We explore beginnings, famous and not-so-famous first sentences and paragraphs, as a way of beginning to explore story and story-telling as a spiritual practice.
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.Not all things are blest, but theseeds of all things are blest.The blessing is in the seed.
–from “Elegy in Joy” by Muriel Rukeyser
Beginning a Story
Rev. Joe Cleveland
January 5, 2025
Could it be that the work of beginning is ending?
There are stories about beginnings, and I could begin with a few of those. But I think beginning is itself a story. In fact, I believe that the truth of the matter is that everything is a story. In a poem called “The Speed of Darkness,” Muriel Rukeyser says, “The universe is made of stories, / not of atoms.” We are all stories. A writer and teacher of Zen Buddhism named David Loy wrote a terrific little book called The World Is Made of Stories in which he explains that “The world is made of our accounts of it because we never grasp the world as it is in itself, apart from stories about it.” He further explains that “This is not to deny (or assert) that there is a world apart from our stories, only that we cannot understand anything without storying it. To understand is to story.” I have stubbed my toe on rocks. I know rocks exist. A rock isn’t a story. But I can’t tell you about a rock without it being part of a story. Even if I’m talking about the chemicals and minerals that make up the rock, if I’m just talking about the atoms that make up the rock, I am telling a story about what rocks are and why and how they matter. “You can’t understand the world without telling a story,” the Anishinabe writer Gerald Vizenor tells us. “There isn’t any center to the world but a story.”
All is story. Beginning is a story.
The story we tell about beginnings is: once upon a time there wasn’t something, and then there was. Or even: once upon a time there wasn’t anything and then there was. Those of us who live in the story that has been called “Western society,” we really like binaries, dichotomies. It is easy to understand either/or. We know that story really well. The novelist Thomas King says, “We trust easy oppositions. We are suspicious of complexities, distrustful of contradictions, fearful of enigmas.” The problem is that nothing begins with nothing.
What is the story of beginning? How can a new story come to be?
Maybe the problem is thinking of beginning as something entirely different from and even opposed to ending.
What if we look at a creation story as a way of understanding beginning a story?
In 2003, Thomas King gave a series of five lectures which were published as The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. King is usually thought of as an indigenous writer. In the first lecture he tells what he calls his favorite creation story. The story he tells is very like a Haudenosaunee story I’ve heard several variations of. As King tells it, it goes like this:
Back at the beginning of imagination, the world we know as earth was nothing but water, while above the earth, somewhere in space, was a larger, more ancient world. And on that world was a woman. […]
King gives the woman a name. He calls her Charm. And it happens that Charm falls through a hole in that ancient world and falls down into the sky, headed for the earth.
The watery earth was inhabited by all sorts of animal critters. Ducks and muskrats and sunfish and dolphins are enjoying their watery world when one of them looks up and sees Charm falling toward them.
The Ducks, who have great eyesight, could see that harm weighed in at about 150 pounds. And the Beavers, who have a head for physics and math, knew that she was coming in fast … Which brought the animals to the first of two problems. If Charm hit the water at full speed, it was going to create one very large tidal wave and ruin everyone’s day.
So quick as they could, all the water birds flew up and formed a net with their bodies, and, as Charm came streaking down, the birds caught her, broke her fall, and brought her gently to the surface of the water.
Just in time.
To deal with the second of the two problems. Where to put her.
The animals ask if she could handle just hanging out in the water with them, but that’s not going to work. Charm wonders if they might be able to put her on something large and flat.
… the only place in this water world that was large and flat was the back of the Turtle. … So the animals put Charm on the back of the Turtle, and everyone was happy. … until the animals noticed that Charm was going to have a baby.
It’s going to get a little crowded, said the Muskrats.
What are we going to do? said the Geese.
It wouldn’t be so crowded, Charm told the water animals, if we had some dry land.
Charm asks who the best diver might be, who might be able to dive down to the bottom of the water and bring up some mud.
So one by one all the water animals tried to find the mud at the bottom of the ocean, and all of them failed until the only animal left was Otter. …
So Otter took a deep breath and dove into the water. And she didn’t come up. Day after day, Charm and the animals waited for Otter to come to the surface. Finally, on the morning of the fourth day, just as the sun was rising, Otter’s body floated up out of the depths.
Oh no, said all the animals. Otter has drowned trying to find the mud.
They hoist Otter onto Turtle’s back and notice that clenched in her paw was some mud.
Of course I found the mud, whispered Otter, who wasn’t so much dead as she was tired and out of breath.
Charm puts the lump of mud on the back of the Turtle,
and she sang and danced, and the animals sang and danced with her, and very slowly the lump of mud began to grow.
Dry land was created. And then Charm has her baby. She has twins.
A boy and a girl. One light, one dark. One right-handed, one left-handed.
Together the twins give shape to the land, creating valleys and mountains, rivers and forests, trees with nuts and fruit. And then they create human beings.
The animals and the humans and the Twins and Charm looked around at the world that they had created. Boy, they said, this is as good as it gets. This is one beautiful world.
