A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens–second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day’s events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.
Reynolds Price

I began my day today with a blank sheet of paper. Having recently been inspired by the incredibly creative book What It Is by Lynda Barry, I wanted to try and explore my ideas of story using words and images. I knew it wouldn’t be elevated to the level of Art that Barry reaches, but it was my inspiration for the exercise. I worked hard to keep from thinking too much about any one thing,  I wanted this to be more of a stream of consciousness exercise, just letting words, phrases and images come without digging into the detail.

I stared at the page for a moment, then wrote, “What is ‘story’?” Since I had been thinking about “story” for a few days, there were already a few ideas of what it was floating around in my head; however, I wanted something fresh and more instinctive to come out on the page. To do this, I ignored my initial responses and traveled back in my mind to the youngest version of myself that I have access to– nine year old Paul. Nine year old Paul loved Star Wars, Micronauts, Legos and Speed Racer; he also loved to climb trees and to lay in the grass and watch the clouds float by  as they morphed constantly into fish, pirate ships and funny faces. If I was to ask nine year old Paul the same question about story that I ask myself today, his answer would be different… was different.

The younger version of myself responded to story in a much less technical way. He related to story by thinking about how he had experienced stories in his life. I wrote down the the first ideas that came to mind: a children’s book, a tall tale and an ancient adventure. When I paused for a moment to think about children’s books, I found that I didn’t imagine a specific book, I thought about the image of a parent sitting beside a child’s bed reading a book. I tried to remember my parents reading books as a child, It may have happened, but I had no memory of it. The image that I had , was a manufactured one, based on some ideal. So, I poked around in the dusty attic of my memory, trying to remember bedtime stories. An image of my dad at my bedside appeared, then suddenly, I remembered.

There was a little cat stuck in the gutter and it was scared and meowing… actually, its meows were words… “help me, help me,” it cried in a little cat voice. I know for a fact that the cat had a name, I don’t remember what it was, perhaps it changed over the years. Really, I don’t remember much about what happened in the story. I am pretty sure the story involved a young boy rescuing the cat, having to over come some obstacles, and I’m pretty sure that young boy had the same name as me. This is the first story I remember being told as a kid. Sure, I may have heard some Bible stories about Jesus, Moses or David and Goliath, but this is the first story I actually remember feeling something about. There was a little cat stuck in the gutter, there was a rain storm, the cat feared for its life and so did I.

What is 'story'?

My little exercise triggered a lot of thoughts and a bunch of memories. I followed along as they popped into my mind, recording those thoughts on the paper. Sometimes, it resulted in a little sketch, mostly as words, phases and questions. I remembered how some stories played a significant role in my life and others were just emotional memories, mostly feelings with a handful of details attached. Things came slowly at first, but soon the trickle became a steady stream. I raced to record them before they flowed away.

As my thoughts moved and I followed those distant memories, they progressed through the years following narratives that opened doors in my life, inspired me or ignited my imagination. One of the most curious discoveries of this exercise was that every thought and memory I have of ‘story’ is a positive one. Not that all the stories I’ve encountered in my life have been positive, but all the memories I have are tagged with positive labels. I don’t know what that means, but I think the contents of this legal pad are going to reveal something more significant as I explore this further.

I am aware of my deep personal need for stories. Perhaps they are tools I use to see something within myself that isn’t readily apparent, or maybe they help me process a complicated world in a way that I can relate to. I know that it is complicated, but it is something I have craved since my earliest memories as a child. What is it about about the little cat in the gutter that still resonates with me to this day? So many questions to ask– I look forward to discovering some answers.

So, what is the earliest story that you remember? What do you remember about it? And even more interestingly, why do you remember it?

The Storyteller

I have been a storyteller my whole life. I may not have been a good one, but I have always love to tell a story. Problem is, my stories tend to be heavy on details and longer than the average attention span. I think that is because I see things with rich detail and when I talk about something, I like to include the detail. My dad had the same problem. Once, I heard it said of my father, that if someone asked him the time of day, he would tell them how to build a watch.

I have started this post three time and abandoned it twice because I started drifting off in some direction that I keep feeling needs more and more explanation. I hoping that the third time is the charm. I began this 30 day “story” challenge because I started peeling back the layers of my highly chaotic life and I started asking myself that one basic question, “what do I want to do for a living?” I have given myself permission to ask that question. I think I have plenty of skills and experience to maintain a profitable career in software development, but I left that five years ago because it was killing me.

