I've been thinking about stories

So I've been thinking about stories, the stories that inform the decisions that we make in our lives. I've fallen out of the story of success, of pensions and mortgages. Now don't confuse me, these will all be part of this life that I'm living, but they are not any reason in themselves. They may be manifestations of a story that informs how I live in this world. There is something about money that doesn't cut it with me. I bore easily, money or affluence pervert my relationship with work. The youth program in Hamilton is a strong example of this for me. After developing the program and building relationships with the people living in the neighborhood and the staff at the community health organization I was working alongside, there came a point where I came to understand how the youth program, and my work, was part of larger systems that of themselves are informing us in ways that we decide to kill ourselves by disrupting earth systems for example, or hurting other people, or our selves, or killing our selves. Suicide is not an uncommon problem.

There is good work happening all over, but I'm interested in the larger story that binds the things that we do, with the reason(s) that we do them. My interest in stories that haven't experienced institutions (like university, commercialism, etc..) is about this. I've recently realized that here on this land, turtle island, is such a rich place for the very fact that people still remember. All of our families have had stories, and have lived in places that met their needs, for food shelter water creativity .... All people are from somewhere, and all of those places are of this earth. In this way, we all share a disruption from an earth based story, to whatever it is today that our life decisions fit into to make sense.


We live amongst peoples who have only recently been disrupted from their stories. We live on the very land, drink from the very water, our lives are truly sustained by the annual abundance that comes to this place as the earth bends towards the sun.

I am interested in different ways of living than the dominant industrial-modern-capitalist ways, obviously. There is much work to be done, in this 'alternative' or 'back to the land' ways of living that includes exploring and strengthening our stories, allowing ourselves to be affected by our real living to further influence our understanding of what is, and therefor who we are, as humans, as animals, as a manifestation of life.

I'll leave it at that, but I think there's something here leading into the tatoo on my arm, which is part of a story that speaks to good ways of relating with each other and all of creation.