Craig Chalquist, PhD 5 min read · Mar 30, 2022 Craig Chalquist, PhD 5 min read · Mar 30, 2022
Change our guiding stories and everything built from them changes too.
Craig Chalquist
Chalquist.com
“I did it because I want to be with Grandma.”
Back in my days as a trainee psychotherapist, I saw a family whose teen daughter had tried to kill herself. Emotionally, the constantly fighting family was a chaotic mess. The daughter’s sole support, Grandma, had suddenly died. The daughter had made a serious attempt to follow her.
Why? Because going to heaven meant being with Grandma again. So I asked Daughter, “How will she will feel about your leaving life ahead of schedule?”
Imagining Grandma’s disappointment put an end to the suicidal impulse. Realizing she’d be around a while, Daughter began pushing back against the family’s manipulative antics.
Can you think of any important part of life that has no root in story? Every important fact, every turning point, every self-perception, worldview, passion, plan, bias, and idea harbors within it a core of story. What is conflict? A contest of stories about how something is or should be. What is change? A deepening of story, or a trade of one story for another.
A common story is that most Americans hate their career, but I am not one of them. To use a title I storied up for myself, I am a loreologist: an explorer of the authoritative guiding stories we use but are sometimes unknowingly
used by. I trace the deep roots of our personal lore, find where the story is stuck, and try to help unstick it. I also teach my graduate students and workshop participants how to go about this. I like that a fanciful title stands over how I earn my living.
As I write this, Putin carries on a war in Ukraine. The news focuses on casualties and battle reports, and rightly so; but few have noticed, as Gary Lachman has, the underlying story behind the war: Putin’s attempt to restore (and restory) the empire of “Holy Mother Russia.” For the aggressors, the war is motivated at bottom, after all economic and political factors are accounted for, by a gigantic nationalistic fairytale, an archaic fiction with deadly real world consequences.
Old bits of folklore spring back to life all the time. The nature god Pan, for example, was known in antiquity for jumping out of bushes in Arcadia to scare passersby. The words “panic” and “pandemic” come from Pan. The current worldwide pandemic, medically known as COVID-19, passed into humans from the animals we cage and sell like commodities and whose habitats we destroy. What is undomesticatable Pan, what is Nature itself, trying to tell us about our relations with what’s left of the natural world?
The story for us to focus on here has to do with the environmental science students I occasionally teach at the University of California. They are learning ecology, policy, community sustainability, data-driven solution finding, and effective leadership as climate chaos accelerates around the world. A time is coming when what they know will be in desperate demand not just here or there, but everywhere.
It’s fun to bring storytelling, folklore, and experiential activities to students so immersed in hard science and practical politics. Unlike some of their older colleagues, for whom only what can be measured matters, the students are very open to what the humanities can offer them. Their imaginative capabilities are alive, if sometimes underused.
One spring morning, we left the classroom, walked out onto the grass, sat down, and began a guided imagery exercise. As the students lay on their backs with eyes closed, I asked them to imagine their awareness moving from the head down through the body and into the grass, the soil beneath, the rocks under that, and on down into bedrock, mantle, magma, and the core of Earth as the pool of imagining spread outward under rivers, seas, and continental plates.
In about thirty minutes, the group was immersed in visualizing the interior of the entire planet supporting them with its flows of rock, water, air, ozone, and magnetism.
“Imagine the billions of years of self-organizing wisdom beneath, above, and around you,” I went on softly as passersby gazed in surprise at graduate students of science lying face-up on the campus lawn. “Think of all the life Earth supports, including yours.” A pause to let them soak it all in, then: “Any time you wish, you can repeat this exercise and return to the sense of being held by the intelligence that gave birth to you and that continually sustains you.”
I led them back up from core to surface and atmosphere to ground, then asked them to open their eyes. A few were weeping quietly in wonder, which is normal for this kind of activity.
Here are a handful of the comments students made when we sat in a circle to talk about how it had been for them:
“My brain knows about the self-sustaining cycles of nature, but for the first time, I felt them in my body.”
“It’s all so incredibly beautiful!”
“The age of our planet, and all that has happened here. What Earth must know!”
“I now have a new mentor: Earth.”
“I not only know, but feel what I’m fighting to protect.”
For many students of the environment, Earth, place, nature, animals, and the elements, though known to be complexly organic and inextricably relational, remain emotionally at one remove, as a kind of complicated machinery. This is because the paradigms — stories — we use to teach view the natural world atomistically and linearly. We have been captured by the Big Machine image of how everything works, including ourselves; as a result, this controlling image stories and narrows our perceptions even when we know better.
The problem isn’t science or that scientific education kills the spirit. The most scientific among us tend also to be the most imaginative and creative… when they survive institutionalization and bureaucratic abuse.
The problem, loreologically, is when the story of the Big Machine is sold as the only story worth knowing. When Method becomes our monotheism, what is intuitive, enfleshed, and imaginative is forced into shadow, where it can only live symptomatically as paranoid fantasy, willed ignorance, or grandiose magical thinking. The wonderous vision we toss out the psyche’s door leaks darkly up through the floorboards.
Alter the tale we tell ourselves, and the passive get active, the uncaring involved, and the guilt-ridden liberated into new possibilities for living.
Modify a worldview, and empires topple, dictators flee, and funds flow humanely.
Change the story from one of distant analysis to data-supported care, and the spectator of global catastrophe evolves into a protector asking: What can I do to help?