At The End of the Year

Upcoming Story Group Opportunities:

• In person Story Group restarts January 12th (3 spots left)

• Online Story Membership Program restarts January 19th (1 spot left)

These stanzas from John O’Donahue’s poem “At The End of the Year” are guiding my reflections of the past months and turning me towards the future. You can read the full poem here.

As this year draws to its end,

We give thanks for the gifts it brought

And how they became inlaid within

Where neither time nor tide can touch them.

Surprises that came awake

In forgotten corners of old fields

Where expectations seemed to have quenched.

The slow, brooding times

When all that was awkward

And the wave in the mind

Pierced every sore with salt.

The darkened days that stopped

The confidence of the dawn.

Days when beloved faces shone brighter

With light from beyond themselves;

And from the granite of some secret sorrow

A stream of buried tears loosened.

We bless this year for all we learned,

For all we have loved and lost

And for the quiet way it brought us

Nearer to our invisible destination.

Looking Back to Move Forward

Between the chaos of my summer with teen kids, and now the plumes of smoke clouding Denver’s skies, it’s been weeks since I have had a critical mass of coherent thoughts to string together into a blog post. But here, for your inspiration, are quotes I’ve collected that remind me why I invite people into the hard work of looking back at their lives.

To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.”

~James Baldwin

I’m working on my own life story. I don’t mean I’m putting it together; no, I’m taking it apart.

~Margaret Atwood

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

~Steve Jobs

“Finding yourself” is not really how it works. You aren’t a ten-dollar bill in last winter’s coat pocket. You are also not lost. Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. “Finding yourself” is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.

~Emily McDowell

The Story Before the Story

Week in and week out, in individual sessions and groups, I hear clients start stories at what they think is the beginning. It happens to me when I’m the storyteller too. I’m sharing what I think is the “origin story” of a struggle, false belief or source of shame but the choices I made in a pivotal moment were shaped by the stories that came before.

It’s the ordinary scenes of my childhood where I learned how others would respond to my needs, what I had to do for connection and the expectations I was expected to fulfill. These are the defining stories that come before the dramatic ones.

In Dani Shapiro’s podcast Family Secrets, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s explanation about where we start stories is…

98 seconds of brilliance!

Listen here (Time Stamp 38:00-39:38) to an excerpt from an episode entitled “The Goofy Ring”

*Trigger Warning: Though not graphic in nature, this episode is primarily about Alex’s story as an incest survivor.

One of the things I’m really interested in is how much where you start a story shapes what its meaning is. You interpret my family’s actions and their turning away from the abuse differently if I begin the story shortly before the abuse.

If you tell a larger story about why they would feel compelled to turn away from the past you start understanding it was an extraordinary amount of grief and fear. I think it’s possible to have more empathy for why it would be so important for them to pretend the harms of the past hadn’t happened.

Finding the true beginning of a story of heartache takes community because what is often difficult for us to see from inside the story is obvious to outside witnesses.

Two July opportunities to step into a storytelling community…

Denver In person Story Group Launch Night

Date: Wednesday July 28th 6:30-8:00pm

Location: 8321 Sangre de Cristo Rd (Suite 200) Littleton, CO 80127

Cost: $25 for intro night then $75 per month beginning in August

Online Story Membership Guest Opportunity

Date: Tuesday July 27th 6:30-8:00pm MST

Location: via zoom

Cost: First month FREE then $95 per month beginning in August

5 Things That Are Making Me Strong

#1 Emma Stone’s powerfully edgy voice in Disney’s new release Cruella. It’s tied with Wicked, the musical, for my all time favorite origin story of a villain who’s not really a villain.

*Watch LeCrae’s fabulous Ted Talk for the truth about heroes and villains!

#2 The Poetry of Pádraig Ó Tuama

From his poem How To Be Alone:

There is a you
telling you another story of you.
Listen to her.

From his poem Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!

You knew the touch of a friend
was not dependent on their cleanliness, and you knew this
because you knew need, knew the way that story bleeds
through actions of a day, and how shame makes us
play parts that are beneath us.

#3 Dani Shapiro’s podcast Family Secrets (recommendation by Nadia Bolz Weber). So many great truths around why stories need to be told so we can be free!

Because growing up in a family in which a secret is being kept from you, is like growing up in a family which has its own poltergeist. Maybe you can’t see it, but know you can feel it, you know you can hear it rattling things in the attic, you know something is wrong but the truth of it is hidden from you. And when there is a difference between what you are sensing and what you’re told, it erodes your trust in yourself and in others in a way nothing else can. Many of us who grew up in families with secrets we sensed while everyone around us was saying nothing’s wrong, just come to the conclusion that well….then something must be wrong with us.

#4 My clients tell me about the most fabulous agents of healing on the planet. This month’s gem is Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. I’m only halfway through but here are just a few of my many underlines.

Patriarchy exists in the Bible because the Bible was written in a patriarchal world. Historically speaking, there is nothing surprising about biblical stories and passages riddled with patriarchal attitudes and actions. What is surprising is how many biblical passages and stories undermine, rather than support, patriarchy.

The problem in the church is not strong women, but rather weak men who feel threatened by strong women, and have tried various means, even by dubious exegesis, to prohibit them from exercising their gifts and graces in the church. (New Testament scholar Ben Witherington)

Glorifying the past because we like that story better isn’t history; it is propaganda.

#5 Finally, this prayer, read by an amazing group of Young LIfe staff at a graduation ceremony, is completely beautiful and from an instagram account I’m blessed to now follow: Black Liturgies.