Myths, Journeys and Stories

Thinking about something other than dogs. I am thinking about books I have read and stories I have learned from and what they have meant to me and still mean to me.

Ernest Holmes, the founder of Science of Mind, wrote that "Thoughts are things, so we find that different kinds of thoughts become different kinds of things. Thought is always creative: it must always create after its own type. It must always give form to something, and the something to which it gives form is not a thing of itself, because the thought that creates the form is a product of the thinker. The thinker comes first, then the thought, and then the form." And as we read this and others like it, we realize this is how it has always been and we also realize how important our thoughts and stories are.

Holmes wrote that comment about thoughts many years ago, and I find similar thoughts in the writings of Emma Curtis Hopkins, William James, Thomas Merton, Joel Goldsmith, Don Miguel Ruiz, Thomas Troward, Rufus Jones, Howard Thurman, and many many more who have written and talked about the importance of thoughts, creativity and change in every generation.

In the book, Your Mythic Journey: Finding Meaning in Your Life through Writing and Storytelling,  Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox in their 1989 update of Telling Your Story (written in 1973), say that "We are storytelling animals" and they, like many of the people above as well as our ancestors and the first people on this earth have all used stories to explain who we are, where we come from, why we exist, why we are different, what is important to us, what we want in life, and much much more. Keen and Valley-Fox go on to say that "To be a person is to have a story to tell."  And what I like the most about what they wrote is something that fits every one of us and all the people who came before us: "With a little imagination," they say, "each person can find within himself a replacement for the myths and stories lost when we ceased living in tribes."

Don't we all know this? Think of the stories we have all been told and that we have all told: all different, some made up from nothing but our own thoughts and experiences, others about people we have known, or have met or who have passed on, or about people who lived long ago and left their stories for us through pictures carved in rocks, stories told by other people throughout history, stories we read in books. . . . and nowadays many come upon their stories through radios, computers, and televisions.

What would life be without people and could people exist without stories?
 Instead of just talking about dogs and all they mean to us, I am going to share some thoughts about stories and writers who have meant a lot to me.