Storytelling
At the Edge of Collapse

With Sara McFarland

This isn’t just another Storytelling event! At the crossroads of inner-led change meet: the collapse that is upon us, the ancestral archetypal world and the other-than-human world. This meeting place is the portal at which we gather for Starter Culture’s: Stories at the edge of Collapse. The transformation invited through this story-journeying seeks to directly affect who and how we are in the world and our way of showing up for cultural renewal as change agents and soulfully alive humans.

As we journey together through story, we metabolize and compost our power-over culture as it is embedded within our ways of thinking and relating with the world (human and other-than-human). When we actively listen, journeying along the storylines, we ourselves are transformed. Listener beware! It is psycho-spiritually risky business to unhook oneself from the story of power-over culture and the modern paradigm of consumerism and control. We cannot change a system we are dependent upon, says Andre Henry. How then do we become in-dependent of the power-over culture and inter-dependent with the Earth community? Perhaps the ancient ones who innately knew how to listen to Earth’s dreaming might point the way through their stories that somehow have managed to stay alongside us humans to this modern age. Come and listen to the stories and after, stay to engage in honest conversation and soulful grappling at the crossroads of change.

Read: Storytelling as inner-led change

Upcoming events:

Stories at the Edge of Collapse are offered on Wednesdays at 12:30-14:30 EST/18:30-20:30 GMT/19:30-21:30 CET approximately every two months.

24th July 2024
30th October 2024
4th December 2024

Tickets will be available 4 weeks before each event. Recordings are available on YouTube (@starterculture) and on this page a week after the event. We appreciate your donation to make these storytelling events possible.

Sign up for our newsletter to receive reminders about these events, the link to the recordings and information about our other online and in person offerings.

We'd love to have you join us!

Persephone and Hades: sex sells

Wednesday October 30, 2024

12:30-14:30 EST/ 18:30-20:30 BST/ 19:30-21:30 CET

Sexuality, eros, rape, power, abduction, incest; the underworld is a hot mess!

Underneath our culture's obsession with sex and unhealthy power dynamics (and unfortunately the blending of the two) lies a story of Eros or Life energy. In this storytelling evening, we will ask:

What older layers of story are held within the current version that we might decolonize and compost to reveal deeper Earth-centric truths within?
How might this story’s journey to a patriarchal tale reveal to us our own journey of how we got where we are and the becoming that is possible in these times?
How does this story point to our own responsibility to “do our work” with power, privilege, class and social norms, in order to liberate us into the Life-Death-Life cycle that is Earth’s continual transformation?
And what does all of that have to do with the polycrisis?

Between the extremes of salvation and surrender lies a third way, a cyclical way, a way of honouring the Life-Death-Life cycle at the heart of Earth's renewal. How might this story and the cycle it reveals be a guide in our times of crisis, collapse and transformation? What if the response of trying to save Earth (or the humans or another species) or of simply surrendering to the collapse, were both part of the same logic? We propose that a change of consciousness is needed in order to dream this third way forward, beyond the binary of save or surrender.

"My sense of things is that both 'the soteriological' (a theology of salvation) and 'the notion of surrender' - like two extremes of a pendulum swing - maintain the same logic of control. The One-that-saves-the-world isn't very different from the One-that-surrenders-to-it. Something managerial persists. Anytime the question turns on how to surrender, the idea of a coherent self that must choose to surrender is reinforced.

I am trying to gesture beyond salvation and surrender. There's a space between those default approaches that feels creative, generative, but frighteningly composting."

Bayo Akomolafe

This is composting power-over culture into relational culture. Please join us for the conversation and the dreaming at the edge of collapse, it matters that you come, that you bring your voice and heart to the questions of these times. Together, we can e in the discomfort of composting and the wonder of Beauty.

BOOK YOUR PLACE!

About Sara

Sara sits at the heart/h of starter Culture as a storyteller, ritual performance artist and singer, as well as a soul initiation guide. For more information, visit their website here.

Questions that may arise about our Storytelling Events...

