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Chapter One:
Following the Beeline: How Story Connects Us
This material is edited from a much longer chapter with hopes it will intrigue you to discover the fullness of the book, Storycatcher, Making Sense of our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story, by Christina Baldwin. Each chapter is carried by a tale about people, family, or community, intertwined with philosophical and practical instruction about the nature of story, how it works and how we can practice it in our lives. The Storycatcher reading group guidelines show the list of questions that appears at the end of each chapter.
 Story — the abundance of it, and the lack of it — shapes us. Story — the abundance of it, and the lack of it — gives us place, lineage, history, a sense of self. Story — the abundance of it, and the lack of it — breaks us into pieces, shatters our understanding and gives it back over and over again, the story different every time. Story — the abundance of it, and the lack of it — connects us with the world and outlines our relationship with everything. When the power of story comes into the room, an alchemical reaction occurs that is unique to our kind: love or hate, identification or isolation, war or peace, good or evil intent can be stirred in us by words alone. The power of story is understood by the powerful, yet the power of story belongs to all of us, especially the least powerful. History is what scholars and conquerors say happened; story is what it was like to live on the ground.
The ground where I was born is the butte country of western Montana, a land of reds and oranges, sweeping wheat fields and brown tufts of cattle grass. Here the days begin with a pinkening line along the flattened east horizon like a great eye opening, and end with marauding sunsets that disappear like ghost riders into the western crags. I was set down in this landscape, placed into the arms of family, community, nation and nature.
 I have traveled far, but come back from time to time in search of some elusive sense of origin. Driving west out of Great Falls on Interstate 15, the one freeway that dissects these plains, running north like an artery to Shelby and Sweetgrass and the turnoff to Glacier Park, I join a bloodstream of tourists, ranchers, Indians, all going to the sun. Just north of the junkyard, truck stops, and cattle yard I swing onto Trunk Highway 21 — Vaughn Junction — where the roadbed follows a path as ancient as buffalo, as tribal migrations, as the sure-footed Sacagawea, who led her band of white men into the same vista that lies before me unchanged. Unchanged, as soon as my back is turned to the slash of interstate. Unchanged, as soon as the sun hits the pavement on a slant that transforms the road into a shimmering ribbon that might be grass, might be water. I drive half blind into glint and shadow until the road catches me up and I follow it as mesmerized as a deer.
Beyond Vaughn Junction, there is nothing in the way. Nothing to break the sightline. The first ridge of the Rockies rises beyond the buttes, the Continental Divide drawn invisibly along the upper crest of peaks, deciding what flows back toward me, what flows west toward the sea.
 My immediate sight is filled with the shape of Square Butte, an overturned, brown-wrapped box of land sticking straight up out of gullied pastures and wheat fields. The terrain around me is tucked away this October day in tidy strips of harvested grain and baled hay. I am heading toward sixty years of age and this is the first time I have seen my birth lands in any season other than high summer. The land waits for winter, though this afternoon is cool breeze, bright sun, a cheery day to find myself sitting on a pink marble headstone with my name on it: BALDWIN. Here lie Leo Elmer and Mary Hart Baldwin, my grandparents; Grace Baldwin Ho, Dorothy Baldwin Humphreys, two middle-aged aunts brought back to the bosom of the family to lie. My feet sink ankle deep into the thatch of grave grass.
For decades, a passel of kinfolk, changing crews every year, would show up for several weeks in August to bring in the honey crop.... One evening my grandpa called me into his study with a small glass bottle of honey in hand. Under the glow of his desk lamp he spread open the huge old Bible that had been his father's before him. The scent of honey rose from his skin and his clothing and maybe the Bible itself. "Lookee here, Chrissie," he said, holding the capped jar like a magnifying glass over the words. "Our bees make such pure honey you can read right though it." The letters were slightly wiggled, but I could see them. "Isaiah," he said in his hoarse whispery voice, "that's a good book. Here, read me this." His hands were square with a fleshy palm, the fingers all sinew and big knuckled. Outdoor hands, callused palms. His fingernail, cleaned with a pocketknife at the horse trough where the men sluiced off the dirt of the day before coming in to dinner, pointed to the middle of the page.
I stood on tiptoe, balancing myself with my hands on the edge of the roll-top desk. "Isaiah, 55:12," I said, just like they began in church, "For you shall go out in joy, and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands."
"Good," he said, and where he touched my hair I thought it smelled of honey. And where he touched my heart, there is honey, still.
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Tell Me This Story: Your Opportunity to
Share Your Story
Each of us has someone who put the honey in our heart. That person is often an ordinary person who becomes extraordinary through the power to touch another life. Teaching ourselves to recognize these persons and remember these moments is essential to becoming a Storycatcher.
Who put honey in your heart?
Let's start there.
Tell me that story.
Click here to answer this question with a story from your own life >>
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