The Space Between Stories

I just finished speaking at the Rainbow Serpent Festival in Australia. I’m not sure exactly what sequence of events led me to speak there. If you asked me to justify this whole trip to Taiwan, Indonesia, and Australia, I wouldn’t be able to justify it, certainly not if I add up the fossil fuel burned or, more personally, the precious irreplaceable moments away from my loved ones. To make matters worse, this was my second trip to Australia in two months.I’ve been deprogramming myself from justifying things, learning another way of making choices outside of reasons and expected outcomes. What has come from these trips was so beyond what I could have expected, that I cannot help but conclude the whole thing has been “arranged,” and that my experience of choice-making, whether according to reasons or to something else, is a delusion. It seems much more like I am being taken on a ride. I am changing so much through these trips that I feel a bit unfamiliar to myself. And I am standing very much in the unknown.

Much of what I’ve received, I knew in theory existed. I have even written about it. My writings seem to have brought their very subject into my life. I cannot yet describe what has been happening or how I have changed; those stories aren’t ripe yet. I think they will take the form of a book someday, maybe fictional. For now I can say that each of these trips has changed me forever and brought people and experiences that I hardly know how to integrate into my world, because they are new _in kind_. I cannot merely embroider them onto an existing tapestry; they don’t fit into its pattern; they are radically new design elements that demand an unstitching and a reweaving.

That is a pretty good description of that state I speak about so often, the “space between stories.” How odd it is to find it happening to myself. Certainly I have been through it before in my life, but what I now realize is that in the prior unraveling, a deeper story had remained intact. And I am sure that after I integrate these experiences and enter a new Story of Self and a new Story of the World, that my future will bring me initiations deeper still.

Those who are reading this who know me personally, please don’t ask me to tell more. When the story is ripe it will be told, in one form or another. The reason I am sharing this now (and I realize this is quite an intimate sharing for those who joined my blog to hear about more intellectual topics, which I will continue to write and speak about too) is that, well, first it is what is real for me now; second, it is what is real for many other people too; third, I think it will become more and more apparent that it is happening collectively too.

And one more thing. The kind of breakdown, uncertainty, and emergence that happened at my Bali retreat is very much related to where I am personally, in this place of not knowing. Paradoxically, not knowing is what I know most authentically right now. Therefore, I have decided to rename and restructure the e-course that I’ve been designing. The original course, called The Revolution is Love, will be postponed until later in the year. The new one will be called, you guessed it, The Space Between Stories. It will be for people who are in some stage of the transition process: in an unraveling existing story, in the space between, or in an emerging but still tender new story. I’ll offer a more detailed introduction to it next week.