What can I imagine will happen during the gatherings?
- Sara will welcome everyone into the gathering and each person will be invited to introduce themselves and where they come from and an other-than-human that they relate to in their home-place.
- Then, there will be a story spoken with drum and rattle, chosen to honor and resonate with the time of year, the seasonal energies and the opportunities for transformation - both inner and outer. There will be a time of reflection, movement and journaling to allow the story to arrive in your own heart more fully.
- We will regather for a conversation that is led by the heart and soul - and full of imagination, mythos, passion, longing, dreams and connection.

What do I need to bring with me?
- Dress in comfortable clothes so that you can sit, lay down, move as you wish
- Bring water or something to drink, but please refrain from eating during our gathering
- Please come to the gathering free from mind-altering substances
- Bring journals, pens, colored pencils, but please leave your other devices turned off
- You may want to light a candle or have a subject (rather than an object) with you from an earth-place you love

If I sign up and can’t make it, will there be a recording?
- Yes! There will be a recording of the story only (not the conversation) available on Youtube and on our website a week after the event
- However, you will miss the juicy conversation and the opportunity to bring your voice and heart to the gathering and weave yourself into the community of inner-led change practitioners.

Previous events:

The Emperor's New Clothes:
Speaking Truth to Power (-Over)

Wednesday 24th July 2024

12.30 - 14.30 EST / 18.30 - 20.30 GMT / 19.30 - 21.30 CET

Speaking truth to power-over means first seeing what is there, and what is not. The naked truth of power-over is all around us every day and every day we participate for fear of being rejected, outcast or scapegoated. Every day horrible things happen, big ones like genocide and small ones like ignorant and racist or classist comments that we do not speak up about. Speaking up in daily moments of power-over injustice and hierarchy can feel impossible because of our inner modernity or civilisation trauma, we sit or stand there silent, listening to the judgmental or hateful speech and can do nothing. How do we resource ourselves and each other to speak up? And when we do, what do we say? How can we touch the hearts rather than raise the ire of those whom we wish to influence? How can we speak innocently, like a child, with wisdom, like an ancestor, from our own heart's deep knowing? How can we create a world our hearts know is possible, now and into the far future?

Sometimes, speaking up can be physically and emotionally dangerous to us, in which case it is often better to keep quiet. And sometimes, it is hard to tell the difference between perceived threat and being safe enough- often, it has to do with privilege, power-over and preservation of our identity and standing (class/caste). Oof, those are big things to transform inside of us and our communities and organisations!

This story brings humor and truth, letting us laugh at ourselves, and alongside each other, as we recognize our own ways of participating. Laughter is such good medicine, like singing or dancing together, it moves us below ideas of right and wrong and into our hearts and bodies, washes our eyes clean and lets us see one another as humans first, ideologies and differences second. And the tears of grief and trauma held in the body can flow on the release of the laughter. Then, we might hear the truth our hearts can speak for Earth, for Love of Life, in Creativity and Beauty. Come along and we'll laugh and cry and speak together of these things in community.

Prince Lindworm:

Courage and vulnerability in times such as these

6th June 2024

This story is one of longing. The longings of the monster outcast and of sacred law. It is a story of cunning ways, of meeting the beloved and of ancient magic and deep transformation. Each one in the story is required to bring their heart’s vulnerability and courage to the decisions they make, shaping their path in radical ways.

This story is a bundle of medicine for these times, pointing the way to how we might shed the skins of power-over culture that have become too small, have made us angry ,violent and terrified. Power-over skins that have confused us and had us betray Earth, ourselves and each other. It is the story of coming home to the heart and to the relationship of intimacy with soul, with sovereignty and with sacred law. It is a coming home that inspires us to take actions based on our values and an ecological ethics rooted in Earth, rather than in reaction to the threat posed by our current untenable way of life.