When I worked as a programmer, I knew in my heart of hearts that what I was doing with my life was absolutely the wrong thing. I was certain the God had created me to do something specific and sitting in a cubical cranking out lines of C Sharp code wasn’t it… and it wasn’t even remotely close. However, when I quit my amazing job, that paid me way too much money, I wanted to do something that made me come alive– something creative. For some reason the thing that was screaming the loudest within me was filmmaking. I didn’t know much about filmmaking, I mean, I knew a lot about filmmaking; I had read a bunch of books, watched a lot of movies, even watched many of them a second time with the director’s commentary. I had learned a lot about filmmaking, but I didn’t know squat.

I know that sounds contradictory, but that is the best way I can describe it. For the last three years, I have loosely chased a dream of being a filmmaker only to reach a point where I wonder if I should continue. I know I need to be doing something creative with my life. I was born with many creative abilities, but I am really unsatisfied with my direction in life. For some reason, I have reached a place where I don’t really have a clear vision of where I want to go.

A few months ago, I started  looking deep within myself and asking some crucial questions. I really want to know what is written in my DNA, what it is that am I uniquely created for. Having turned 40 in May, I thought it was a good a time as any to figure out what I want to do with my life. I didn’t feel as though my current direction was drawing enough on my creativity and I needed more answers. When I began to examine my life, when I ran back the years and looked at a younger version of myself, I started asking what was the common theme in my life that seemed to play out in my memories. What were those things that I remembered, what made me feel alive.

I wandered around for a while until I started seeing something play out repeatedly in my memory, something that come back to me time and time again. Having a vivid imagination and a keen sense of observation, I began early in life to be a storyteller. As it turns out, stories have been a central theme in my life. I have come back to it over and over again the past few months, but I constantly hear the same answer when I ask myself what I want to do for the rest of my life… not doubt about it, I want to tell stories.

The problem is, I have no idea what that means. So, I am starting a 30 day journey to look at “story”, what it is, and how it plays a role in my life. I know I want to be a story teller, but I don’t know if that will be as a filmmaker, a writer, a painter, a lawyer or a professional liar. I have absolutely no idea. I do know that stories flow out of me and they energize me. So, here I go. I’ve got 29 more days to go and I hope I discover something interesting along the way.

What is "story"?

A frequent theme on this blog is how long it has been since I have written anything. It seems that I can go a year without writing anything then I’ll post something about intending to do better, followed by the creation of five or ten different unfinished blogs– then I just lose interest. So, to spice things up a bit, I have done what oh, so many other bloggers have done– created a 30 day writing challenge.

I have chosen to take a different path here, mostly since I am writing to for the enjoyment of a non-audience. I am not fooling myself, no one is sitting around waiting to hear what I have to say. Ultimately, the next 30 days is about me. Lately, I have been stuck in a bit of a miry place and I am in great need of stoking some internal fires in hopes of getting a handle on what direction my life should be taking.

I have quieted my mind and sought deeply for what it is that makes, me, uniquely me. I needed to find out what it is, that is deep within me, which I can burn for soul-fuel, something that is naturally produced inside me. When I reached the deepest part of myself and could see no further, I spoke to the darkness.  Straining to hear something, I heard the fainest echo– like the gentle rustling of a brittle leaf as it falls from its home among the branches to find its final resting place upon the ground. A little crackle that spoke a single word– “story”.

So, 30 days this September will be dedicated to “story”. What that means, I have absolutely no idea– I guess I am about to find out.

I have many, many unfinished posts that I’ve started writing and never finished. I am going to go through many of them and just flush them out into the wild. I have tried to do this before, on several occasions, but started reading a post and began feeling like it really needed to be finished before publishing it. Well, it was deja vous all over again. I started writing again on the posts and failed to finish it– again, keeping it stranded. Many of these posts have some good stuff in them even though they are not finished.

This post was to be about “crooked paths” and how it seems that God often leads people down paths that don’t seem straight. This is often contrary to our religious concept of a “straight and narrow” path that we expect to be the correct one. I wanted to look at that religious concept and compare it to many of the paths that God’s has lead his people down throughout the Bible and see if our concept matches those examples. Well, I only got to the introduction of that concept (after much rambling about my life) and never had time to do all of the verse research for my examples. Maybe one day I will get back to this, but until then, consider this my first “flush” — an unfinished post that I am publishing anyway.

