Story Practice

  • This Is What You Shall Do

    —

    by

    josh
    in

    Eight years ago, on a very similar day, I was at Skylight Books in Los Angeles for an event called: The Election: Let’s Gather. The book store was packed that day. There was barely room for everyone to stand. People came because they were angry and confused and afraid. They came because they were looking for wisdom and community at a bookstore, as one would naturally do. That evening was the first time that I heard the quote by Walt Whitman that I’m posting below. It’s an excerpt from the preface of Leaves of Grass.

    “This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

    This quote appealed to me then and it appeals to me now for the same reason. Eight years ago felt like a time of setback. It felt like a time of goals unrealized. It feels like that again now. I hear, in this quote, a reminder about the importance of regular practice in making change. I hear a reminder to be every day a person that will make change in the world. I hear a reminder that the big things will come when you take care of the small daily things. I think that I need that reminder today, and so I’m sharing it.

  • About Story Practice v. 0.1

    —

    by

    josh
    in

    As I set out on this project that I’m calling Story Practice, I want to write down what I’m doing. Or at least what I think that I’m doing. This began with me thinking about how I could do more writing that was public facing. I wanted the writing to be anonymous, or at least pseudonymous. And I wanted to write for a platform that I would have control over. These desires led me to starting a WordPress blog, like it was 2004 all over again, but gave me little sense of what I might want to write about. When it came to content, I wondered if I could create something that combined my love of stories with ideas that were coming to me as a result of my recently started meditation practice. Thus Story Practice was born.

    But what do I mean when I say this was inspired by a love of stories? I intentionally chose this idea of a story practice over a writing practice or a reading practice, even though what I envision as a story practice would include both of those things. For me, reading and writing alone couldn’t encompass everything that I loved about stories. It needed to include playing and building RPGs and other games. It needed to include the way that I crafted my own personal identity. I wanted to write about all of these things, and the word “story” felt like the best word to include all of that.

    Then what do I mean when I say that this was inspired by ideas that came out of my meditation practice? It’s not that I have a strong desire to write about meditation, though I might at some point. It’s more that, when I started meditating, I started focusing more on the journey rather than the destination, more on the process of doing things rather than goals. This is what the word “practice” means for me. It’s the little things that you do every day that add up to a big thing over time. Practice also means that you don’t have to do things perfectly the first time. Or ever really. Stories are always works in progress. Stories always build over time. And I want my Story Practice to reflect that. I want this site to be a work in progress. I want it to grow and change as my own thoughts grow and change.