This story asks us questions like:

When we feel outcast and abandoned, what layers of protection do we grow and at what cost?
When faced with a dragon of rage and hunger, how do we respond?
When faced with the polarising politics of these genocidal times how might we find vulnerable and courageous ways to relate with the grief and loss and heartbreaking and scapegoating and fear this evokes?
How do we choose vulnerability and the courage to let our tender hearts be revealed when we are faced with something monstrous and terrifying in the heart of another? What does it take to shed the skins of power-over culture?
What is the inner and relational work that we need to do to become more fully alive and connected? More fully feeling? How do we build relational culture together?

Please come and join me as we explore how building relational culture within our daily relationships can change our world, and impact how we work for change in the world.

Red Ridinghood meets Peter:

domesticating the wild in and around us

13 March 2024 12:30-14:30 EST/18:30-20:30 GMT/19:30-21:30 CET

Don’t be fooled, these two children's stories- Peter and the Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood, are much more complex than they appear. They reveal the path of forgetting and how each of us has been domesticated. They show how, generation by generation, we pass on the worldview of power-over culture. As well, they still hint at the depths beneath that reveal our connection and reciprocity with the wild (including healthy respect for the predators!). Let’s see if we can catch the thread of the older stories and follow it backwards, rewilding our psyches and composting a bit of power-over culture. Let’s see if we might better understand how we have gotten here to this place in time and the ways our actions create the consequences we call this current crisis.

In these days, when faced with my own despair or hopelessness at the state of things, I find myself asking, “How did we get here?” Here, where we are today. Though multivalent, the lens I am currently speaking of is, late-stage capitalism and fear based power-over greed and destruction of the Earth and all her creatures coupled with our human capacity for large scale war, genocide and modernity’s cruelties of racism, poverty, polarization, supremacy… (there is also, of course, the very human capacity for love, collaboration, imagination and beauty alongside, thank Earth for that, otherwise it would be very bleak indeed, however, that is not the current thread I am following, so please bear with me a bit longer). In my mind’s eye, I see so many avenues made of small steps and choices that numbness and reactive protective responses have created over thousands of years that have shaped the systems we live within and that live within us. The one I want to point to now is domestication, or, colonization of the wild.

I happen to believe that fear is at the core of our impulse of domestication; fear of starvation, cold, invasion, loss and of the Wild itself. I ask myself, “How did we learn to fear ‘the Wild’ rather than living as part of its entangled web of undomesticated ecologies?”? Only the domesticated human’s perspective could view the Earth as if separate from us, as a resource to be used and property to be owned, or, although it might be more uncomfortable to admit, as a place of original purity we long to return to, seeking oneness with “nature” without seeing the complexity of its life-death-life cycle. This romanticization too is the symptom of separability and a product of our domestication.

We are all - humans and other than humans, suffering under this belief of separability, I ask, as I watch myself buy food wrapped in plastic and continue to participate in ‘business-as-usual’,

“Why do we continue to live this way”?

Why do we tell these stories of domestication to our children, reifying the separate-ness of human and creature, human and Earth, teaching fear, romanticization or even destruction of the wild?

How did we get here?

How did we learn to fear the Wild?

Why do we continue to live this way?

What did we do to our own souls, bodies, hearts and minds when we domesticated the Wild?

How might we respond if we were not afraid?

So many questions have me these days. Come and grapple with me and perhaps begin to free the undomesticated human heart that lives within the zoo of modernity. Let us look together and share what we see of the threads both remembered and forgotten. We’ll spend time in the story, but we’ll spend more time than we have during other evenings grappling with what we sense, feel, imagine and think through the lens of the story and how we might understand the human’s journey of how we got to where we are and how we might respond differently, together.

The dream makers: What is Earth up to?

January 17, 2024 12:30-14:30 EST/18:30-20:30 GMT/19:30-21:30 CET

The Dream Makers is a lesser known story from the Scottish Highlands on the Isle of Skye, where the Cuilllans soar up into the sky and the deer take refuge. This story is an invitation into the otherworld, the Dream world, where the Dream Makers live, those ancient ones who send us our dreams, and what happens when a young woman stumbles into their valley.

Dreams have been fascinating us humans for as long as we have known we dream. To dream and to remember our dreams and to share them and listen for wisdom is a practice common to all cultures and spiritualities, even if the practices have been forgotten through modernity’s traumatizing tyranny.

