Of Words and Stories

The crux of storytelling lies not only in crafting narratives but also in knowing when to release them.

Hi,

How are you this week? What’s your relationship with words?

Autumn Landscape (1911) by Akseli Gallen-Kallela (Finnish, 1865 - 1931)

A tame on the river. To say that writing hasn’t come easily in the past weeks would be an understatement. Not only these long-form posts, but even simple Notes or responses to comments and messages from you, dear readers.

In an attempt to instil some movement within me, I picked up journaling and tried to fill at least a page every morning—a practice I had abandoned long ago, since I didn’t feel the need to tend to my mind in this way. But I revisited it now to see whether words would let themselves be lured in private—yet to no avail.

Even now, as I try to put this introduction together, I need to pause every few steps I take on the keyboard; deep inhale, long exhale. When I close my eyes to recollect my thoughts, I enter emptiness; I have to be careful not to lose track of what I want to write entirely if I am to complete this essay. The struggle to write about the struggle. I take it slow.

When we feel like an insurmountable obstacle surges in our reality, it’s a sign that the way we have walked so far needs to change—and that there’s no going back either. The effort, then, needn’t be to resist or overcome the challenge per se, but to muster the courage and willingness to let go of the ways we knew, which led us to this point, and endure in the empty spaces that remain until the knowledge of the path forward reveals itself. Then, the obstacle unravels on its own.

And so, a realisation came to me earlier this week that it might be time to revisit my approach to words and stories, and to learn to hold them anew. This, I feel, means recognising that they’re “meant to be held lightly, like delicate butterfly wings, marvelling at their fragility and wonder without gripping too tightly.” I asked for your thoughts on this in a recent Note, and

Seye Kuyinu

’s response captured this beautifully.

With this gentle grip and fresh curiosity, I decided to write today’s essay in alignment with the original meaning of this word, which comes from the French essayer, meaning to try or to attempt. And as I lay this down on the page, I can’t help but smile; it seems the words are already leading me. Let’s see where they take us, if you’re coming along.

My relationship with both words and stories is quite peculiar, as some of you may know from my other writing.

According to my parents, I began to speak much earlier than I learned how to take a second, steady step after the first clumsy one. Before I went to school and learned the alphabet, I invented my own, written from right to left, and wrote secretly out of a mysterious, burning need to let the words out and weave them into stories. As soon as I learned the intricacies of the written word, I plunged into the vast and endless universes of books from the local library, where I spent most of my free time.

At six, I declared to my teacher that I would become a writer when I grow up—something I tried embodying around the time I turned thirteen, when I attempted to write my first novel. Now I know that growing up happens throughout life, and you can never become a writer; you can only keep working alongside words and stories with attention and care, and let that be enough.

In my later teenage years, I became fascinated with the concept of the Linguistic Image of the World, something I was reminded of through

Susanne Steinel

’s insight in a comment under the same Note I mentioned in the introduction. For a good few years, I studied how the language we speak shapes the world we see, both externally and internally. Now that I think about it, it might have been the beginning of my commitment to uncovering the ways words and stories influence us, even though I had no way of knowing it would lead me to turn 180 degrees from what I loved the most some years later.

All that was born out of this intimacy with words and stories became a core part of my identity. It’s sufficient to say that words held me throughout my life as closely as I held them—if not closer. I could not have predicted that, just after turning twenty, I would abandon most of what sustained this relationship within me.

As I lost my love to heart disease, and my vital cognitive function to the six years of depression that followed, the stories that had shaped and raised me held me no more—at least not in a way that would help me stand anew. For the first time in my life, I saw clearly the dangerous, even destructive, force of stories, which shape visions of life that are far from reality. Now I know that a major part of this danger comes from our attachment to what these stories contain, but at that time, I had no tools to recognise this. So, I did what I intuitively felt would help me regain at least some balance: I committed myself to eliminating as many narratives from my life as I could, in the hope that without them, I would be able to experience my emotions in their unadulterated form—just as they are, raw and fluid.

Carrying out this task included forgoing music, films, poetry, and novels (my two greatest loves at the time), and later—taking up regular meditation and mindfulness practice, minimising my possessions (both in number and form), simplifying the way I dress, the way I eat, the way I work, the way I think and speak, and the way I spend my free time. The process is ongoing and still serves me well. Whenever I identify a distinct narrative in any aspect of my being in the world, I hold it in my awareness until the narrative dissolves, returning me to freedom piece by piece. “The heart enjoys simple things,” a monk once told me during my retreat at the monastery, and this is one of the ways I bring more joy to the centre of my being.

