Story Tellers of the Ancient & New

The Disquieting Chaos Between Stories 

Here we are

Living in an age between stories

Breathless we gasp and begin to faint

For the stories our lungs truly crave

Are touched by the ancient and the new

And represent a kind of awakening to the magical present

Where the presence of a living fable captures us

Forms us and speaks us into being

Offering a sacramental breath to our story hungry lungs

A poetic oxygen to our starving imaginations

But alas,

We are a people who have become strangers in a familiar place

Without ritual or an enchanted present

We have grown weary in the waiting

Weary in our yearning for a story that is waiting to pierce us

With a beckoning message from the past and the future

Lacking the poetic emissaries to usher in the age

Our larger collective commons

Has silenced and disempowered the creative couriers

Who know the difference between the chattering of the muse

The silence of the prophets and the very voice of God

It has been decades or longer

Since we have sat in the radiance of a world creating story

And in this breathless moment many feel written out of the future

Fighting tooth and nail for their dominant role in the narrative

But to enter the generative world between stories is a sacred calling

And in this moment no one appears compelled

Merely bothered and angry

Caught up in the disquieting chaos of dominance and control

As we easily see the failures of our foes

Mocking their stories as propaganda

All the while our cynicism is shutting down our imagining

Making revelation impossible

For God breathed stories create worlds

Shape who we are

Constrain us to act out our dreams and aspirations

And bring alive our beliefs through obedience and acts of love

But the truthfulness of our stories

Is only born anew in our lived narration

Formed and made manifest through brokenness

So the story can have its way with us

But the ushering in of this new story

Will not come as a sign of our own acumen

Proved superior via some contemporary polemic or moralistic point

But as a wild idea

One the divine scapegoat has proclaimed dangerous

Only made real in the laying down of all our sufficiency

As we are miraculously made clean again by the story and its telling

The featured image is courtesy of Andrew Seaman on Unsplash. 

David Bunker

David Bunker is essayist, poet, creativity coach, and college professor. He has worked primarily in the worlds of music education and music business, creating his own small record labels signing such artists as Six Pence None the Richer. He now does poetry readings wherever someone is willing to listen and leads retreats through his latest book “Meeting Your Most Creative Curious Self.”

https://www.facebook.com/david.bunker/