"What's the story here?"

As a photographer, I find that one of the most pleasant moments for me is the point where I am scanning something through my camera and asking, oft times outloud, "what is the story here?". I find "stories" in sometimes very simple things. I see more things than most, and absorb them deeply. I find feeling or "essence" in something mundane. Like this:

"Give us your lunch money"


or this:

"Delicate Virgin"

It strikes me as natural that I do this with my internal world a lot, too. I scan my experiences and absorb them deeply, imbue them with feelings and thoughts, colors and sensations. I spend inordinate amounts of time and energy in my head, heart and body. Every. Day. I live life "big".

Once I said something to Scott about that, and he replied:

"Yeah, you are a big liver"

To which I replied:

"Oh YEAH? WELL YOU ARE SOOOOOOOO A BIG SPLEEN!!"

Laughs ensued, but the bottom line is that I do have a lot of stories.

When I am feeling cautious, or afraid, coming from a place of contraction, not from Open, I try, as often as I can remember to, to trace back from the immediate feeling to the same question. "What is the story here?". In learning to re-wire myself from a place of reactivity (learned from some childhood traumas) to a place of acceptance and calm Being-ness, I am uncovering the Nuclear Stories underlying my Big Feelings.

Basically I am scanning my inner horizons for the likely story that is being stoked from some external (not "of Me") stimulus.

It takes a lot of work to be Me sometimes. Because sometimes the story, like the lunch money story above, isn't real. I imagined it from a place of fear. And other times, it is very, very real, and I just have not found it in the landscape yet.

Thus endeth today's system analysis.