It is perhaps this very approach that now tells me to revisit my relationship with stories and the words they contain—to simplify even more. Over time, the commitment to let go of narratives became a narrative on its own; an effort of the mind to assert itself on the otherwise fluid reality, dressing it up in an illusory structure. It’s time to let it go. I feel I am being asked to embrace the importance and role of stories and words as tools beyond myself—not only for writing, which I’ve done out of nostalgia and practicality, but to look at their presence in our reality more broadly, to see their role in our culture and society; in how we come together as humans. I also feel that I might need to reach out to them more deeply, drawing with greater conviction from their potential to inspire change and movement.

I feel ready to do so now that I’ve done, what feels like, sufficient work to see through words and observe their influence on my perception of self and the external world without falling back into the illusion of duality, which they often reinforce. I do recognise that my mind might still attempt to identify with whatever comes next, following its deep-rooted habitual pattern which is still present and operating. I trust, however, that even if it does, it will pass and change, just like everything else.

Easing into this exploration throughout this week, I turned to traditions and wisdom-keepers that transcend singular, narrow perspectives and span across centuries and millions of lives. I began reading about how Indigenous cultures and our ancestors approached stories—the circles, the myths, the legacy. I leaned towards poetry, which, as David Whyte writes, “is the art of uniting the inner and the outer worlds.” And, of course, I spent some time re-reading and re-digesting the Buddhist teachings and their wisdom surrounding this topic.

I also reached out to you, my wonderful community (I am incredibly grateful to those of you who took the time to share your thoughts!), to expose myself to lived and alive perspectives that are not limited by my own. I wanted to know how you interact with stories and their components, since we all grew up among words, having once spoken our first one, and we will all die with the last one still on our lips, like the silence that remains after it. Or, as David Whyte describes it:

“Not all of us grow up from infancy practicing the art forms of painting, sculpture, or music, but all of us grew intimately and from our very birth learning the power of words and the magic of language (…). Words were our horizon between self and other. A child learning the word ‘door’ for the first time is not describing something that lives only outside of themselves, but experiencing everything inside them or outside their bodies that might be opened, leant against or closed against them.”

Words, then, are bridges between our inner and outer terrains, between self and the other. What makes them troublesome, however, is that we often stop in the middle of those pathways, not only refusing to meet what awaits us on the other side with openness, but also building forts of identity in places we were only supposed to pass through.

As I tried to come to terms with both the bright and dark sides of stories and words, my still-unripened thoughts were, again, accurately captured by Seye Kuyinu in his comment, where he noted: “A narrative well crafted would burn down cities yet another combination of words would reunite homes.”

This sentiment is echoed by Pádraig Ó Tuama, who spoke about the important role of stories in his conversation with Krista Tippett for On Being:

“These are the kinds of things we need for the tired spaces of our world. This is the way we need to move forward in a world that is so interested in being comforted by the damp blanket of bad stories. We need stories of belonging that move us towards each other, not from each other; ways of being human that open up the possibilities of being alive together; ways of navigating our differences that deepen our curiosity, that deepen our friendship, that deepen our capacity to disagree, that deepen the arguments of being alive. This is what we need. This is what will save us. This is the work of peace. This is the work of imagination.”

There is undeniable potential in stories to soothe our collective wounds and show us the possibility of a union that surpasses and even dissolves the many divisions we hold ourselves and others captive to, which are, after all, just more stories. If we are willing, we can use words to point to similarities between us all and to our shared human experience. As

Eden Ariel

wrote in her piece Widening Circles: “Every time I sit in a circle, whether in group therapy or in a moon circle, I notice how similar my story is to others’, and I notice how we all seem to move in cycles together. We are never really alone in what we are going through, even though it may seem that way.” This, as she notes, is “the most powerful medicine” of the stories that “everyone [in the circle] came holding.”

Story-sharing and energy-sharing circles were a cornerstone of the integrity of the communities that raised our predecessors. The role of stories and words for them went far deeper than mere communication; they were vital to the fabric of life itself.

