The bottom line:
Immersing myself fully in the Story Skills Workshop, I am dreaming about the tools and framework given to me, an indication that I am wholeheartedly taking on the challenge of learning and discovering what these might gift me with.
I dream stories.
Here, a dream-bubble filled with the engaging beginning of a story.
There, another bubble filled with the story scaffolding.
Characters. Catalysts. Change.
Bubble after bubble burst into my dreams, having me process, relate to, befriend the framework and tools presented to me in the most ingenious way in the Story Skills Workshop. As I sleep.
This is what the brain does.
Make sense of what abounds in my world during the day, cleaning it up if need be, categorizing it, upgrading some to becoming a part of my memory bank, others discarded as not relevant, not worth the time and effort of remembrance.
There’s a lot for me to relate to, to integrate, to try on for size and fit, of all that is presented to me in the workshop. And I am reminded of the value of me keeping an open (an even more open than I have been, honestly!) mind and heart to it all, when I read Lewis Hyde A Primer for Forgetting, in an ask to the reader, by courtesy of Nietzsche:
”Whoever wants really to get to know a new idea does well to take it up with all possible love, to avert the eye quickly from, even to forget, everything about it that is objectionable or false. We should give the author of a book the greatest possible head start and, as if at a race, virtually yearn with a pounding heart for him to reach his goal. By doing this, we penetrate into the heart of a new idea, into its motive center: and this is what it means to get to know it. Later, reasons may set limits, but at the start that overestimation, that occasional unhinging of the critical pendulum, in the divide needed to entice the soul of the matter into the open.”
This, an ask, that I can take to heart even though I am not here, in the Story Skills workshop, reading a book. I am, I want to be, penetrating into the heart of this, for me, new idea of the story scaffolding, learning, playing with, experimenting and examining what it can be for me, what it can mean for me, as I write, as I continue to learn and to discover what is there, for me to expand with, through, from.