There is the dream that visits us or perhaps we visit at night or in a sacred vision, and the dream that is our imagination expressed through our creativity. And there is the dreaming, the way humans are interwoven with life through space and time, in our own human ancestries and also other-than-human and place ancestries. We could say that Earth is dreaming us; through us and as us. We are part of and within Earth’s dreaming, which includes all creatures, and that our dreams arise directly from the dreaming of Earth.

We can develop a relationship with the dream maker/s and with Mystery and with Earth, so that our dreams are a conversation with/in the dreaming. Cultures around the world have and still practice sharing their dreams in the morning to harvest the wisdom, healing, warning and guidance of the Dream Maker. This is not a psychologized interpretation of dreams as being simply mirrors of our inner parts (although this is one layer of being with the dreaming), rather it is a co-creative act of receiving guidance from ancestors, the gods, the Holy in the Wild for our life path.

There are many ways to visit, and even participate in, the dreaming; one way is our dreams. But where do dreams come from? Are they perhaps a personal and mysterious gift from the dream makers? And what do they have to say to us? And how do we listen and understand their message? There is so much to remember; through tending to nervous system regulation and as we re-member ourselves as part of Earth’s body and dreaming, we begin to remember our own dreams and let them guide us, rather than interpreting them, into living a soulcentric life. Another way for us to enter the dreaming is through Myth and Story, we drop into the ancient dreaming of Earth, of ancestors and place when we listen to a Story. This is part of why we gather for Stories at the Edge of Collapse; to shift into the consciousness of the dreaming and co-create with Life, to wake up from the sleeping curse of modernity and begin to dream with Earth.

Some questions we will explore together: How might we be guided in these times by the deep time/the dream time? What if we let our human dreaming be in service of Earth’s dream? What if our dreams are a way of listening in to Life’s generativity and creativity? How might we co-create the dream of this world with Earth?

Medusa: the monstrous tyranny (and gift) of civilization trauma

Postponed to November 15th 2023 6-8pm GMT/7-9pm CET

She is one of the most feared monsters in the western world, because she has the power to turn those who look in her eyes to stone. Petrification. Freeze. She has snakes for hair, fangs, horrible ugly skin… but she wasn’t always this way. Her story is one of beauty, devotion, violence and trauma. She is the demoness and the demonized, yet she is victim. She is powerful and empowered, yet she is traumatized. She is wounded and she becomes the perpetrator. She was beautiful and becomes hideous, human and becomes beastly. Shapeshifting one who is feared and yet becomes the shield sign to protect against evil. She has even become a feminist symbol of defiance and justice.

Medusa is a writhing conglomeration of snake-like stories - the ancient shift from pre-hellenic to greek pantheon, the age-old oppression of women through the rape of their bodies and the perversion of their stories. Medusa reveals to us both the wounding from and acting out of power-over culture. We at Starter Culture refer to the roots of this as Civilisation Trauma. This is our way of pointing to power-over culture as the waters we swim in, the larger story of wounding and trauma that we carry as a species through our civilisation and domination of one another and the other than human creatures. It is the trauma of the mistaken separation of human and Earth (sometimes called nature) to even think there is such a thing as “nature” that is other than we ourselves are. Medusa shows us that split, the forgetting and the inheritance of it. She becomes a monstrous vision of the tyranny of the trauma. She is cursed, ostracized, demonized, feared, rejected because of it. And, she also is a powerful and monstrous vision of the Beauty, sacred gift and magical power, the blessing/curse, that this trauma co-creates. Her experience and her story is personal and political, collective and mythic. What does Medusa have to teach us about the sacred alchemy of healing and transformation of Civilisation Trauma? As she says, it’s not what you think…

Come join us to traverse the terrains of civilization as trauma; and trauma as the gift that just keeps giving way to the world’s longing for the birthing of relational culture through us.

