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Chapter Ten:
Storycatcher: Taking Our Place in the Order of Things
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 is a search for community. Open your mouth, grab a pen, type on the screen — sing out who you are, for I need you. I am looking for you; you are looking for me. We are tribe. Something is happening to me: I am thrown into the spiral of my experience. I've never been here before. I am disoriented. But I know I cannot possibly be the first human being to experience this — where are the stories? Not that I'm going to live through something exactly the way anyone else has, but the purpose of the map is to show us how. And then I take my own steps.
 None of us can judge exactly what is needed: we don't know; we just set out the stories because someday, somebody will need these clues. You may have entered this book alone; you leave this book held in a network of storycatching. It will save your life: for the story that gets one person through makes a map for getting the next person through. Storycatching is really the art of story releasing, of putting good stories out in the world, holding them high and tossing them onto the wind like a hawk taking flight into freedom.
Story moves through the world in a living network. No longer restrained by face-to-face transmission, or limited by place of origin, story is a self-organizing force on the planet that works through us. Stories and people co-create. Stories and people co-evolve.
In their book A Simpler Way, Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers talk of the world as "tinkering itself into existence." They write: "But life's tinkering has direction. It tinkers toward order — toward systems that are more complex and more effective. The process used is exploratory and messy, but the movement is toward order.... What begins in randomness ends in stability. Life seeks solutions, tends toward support and stability, generates systems that sustain diverse individuals. ... But how it gets there violates all our rules of good process.... Life seeks order in a disorderly way. Life uses processes we find hard to tolerate and hard to believe in — mess upon mess until something workable emerges."
That's where we are now, living in the repeated messes. But when we are messing with life, not against it — attempting to contribute, even in our human ignorance of the whole picture — we are tinkering toward wholeness. We are contributing toward order. We are part of the living system, the network.
This network animates the Storycatcher in us and connects us to each other and to the wholeness of story, even though we only have part of the story to share. The Storycatchers' network seeds us with ideas, shares what works and what we learn when something doesn't work; this network reassures us that we belong to a community of human aspiration almost beyond imagining.
...
 Story told to inform — inspire — activate — becomes an act of citizenship. ... The proper use of story creates community; communities creates story.
Once there was a circle of journal-writing women who met in a fancy home along a little suburban creek. The creek ran through the backyard and into the city, where it was pushed underground in a large culvert until it discreetly disappeared into the swirling brown eddies of an industrialized river. Sitting in the solarium, month after month, the women wrote and read and noticed how often the creek appeared in their writing as a contemplative focus or a metaphor for their own life journeys. They began to think of the creek as a member of the group and as they looked more closely they realized she wasn't in very good health. As the water babbled around boulders, she churned up yellowish suds, and sometimes the water turned green with algae and smelled funny.
The women talked to an old man who stood on a pond's edge near this home and listened to him speak of the fish he caught here as a boy, and how now the creek was nothing but carp. "It gives me peace to just spend an hour throwing my line in the water," he told them, "but I'd never eat anything that came out." They followed the creek into town and talked to the Hmong families who relied on those carp for food, whether or not they were healthy, and who plucked watercress out of the babbling places near the golf course and sold it at the farmer's markets. And they began to understand: the creek held a very large story that reached out into issues of farm-field runoff, storm-water management, industrial pollution, gaps in social services, cultural differences, and class privilege. And the women, sitting in the sunroom sipping tea and eating watercress sandwiches, were writing within the circle of the story.
... Here is a choice: What will the women writing beside the creek do with their growing awareness? What would you do? At different times in our lives we choose avenues of escape or engagement. This time these women chose engagement. They saw the creek as an issue that was the right size for them to develop their power. The women traced the creek back to the lake it flowed out of and contacted the Department of Natural Resources. They found that the DNR could provide them with water-quality data over the past twenty years and they put this information into letters to the city council, the county government, and a flyer they were writing. They investigated how lawn fertilizer affects algae blooms. The next summer, when the water level was low, they walked the creek in one-mile segments, pulling garbage out of the muck and conversing with creek-side landowners about their lawn fertilizers. They carried their flyer: one side held information and phone numbers and websites outlining corrective practices. On the other side was a brief story about their writing circle and an invitation for others to do something about something they cared for.
So the journal writers pulled tires and scrap metal and plastic and slimy bottles and rusted cans out of the creek. They chipped their nails and got sunburned and got radicalized, step by sloshing step. They cried to find the lifeless bodies of ducks and buried a litter of drowned kittens. They cheered when landowners volunteered to join them and jumped in the creek to help them haul junk to shore, or agreed to inform others, to become creek tenders, and to pass along the word. And at the end of the day, nearly as dirty as the creek itself, they celebrated their transformation and proudly took a photograph of themselves dressed in their husbands' waders, or old muck boots and rain suits, sweaty and bedraggled warrioresses of the creek, standing in front of a mountain of garbage bags on their way to the dump. It was just the beginning.
When the women attended a city council meeting to let their commissioners know they were adopting the creek, a local reporter picked up the story. At first, they resisted the idea of becoming a media story. "We're not doing this to get attention for ourselves, we just want to see what can be done about this one little stretch of water." After some thought, however, they decided it was important that the story get told so that others would decide to do something in their own backyards.
 Stories start movements: Adopt a Highway is a story-to-action; Mothers Against Drunk Drivers is a story-to-action; foster grandparenting and school volunteer programs are stories-to-action. Storycatching is a movement. The list is beyond counting. Well, actually Paul Hawken tried to count it. At the Bioneers conference in October 2003, Hawken showed a video that listed the websites of nonprofit, community-based, nongovernmental organizations worldwide that are working to restore the planet and foster human community. The video is a visual of the earth in space, some soft music, and a scroll of names and websites. If played in its entirety the list would go on for three days. There are that many people in the network of restoration; there are that many stories.
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Tell Me This Story: Your Opportunity to
Share Your Story
Story is a search for community that allows us to share, build, and learn from each other. Intentional storycatching is a movement in the making, ensuring survival of the stories through oral and written traditions. Recognizing story as an act of citizenship, we know that the world can change on a word. Story can save us. We choose whether we want to live in hopefulness or despair. Storycatchers choose hopefulness, knowing that story has the power to change our lives.
What is the treasured moment you carry in your pocket right now?
Let's start there.
Tell me that story.
Click here to respond to this question with a story from your own life >>
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