King also shares some of the creation story as it is in the King James version of the Bible. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” I’m going to assume you’ve heard this one before. King says that “the elements in Genesis create a particular universe governed by a series of hierarchies—God, man, animals, plants—that celebrate law, order, and good government, while in our Native story, the universe is governed by a series of co-operations—Charm, the Twins, animals, humans—that celebrate equality and balance.” [23-24]
The Genesis story has a creator God who acts alone. In the Native story, “the acts of creation and the decisions that aet the world are shared with other characters in the drama.” [24]
King says,
in Genesis, the post-garden world we inherit is decidedly martial in nature, a world at war—God vs. the Devil, humans vs. the elements. [24]
It is a world where things are in competition with one another.
In our Native story, the world is at peace, and the pivotal concern is not with the ascendancy of good over evil but with the issue of balance. [24]
What if success in the task before us is not the complete elimination of one story by another, a clear ending and then a separate new beginning? What if there is ending and beginning together?
In Jacqueline Woodson’s story, The Year We Learned to Fly, the two main characters, the two kids, get stuck now and then in bad or uncomfortable situations. They are bored, fighting with one another. The darkness grows and grows through autumn. They have to move to a new place in the winter where the reception by the neighbor kids is cold. To get unstuck, they need new beginnings. And the advice from the grandmother is: “Lift your arms, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and believe in a thing.” To begin again, they stop. They recognize the situation they are in. They take control of their breath. They consider that they are not alone. They remember their ancestors and their resilience. And then they engage their imaginations.
This actually feels lot like the process that Brené Brown describes in her book Rising Strong. After a fall, Brown wanted to know how people got back up. What is the process of that? To rise strong, we acknowledge how we’re feeling, we get curious about how we’re feeling. We get honest about the story we’ve been telling ourselves about whatever we’re struggling with and get curious again about what other stories might be true. And out of what we learn, Brown says we then can “create a new ending to our story,” which is also, though she doesn’t say it, a beginning of a new story.
I see people attempting to go through this process when, for example, I hear Democrats trying to figure out how they lost the election. I hear people trying out different stories, and at their best, willing to let go of some stories they might be clinging to that might be holding them back from creating the ending of a story they’re stuck in, an ending that is a beginning.
Thomas King brings up a story that is told in the novel Ceremony by Leslie Marmom Silko about how evil comes into the world. The story starts by describing the world as complete and has everything, “including witchery.” Then witches gather from every tribe from around the globe, and they start competing with each other over who can come up with the scariest thing. It comes down to one last witch. No one knows which tribe they’re from, and they don’t know their gender. The witch says they have a story, rather than some sort of scary object. The other witches are skeptical, but then the witch tells their story. And it is of horrors and awfulness and evil. And the other witches say,
“Okay you win; you take the prize,
but what you said just now—
it isn’t so funny
It doesn’t sound so good.
We are doing okay without it,
we can get along without that kind of thing.
Take it back.
Call that story back.”But the witch just shook its head […]
It’s already turned loose,
It’s already coming.
It can’t be called back.
Stories are powerful and potentially dangerous, and a story once told can get loose. Even before the story gets loose like some sort of feral hound, remember, the world already has everything— “including witchery.” The world isn’t a place that has either evil or good in it; it has everything. Rather than there being a simple dichotomy of good people versus evil people, Thomas King says that what
Native writers suggest is that there are other ways of imagining the world, ways that do not depend so much on oppositions as they do on co-operations, and they raise the tantalizing question of what else one might do if confronted with the appearance of evil. [110]
King doesn’t have an answer about what else one might do, except to say that he believes in stories. Whether our spirits thrive or die depends on the story we believe in. And I put that together with what Brene Brown says: she identifies integration as the engine of our ability to rise strong after a fall. And one of the main ways we integrate all the mess of living is through storytelling.
you haven’t failed if you have not eliminated a story from the landscape. Denying or ignoring a story is just a way of letting it own us. When a story owns us, that story doesn’t end, although it may work to end us. Brown says,
When we deny our stories and disengage from tough emotions, they don’t go away; instead, they own us, they define us. Our job is not to deny the story, but to defy the ending—to rise strong, recognize our story, and rumble with the truth until we get to a place where we think, Yes. This is what happened. This is my truth. And I will choose how this story ends.
So let us begin.
Here we are at the beginning of a new year, which is the ending of an old year. Here at the beginning of a new year, let us lift our arms, close our eyes for a moment, take a breath, and believe a thing. Believe that we are not alone. Believe that we have ancestors who were survivors and imaginers. Believe that we also have imaginations that can take flight.
Or, hear these words of the blessed Fred Rogers: “Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else. I’ve felt that many times. My hope for all of us is that ‘the miles we go before we sleep’ will be filled with all the feelings that come from deep caring – delight, sadness, joy, wisdom – and that in all the endings of your life, we will able to see the new beginnings.”
And so I come to an end. And so I come to a beginning.
Resources
- King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. United States, House of Anansi Press Incorporated, 2003.
- Loy, David. The World Is Made of Stories. United States, Wisdom Publications, 2010
- Woodson, Jacqueline. The Year We Learned to Fly. United States, Penguin Young Readers Group, 2022.
- Brown, Brené. Rising Strong: How the Ability to Reset Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2017.
- Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition). United States, Penguin Publishing Group, 2006.
Topics: Change, Indigenous Wisdom, New Beginnings, Story, Transformation