Hi all,
The other day, I saw a story on one of my social feeds where a young writer was speaking about a very loaded political issue. What I want to speak about is not the issue the writer was speaking about but how he framed the issue. He said, beyond all the arguments and the particulars, that, at the heart of the issue was a narrative war.
A narrative war.
Of course, we can apply this to any of the terrifying things happening in the world right now, including many things that are happening here in my own country of the U.S.
There is so much bending of fact and truth, there is so much shouting down of voices who want to bring simple facts to the table, there is so much information being manipulated. By politicians, political parties, news outlets. So many places. No matter where one stands, the truth is that outlets we trust are manipulating and shaping narrative.
Narrative wars.
We all know about this in terms of history – the victors get to tell the story of what happened. Again, in my country, one of the narrative wars still being fought is around our history, how the wealth of the nation was created and on whose bodies and lives. How this is still true in many ways – partly because we are still in the narrative war around how to tell the story of centuries of the abduction, enslavement and torture of people of color. Centuries of genocide and forced “migration” of native tribes.
This week, too, a new narrative war about why my country needed to bomb a country we are not at war with and who was not at war with anyone a few weeks ago.
This side says this, that side says that, another side says something else.
We wonder why it is so, so hard to learn to trust ourselves.
We live in cultures that are actively bending narratives around us all the time. We are not just trying to find our way around breaking closed systems within our inner lives, our personal lives. We are also trying to navigate how to be with the closed systems in the cultures around us.
Or even, how to identify them, really.
Just as in our inner worlds, we often do not know we are living inside closed systems around our stories, our histories, the ways we see ourselves. We often do not know which stories others have told about us [whether it is based on personal history, gender, class, economics, “race”, belief systems] are open system narratives or closed.
If I am raised in a culture that tells me I am less than based on my gender or where I was born and it is just presented as fact, I may not know to challenge this story because it may feel completely true to me. The natural order of things.
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So when we begin to break open our personal closed system narratives, when our dreams are helping us to blow the roof off any old structure that we may still be living in, without even knowing it, it is important to be conscious of how this changes how we are in relationship to the world around us.
Meaning, when one roof is blown, many can be blown, too.
When we break out of old narratives, coming into relationship with the world free, the world will look and feel different. When we see and break our closed systems, it helps us to see the closed systems in the world around us.
Often, this starts with our family closed systems, of course. Because some of the narratives we break free from come from our families.
It also extends to the worlds beyond families and chosen families. It extends to the structures around us. This can include work structures, religious structures, general cultural structures and even, yes, political realities.
Luckily, dreams help us on many levels around all of this.
First, as we break our closed personal narratives, as we break free from the narrative wars we were raised from the inside, from our trauma experiences, from our experiences in the world, the dreams help us every step of the way.
They help us to build not just skills to be in the world but – yes, I am going to bring it back in – they help us build our inner trust, our own knowing.
So, when we are faced with seeing the world with new eyes, we do have skills and our own hearts and intuition to guide us.
And, of course, I believe our dreams help us to navigate being in a world of closed systems even when are no longer living in them, even when we have broken free in our own ways.