For Indigenous peoples of the past and present, stories were living entities that connected individuals to their land, history, and the cosmos. Words were sacred acts that transmitted the collective memory of a community, preserving the knowledge of generations. Through storytelling, Indigenous cultures maintained an intimate connection with nature, learning how to survive, respect, and thrive in their environments. Myths and legends offered explanations for natural phenomena, spiritual beliefs, and social structures, reinforcing the community’s connection to the land and their place in the universe.

Our ancestors, too, leaned on stories for guidance, comfort, and continuity. They were used not only to impart practical knowledge but to instil moral values and ethical frameworks that guided individuals and societies. Storytelling was a communal act, creating bonds between people and fostering a shared sense of purpose and belonging. Through parables, allegories, and epic tales, our ancestors navigated challenges, understood their limitations, and envisioned a better future.

The story was not a static thing but a living dialogue between the individual and the cosmos, offering ways to navigate both inner and outer worlds. To sit in a circle and tell a story was to create a space of belonging, of shared humanity, where the act of listening became as important as the words spoken. And within these words, there was always the power to heal, to transform, to bind wounds we didn’t know were there. The spoken word was considered a force that could build bridges between individuals, reconcile differences, and restore harmony within a community.

Stories grew to be the ties that bind us together as humans. When we engage with them mindfully, as our ancestors once did, we allow them to become bridges, not barriers, between ourselves and the larger human experience. If we can remember to use them only for as long as they need to serve us—that is, to meet parts of ourselves or another on the other side of the bridge—we might tap into their transformative and magical potential.

As soon as we leave the bridge, however, when the message is delivered, we must let ourselves walk away, letting the words and stories disperse. Otherwise, we not only defy their role as tools of connection, but also deny ourselves the capacity of word-bearers, and instead, subject ourselves to them completely, allowing their tissue to grow through our own. When we identify with words, we cage what was always supposed to be free and ever-changing—a living dialogue with the cosmos, as seen by Indigenous peoples, and the aliveness of space, as proposed by

Peter Webb

in the aforementioned discussion.

Our mental labels and categories are useful but ultimately arbitrary, as they depend on causes, conditions, and context. To see them for what they are, the solution is, I believe, to let the words and stories arise spontaneously within us, as they do in response to the circumstances we find ourselves in at any given moment, use them wisely with discernment, and then, once understanding or connection is attained, release our grip on them, letting them pass away into the emptiness from which they originated.

In the parable told by the Buddha, words are likened to rafts used to cross a river. Upon reaching the other bank, the raft is released, and we can continue our journey lightly. And although he referred to the words of teachings, and crossing the river meant attaining enlightenment, I find it suitable to also consider this wisdom on a micro-scale in our use of words in each consecutive moment.

It seems that the crux of storytelling lies not only in crafting narratives but also in knowing when to release them—allowing them to flow freely, like a river that nourishes the land as it passes through. If we were to hold it back, it would flood the surroundings—just like words can flood our minds if we cling to them too tightly. The stories our ancestors told were never meant to be prisons for the mind; they were meant to be shared, to connect, to heal, and then to dissolve into the air like smoke from a fading fire. When we hold onto stories too rigidly, we risk turning them into fortresses of self, separating us from others, and even from our own evolving selves.

Yet, there is power in words when we recognise their transient nature. If we can let stories arise naturally and then let them pass, they become tools of understanding and connection rather than burdens. Like the Buddha’s raft, which is meant to be left behind once it has served its purpose, words can guide us across the rivers of our lives. But once they have carried us to a new understanding, we must set them down gently on the shore.

Now, as I reflect on these age-old practices, I recognise the enduring power of words to remind us of our interconnectedness, not only with each other but with the world itself. They can connect us to our roots, foster healing, and help us rediscover a shared humanity. In a world so often divided, perhaps it’s time to return to the wisdom of our ancestors and use words not as fortresses for the self, but as bridges that unite us. The stories we tell—like those first spoken around fires or beneath open skies—can lead us back to a sense of wholeness, reminding us that we are never alone, but part of an ever-unfolding story that began long before us and will continue long after.

To keep the stories alive and moving, serving their purpose, we can try to see them as living entities—allowing each word to rise and fall like a breath, each story to meet the world and then melt back into silence.

I close my eyes, and again, I am met by emptiness.

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On this walk with my little dog, which leads through fields and forests, across streams and over hills, I realised I needed to revisit my relationship with stories.

A question to you, dear reader:

How tight is your grip?