Telling your higher story

Welcome to week forty-six. This week, David listens to someone sharing around a campfire and reflects on the process of telling a higher story.

Excerpt:

We stopped next to a campfire and listened as an elegant man completed a story. The pilgrims of Caravan appeared to have returned to dressing in more or less modern attire.

The work with life mission moving through time seemed to be complete for the moment. As the man finished speaking, I realized it was his story. His was a story of a life between two worlds. He asked what it meant to be of these two worlds in the horizontal world. I wondered if remembering being part of the horizontal world and Caravan helped him. As he finished, others sitting around this campfire said nothing. The woman in the earth robe standing by the campfire next to him put her hand on his shoulder and said, “Tell us again. Find the highest thread of calling in your story.”

Everyone in the circle leaned in. I could feel their presence to his story. What were they listening for? He started over, taking more time, weighing his words. He seemed to listen and watch for their response. As he told his story again, I remembered something James Hillman wrote. “It is not so much the damaging things that happened to us, as the damaging way we tell ourselves the story of what happened.” I wondered if this man would now tell his story differently.
His story of the journey between the traditional and the modern, African and European, ancestral home and city, community and isolation, secular and sacred life interested me, and stayed with me as Verity signaled to move on.

The Caravan of Remembering, Chapter 3, Life Mission, Spiritual Agreement, p.99-100.