Consciousness & Spirituality, Story-Telling & Narrative

Telling Our Way Home

KINSHIP: An Online Course Talk with Sophie Strand

So many of us grew up inside mythologies and scriptures deracinated from their original ecosystems. Using the triple lens of MYCO ECO MYTHO, we can replant our favourite legends and parables back into the mycorrhizal nourishment of their original soil, uncovering more-than-human wisdom hiding just below the surface of stories of human supremacy. The MYCO perspective reminds me that stories live interstitially. How do my stories center relationships over individuals? How can I understand that storytelling isn’t a monologue? It’s a consanguinity with landscape. ECO reminds me that every story arrives from a specific ecology, a specific assemblage of stones, animals, fungi, and histories. ECO encourages rootedness and curiosity about the ground below our feet. How can I honor the home of every word and idea and story? And MYTHO reminds us to keep my stories oral, interrogative, and participatory. Using this model, we can compost our old beliefs into new narratives as textured, complicated, and diverse as an old-growth forest. As feral and involuted as a spoonful of dirt holding one billion bacteria, up to ten miles of mycelial fungi, and thousands of protozoa. Let us come home to our favourite stories by planting them back into their original soil.