Windows and Mirrors - The Connective Power of Storytelling, by Jazz Meyer
"Storytelling is a practice of vulnerability, of intimacy, and of humanity."
Jazz Meyer is a workshop facilitator and writer, a perpetual student of the universe, and a lover of vulnerability.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with stories. Like most children, I sat enraptured as my parents read me bedtime stories, the words and pictures weaving a world within my tiny mind. As I grew older I was the one reading myself to sleep, hiding under the covers with a torch and a dog-eared book long after my bedtime. Soon I started writing my own short stories, replete with illustrations, crafting my own bound storybooks from scrap paper and twine. In high school my notebooks were filled with angsty poems and melancholy tales, and my journals overflowed with recollections of my teenage days. It seemed only natural that storytelling would become part of my life and I eventually went on to complete a Bachelor’s degree in filmmaking, bringing my stories to the screen.
Now, as an author, blogger and podcaster, my obsession continues. And over this lifetime of delving into the art of storytelling, I am more convinced than ever that stories, far more than entertainment, actually function as windows and mirrors.
There’s one other credential to add to that list - I facilitate workshops on communication, giving space for people to open themselves to each other with compassion and understanding. Along with storytelling, my greatest passion is people. And I believe one feeds into the other. I love people because they are living, breathing stories. And I love stories because they connect me to people.
The structure of a story itself is something that has been discussed and debated since antiquity, and while there are many ways to tell a story, I believe the most fundamental factor is connection. In stories we show ourselves and we see ourselves. Storytelling is a practice of vulnerability, of intimacy, and of humanity.
As a teller of stories, I recognise that they are powerful windows into the human condition. When I craft a story, I am inevitably offering a part of myself to my audience. I am taking the culmination of my lifetime, of my collective experiences and forming some part of that into a tale with which to connect with other humans. It’s an incredibly vulnerable act, an act of exposure. In my most meaningful works, I experience the distinct sensation of baring my soul. As a reader, listener, or viewer, I see stories as an opportunity to connect with those who tell them. I see them as an offering, as an invitation, as a display of the human heart behind them. As Ernest Hemingway once said, ‘There is nothing to writing. All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.’
We, all of us, are longing to know and to be known, to see and to be seen. We need connection in some form - this is a non-negotiable necessity of human existence. And through the window of storytelling we find some of that connection when we see into each other. We find that intimate, vulnerable humanity that we all secretly long for.
And so, too, do stories act as mirrors. When I hear a particularly poignant story, one that touches my heart in some way, I see myself. I am reflected in the story’s characters. With my head buried in a good book or my eyes glued to the screen of an entrancing movie, I don’t just see the characters, I become them. I feel myself embodied in the heroes and heroines of these stories, and I follow them on their journey, through all their peaks and troughs, all their challenges and victories. I connect with parts of myself that I might be ignoring, avoiding or denying. I am enlivened and awakened to my own humanity.
A filmmaker friend once asked me if I think life works like a narrative. I believe that it does, but only in hindsight. Our minds are meaning-making machines, finding patterns with a deftness that surpasses our conscious faculties. In one fascinating study, a group of participants was shown a short film that involved three geometric shapes being moved around the screen. They were then asked to describe what the film showed. All but one of the 34 participants described the film as a relational story, explaining the roles of each of the objects in the film, their actions, and their relationships to each other. Only one described it in purely geometrical terms.
We have the power to craft our lives into stories - into tales that bring meaning and purpose to otherwise random events. We find the connections that are hidden in our lives - we ‘connect the dots’ as Steve Jobs famously put it - looking back at past events and organising them in a way that tells a story. What’s beautiful about this, is that we choose what that story is. We can shift the focus onto whatever is meaningful to us and can decide whether a story is finished or not.
In The Hero With A Thousand Faces, American researcher of mythology and religion, Joseph Campbell, espoused the now-famous theory of the hero’s journey. When I first heard about the hero’s journey, I was intrigued to find that I could look back on my life and find this journey in different areas - I could project this narrative structure not only onto my life as a whole, but onto the subplots that threaded their way through.
This theory aimed to sum up the central narrative structure in many of the world’s stories, myths and legends. And while there are many possible elements involved in this narrative arc, in its broadest sense it follows Aristotle’s philosophy of the three-act structure.
In the first act, known as ‘Departure’, our hero begins as an inhabitant of the ordinary world before seizing the call to adventure that lures them over the threshold into the ‘special world’ as Campbell called it.
This crossing of the threshold brings the hero into the second act, characterised as ‘Initiation’. Here, the hero is tested and faces a great ordeal, resulting in their death and rebirth, and the claiming of the reward.
Taking the road back and crossing over the threshold into the ordinary world again marks the beginning of the third act - the ‘Return’. The hero returns with the elixir, the reward for which they fought, and balance is restored, coming full circle to the ordinary world, where the story is free to begin once more.
"I recognise that I have a story, I am a story. And every person I meet has a story, and is a story."
We’re all familiar with this narrative - through the fairytales and folklore that defined our childhoods. We know the ‘once upon a time’ and the ‘happily ever after’ and everything that happens in between. We know that, generally speaking, stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, even if they don’t necessarily occur in that order.
What I love about the hero’s journey, and the three-act structure in general, is that (at least in their original format) they are descriptive, rather than prescriptive. These narrative theories explain the way we already tell stories, the way we have been telling stories forever. Campbell’s theory came together after he studied the world’s most pervasive myths and religions. He found the common thread that binds together humankind’s eons-long practice of collective storytelling.
This is, of course, just one theory to explain the complexity of human storytelling - an art form that shifts and changes through time and across cultures. But it is an interesting tool with which to measure the similarities that seem to bind us together and it has now inspired an entire self-development movement, based on the narrative steps in the hero’s journey. Stories are something we inherently connect to, they are healing and illuminating. They help guide us back to ourselves and to each other.
However we tell them, stories are powerful. They have been around just about as long as the human race has. We are drawn to telling them and hearing them and what’s beautiful is that one cannot exist without the other. To tell a story you must have someone to whom you can tell it, and vice versa. Stories are tools for connection.
I’m constantly awed by the potency of storytelling, by the fact that I can weep tears of grief, or fall in love, or become livid over a person that exists only on a page. And I will forever be grateful that through these narratives, I find myself closer to the heart of humanity, not only through the people in the stories, but through the stories in the people.
With these windows and mirrors, I become more of myself as an individual, and more of myself as part of a collective. I recognise that I have a story, I am a story. And every person I meet has a story, and is a story.
By reading the stories in ourselves and each other we are taking up the call to adventure - the adventure of diving deep into vulnerability. We cross the threshold into the world of exposed hearts, and come out the other side with that elixir of connection, bringing it back to our ordinary world so that we may, upon finding another story, begin the process all over again.
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