Originally written February, 24 2009:

I haven’t written anything in a long time. For the past several months something deep inside me has wanted to explode out in words, but something has been repressing it. Every time I have sat down to write, something has distracted me. It’s not because I have nothing to write about, so much has been happening in my life since my last post– I just seem stuck.

Recently, I have been turning over and over in my head my direction in life. Over two years ago, I left a great paying software development job to pursue an interest in filmmaking. While I can’t consider my pursuit a failure, it has not taken the direction I expected. I had hoped to be writing and making films that spoke from the eternity in my heart, but that is not what has happened. For many different reasons, I have found myself looking to others for inspiration and motivation– something that I have not found, at least not in the way that I wanted.

Despite the last two years having taken I path that I did not expect, I do not feel that it was the wrong path for me to take. I have met many wonderful people and forged several great friendships, something, that I feel, is always worth the cost. But somehow I have a deep sense that I am off target and steering in a direction without purpose or vision. Every time I try to circle the wagons and regroup, I end up heading off again with no resolution or sense of direction.

Is filmmaking something that I need to be pursuing? The downturn in the economy makes me want to run back to the more profitable world of software, something more stable and significantly more lucrative. But each time I begin to look at software development jobs, I get a sick feeling in my stomach and a deep foreboding begins to creep into my psyche. I don’t understand that reaction, I am looking at jobs that pay 70-90k per year, how could something like that create this dark of a reaction?

I think that the answer is hidden somewhere along my current path. I have a concern about my current direction, but I have no real desire to return to path the was easy and comfortable for me. Why? I think it all has to do with the reason I took a different path in the first place. Creativity. I fear going back to a place where there is no need for that part of me that makes me feel alive. I imagined that filmmaking would put me on a path that would help me tap the deep rivers of life that run within me, helping me to plumb the depths of creativity that God placed in me, one of those important things that make me uniquely– me.

The real problem is that despite working around the industry that I had felt drawn toward, I have yet to parlet that into a deliberate exercise in creativity. For the last two years I have worked on projects that didn’t require much from me creatively. Deep down, I still want to create, I want to make art, but something more sinister is at work preventing me from doing that very thing. I don’t know if it is just pure laziness or if it is some covert fear of failure that is bridling me and holding me back from doing those things that I need to be doing.

For many years I was afraid, because I was under a dogmatic assumption that God doesn’t want his children working in the film industry– something that I later came to believe was simply imagined and not actually based in who God is and what He does in and with his people. Not something I simply conjured to make me okay with something, but based on prayer and the doors that seemed to open at just the right time, when I simply rested in God’s sovereignty and stopped living a life driven by a misguided religious fear.

I don’t say this to suggest that there are jobs that are “okayed” by God and others that aren’t– I don’t believe that God operates that way. Sometimes, based on my life experience, God will allow you to take a certain path, only to lead you to another one. There have been a number of times in my life that I have taken paths that I couldn’t have imagined that God would be okay with, but discovered that something wonderful in my life would not have been possible without it.

I don’t understand the ways of God. In the book of Isaiah there is a verse that becomes more and more true the older I get:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

—Isaiah 55:8-9

I know more now than at any other time in my life, that God doesn’t do things the way that I expect Him to. Almost all of my religious fears are based on assumptions and conclusions that I have made about God, but the more I become acquainted with the people that God used in the Bible, the more I realize that God almost always does what is unexpected and uses that people who are often the wrong type of person or someone who is on what seems to be the wrong path.

While I worry about not being creative and not living up to what God has created me for, God is simply taking me down a road that exposes my fears and doubts and constantly compels me to put off my anxieties and simply rest in Him. The more I rest in what God has already done for me, the less I worry about what I am doing wrong and simply look for the doors that are opening to me and taking that paths that appear before me. The more I trust in Him, the more I cant’ help but realize that exact path is not issue, it is the walk that matters.

There are many verses in the Bible about “paths.” Those who want condemn a certain path will pull out Matthew 7:13+14 which declares that “wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction” with the compelling that one should only take the “narrow road that leads to life.” The problem with such a misplaced criticism is that it is usually imposed on by someone who has the “narrow road” pre-defined without any understanding or experience of being “led to life”… or even more importantly, the experience of having God actually lead them down a crooked road.

