia use the word alcheringa to describe the realm in which stories happen. This word is often approximated in English as “dreamtime,” though that word carries with it unfortunate connotations of childhood and innocence. As I understand it, this word describes a time that is not only past but still to come, an eternal realm that, like the Celtic Otherworld, shares the same location as the world of the everyday though it can only be accessed through certain trance-states, myths, and dreams. It is an imaginary realm which is no less real for being insubstantial. It is where all things begin and end, and contains the patterns by which our everyday world is described.

This may sound exotic and strange. But in broad terms it is not so different from the dream-life which opens for each of us in sleep or, for that matter, the world of mathematics.
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For mathematics too is an imaginary realm which, though insubstantial, contains patterns which are useful descriptions of the world in which we live. And just as it is pointless to attempt to visit the place where Einstein’s equation of mass-energy equivalence (“E=mc2”) is located, so it is pointless to go looking for, to take one example, Sleeping Beauty’s thorn-defended palace. Neither exists in the world in a concrete way, though the patterns they describe—of the relation between mass and energy, or of the feminine journey through adolescence—are visible everywhere. 

The glass of wine on the restaurant table is not the same as the one in the hands of the priest, for one has a story and the other does not. So too the veteran in the drug-treatment program is simply a man with a problem, yet connect him to the story of Odysseus returning home from the Trojan war and he has both a troubled brother whom he never knew and a map to guide him through his suffering. To see the world in these mythic terms is a healing act.

Yet this understanding of story as a pattern of the mythworld is imperfect, for while stories can be said to occur in the realm of the unseen they are also often beautifully, marvelously married to place. Many stories have their origins in a particular hill, waterfall, or tree, and though they can be carried away from those origins they will eventually—like an electrical charge in a storm cloud—seek to be grounded once again in a particular landscape.

The Finger Lakes region of upstate New York where I live is riddled with place names out of classical mythology, so that in a day of driving you can visit Rome, Ithaca, and Troy, mythic places steeped in narratives of victory, healing, and death. To give those names to this landscape was an arrogant act by those who came to live here, an act of conquering which speaks of their profound ignorance of—and disregard for—the culture of the Haudensaunee peoples who had lived here for thousands of years before they arrived. Yet at the heart of that action is the natural human instinct to live in a landscape made rich through story.

For just as we may sit in a chair and, through the voice of a storyteller, also walk through a forest bright with summer-light and birdsong, so the boulder beside the parking lot may be graffiti-covered and strewn with garbage yet also be a stone hurled by the sky-god in his battle with the giants back when the universe began. These two realms continually interpenetrate, inform, and act upon one other.

Storytellers—together with shamans, medicine women, and holy people of all kinds—are those able to walk in both worlds, able to weave together the visible and the invisible so as to bring health to the land and their communities. For when the land has a story it is protected. A forest can be cut and bulldozed easily, so long as it is only a forest; but see it as the place where the goddess walked, as the battlefield of your ancestors, or the grove where Merlyn once called twelve spirits out of twelve stones and—so long as that story is remembered by a community—it will remain a forest.

The territories of Israel and Palestine are fought over so fiercely not only because they are home to millions of people but because they are drenched in the stories of three major religions. North America, by contrast, is for those of European descent a land largely empty of story. As a result its hills and forests can be easily leveled, cut, and cleared for housing developments; as a result the metal surveyor’s stakes with their pink flags arrive, and the earth movers soon after.

So storytelling is a dreaming which brings health not only to ourselves but to the world around us. This dreaming is an everyday habit of thought, an experience so common as to go unnoticed. Yet all the same there is something mysterious about it. We sit in a chair listening but are, for a time, standing in a field at night beside a pool of water, looking down at the rippling reflection of the moon. A crowd of workers with dirt on their hands is around us, and among them a restless king with a man beside him in a long cloak, muttering into his ear.

This vision is not something imposed upon us from without but is a collaborative creation of the storyteller, our own imaginations, and the story itself. This is what gives it its power. When the story is finished there is no evidence that anything has happened at all, though for many of those who heard it the world is different than it was before. 
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