The Handless Maiden: Growing beyond Learned Helplessness

August 16th, 2023 6:30pm BST

These times are hard, but times have always been hard, haven’t they? Famine, drought, desertification, floods… they have always been part of the dance of life and death, of Earth’s repair and rupture as well as growth, evolution, collaboration. The big stories and myths have told of upheaval and great events of destruction and renewal since before humans existed. There have always been both destruction and creation, chaos and order in the universe. Out of the one is born the other. Into one, the other returns. We told these stories generation after generation so that we might remember. Our prayers, rituals and beauty making were the ways we humans have kept balance, danced with the great powers that uphold the universe. Until science killed our ancestors, oppression and colonisation invaded our inter-being with the Holy in the Wild and the great forgetting was necessary to survive the industrial growth society of humans. We have cut off our capacity to respond in beauty and creativity in these times of destruction. We have lost ourselves in the separation that forgetting has caused.

And now, now we must remember, in order to again discover how to respond to these times with healing, balance, grace but also not-knowing, grief, joy, love. How do we each and collectively leave the learned helplessness of the forgetting behind us and move towards action? What is an activism that is grounded in a deeper conversation with the other than human world? How do we need to humble ourselves, returning to Humus, to grow the necessary capacity to act on Earth’s behalf?

The Handless Maiden is a story of healing and becoming whole, learning how to care for oneself through radical responsibility, as well as learning to be cared for by Earth after the severing of old way of being in the world. And out of this, growing a way that is our own to act with fierce love and offer beauty to these times of collapse.

Slip into your Bearskin and remember yourself home to Earth Community

June 14th 2023

How might we slip out of our human skin and into the skin of bear, or tree, or falcon and return to the creatureliness of ourselves more alive and more wild? Some might say that at the heart of the ache and trauma that afflicts our world today is the misunderstanding that we are separate from life. The belief that all of life is either dead or dumb and that we are the only intelligent life on the planet and are therefore ordained to have dominion, is rooted in our modern culture. However, there is an older way, a way that the ancestors of each of us once knew, before the great forgetting, of recognising our being Earth, Water, Fire, Air and having breathed in particles of all the creatures that have ever lived and offer our breath to that great river. In this intimate relational experience of sentient agential interbeing, we rewild ourselves and awaken into a world that is interwoven with consciousness.

Bayo Akomolafe writes in his book These Wilds beyond our Fences, "Look how things sprout from other things. How nothing is itself all by itself - or without the contributions of other things. When you happen upon a flower, especially one whose otherworldly beauty and feminine fragility contrast sharply with its less endearing environment, you might treat it as this localised “thing”, as an object - one deserving of admiration - but an “object” nonetheless: removed, unique, separate and even audacious. What our linguistic conveniences blind us to is how that very flower is no more distinguishable from the dirt, the erratic weather, the traffic of pollen bearers that come from far off, the blazing sun, and even the occasional imprint from a boot worn by an uncharitable tourist, than a wave is distinguishable from the sea….

Perhaps we could say [] that the environment “flowers”. And all we would be hinting at is a “new” paradigm of thought- one that inaudibly recognises how everything is connected [] and how what we “really” are define notions of size, hues, grades of quality, origin and destiny.”

In this intimate relational experience of sentient agential interbeing, we rewild ourselves and awaken into a world that is interwoven with consciousness. This is the story of the journey of Eco-belonging, re-membering ourselves as part of Earth’s Community. This is paradigm shift from the inside out. Will you dare to slip out of your human skin and into the skin of Bear? The reimagined story of Bearskin awaits to help us do just that.

Bluebeard in the house of Modernity

April 5, 2023

We will listen to the story of Bluebeard and unpack Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s image of the house of modernity. We’ll ask questions like, Who is Bluebeard (culturally, in us and in our world) How might we turn the key of ignorance into awareness through empowered action; how do we call together and tend community; What are the necessary resources it takes to make visible what Bluebeard wants to hide. And we'll explore the things that happened in the basement that we aren’t at fault for, but responsible for and what that means now. It will be a deep dive into the power-over culture, inside and out, as well as the ancestral, archetypal, communal and other than human ways of responding to Bluebeard in these times.

Welcome

Storytelling At the Edge of Collapse