Would God lead someone down a crooked road? I think that the answer is best know through experience, but certainly if He would, then there should be evidence in the Bible. I think that the first solid example of such a path would be Abraham…

Sorry that I never got around to finishing this one, certainly such a study would be one worth doing. How about digging into this and posing some of our own insights and experiences?

Hey, just a note that Kim and I now have a joint blog called Goats in the ‘Hood over at blogspot.com come by and check it out, it should have some fun and informational blogs about many of the things we have been digging into, like baking bread, budget shopping, planting a vegetable garden and roasting our own coffee at home. Much of what we are doing is timely as many Americans try to stretch their dollars a little further.

I am sitting here wracking my brain, trying to think of some fun, witty or deep to write about, but my mind is tossed by a constant tempest and any safe harbor my mind finds, is quickly stirred again into frenzied sea. I can’t count how often I have an idea for a blog that never sees the light of day or is begun only to be bogged down by an excessive inclusion of detail and back-story. Often it is just an idea for a blog title that gets my mind thinking about writing, but lately… nothing has solidified into anything resembling a cohesive blog.

In some way, I think I need to exercise the demons of these ideas, so, they don’t continue to plague me. So, here will be my attempt at some micro-blogging– a blog title and a single paragraph of bloggering:

I Enjoy Being Missed…

Occasionally, my world is viewed from a very negative perspective, and often I see the things around me as a litany of things that can, and possibly will, go wrong. Today is not one of those days. Everyday, when I leave my job, I have to take a short walk through a nature path to get to the parking lot where my truck is parked. I often enjoy this walk, as the path is lined with trees and a manicured garden which often causes me to walk a little slower than normal in order to take in the beauty of the man-polished nature. On this particular day, I was walking and noticed a couple walking toward me, so, I shifted to my right in order to allow them to pass comfortably. This was a very lucky happenstance, for as fate would have it, just as I shifted to my right, I heard a series of large splashes to my immediate left. I turned quickly to witness the source of the splashes, as a very large bird-turd splattered the sidewalk beside me creating a fourth splash. As I considered how my day may have begun, had I been the target of those droppings, I couldn’t help but think, how much I enjoyed being missed.

Ok, that wasn’t that bad, it may not have been a true “micro-blog” but, for someone like myself, who is usually prone to writing epic blogs, that was pretty micro.

It’s been more than six months since I’ve posted anything online. It is difficult to believe that, in the swirling changes happening over the last few months, I haven’t found at least a few moments to do a brain dump. I think I began a few blogs, but they were mostly based in some deep, theological wrestling and tended to be something that I couldn’t just bang out in 20 minutes.

At the moment, I am sitting in a room at the end of a long hallway of a large Hotel, keeping an eye on the cast of this next season of Nashville Star. They are all asleep, and I am killing time listening to a preview copy of my brother’s new record, Swallow the Sea, and feeling a need to create something. Over the last few years, my creative energy seems to direct out of writing, and what easier way to write than to dump something into the blogosphere.

The last six months have seen many changes in my life… like my attempt at a serious relationship, running out of money, learning to trust in God for my living, working in television production, making new friends, becoming an uncle again, witnessing suffering, attempting to experience and build community with my neighbors, watching God work in other’s lives around me, abandoning old personal issues and concepts… did I already mention learning to trust God, yeah, that has been a big one.

For someone who wants to know the details, learning to live life one day at a time has been a real challenge. But luckily, I haven’t had to do it on my own. Having my girlfriend, Kim, in my life has helped me take a new perspective on many things that I thought had been set in stone. In a way, she has helped me tap into the Paul of my youth, the one with dreams and a spirit of adventure… the one that loved laughing and found energy by being with other people. Helping me also to rediscover a God who is living and operative… who loves me and desires good things for me– a concept that experientially died in me long ago, when I chose to embrace theology and doctrine over a life of faith in love.

Right now, I am sitting in a chair, staring down a long hallway, waiting for signs of life. A housekeeper is making her rounds, and the cast is beginning to stir. I don’t know what the day holds for me, perhaps some adventure, perhaps just some rest. I need to return to my job, so I’ll close my brain dump for now. Hopefully, I have arced the last six months and future bloggings will come with more regularity.

Here’s to hoping