It is all a story…
Every human experience has been a story. Stories of how we came to be, and why we are here. Stories of our purpose, our relationships, and the long evolution of our emotions and our psyches. Our creations, inventions, and systems all carry the same signature, language, communication, organization, & the way we interpret the world around us. Even discovery itself moves through us as story.
With every incarnation, we have participated in these manifested stories, finding ways to live them with deep purpose, meaning, and emotion. The body records everything cellularly. History records the rest.
We are drawn, again and again, to different ways of expressing our interpretation of this experience. So many stories exist by now, written, spoken, & created, that no one could live inside them all. Centuries have shaped and reshaped them. New ones arrive; old ones return wearing new clothes. Each one matters. Each one feeds the larger life experience, even while remaining nothing more than a human creation. A book needs a setting, characters, a plot with climaxes, or it is nothing at all. And anyone deeply invested in a good story wants it to keep going. Never to end. An adventure, by nature, resists its own conclusion.
Think of an amusement park.
No one wants to leave before experiencing everything. The ups and downs, the emotional swings, the physical exhilaration, the simple pleasure of watching the sights and meeting fellow travelers along the way. Each person there feels something different. A different connection, a different reason for coming, & a different interpretation on what they’re seeing. Yet everyone participates in the same experience together.
That is life. Together, we participate in the amusement. The exciting parts and the mundane ones, the extreme and the hard, all of it an improvised story we’re creating as we go.
Looking back at what we’ve done and experienced builds a deep appreciation for the smallest things. This is how we discover what we want and what we don’t; the whole of life becomes an experiment. Hard things teach the deepest lessons, and from them, insight and wisdom take root. Precious moments call to be recreated; painful ones call to be avoided. Either way, we record them in the body, in memory, in written word, in visual art, music, animation, in the traditions we build and in the meanings we attach to them.
The Agape Philosophy comes down to this: an exploration of the human experience. The story you choose to live, or create, holds exactly as much beauty as any other. None of them are wrong. None of them hold the ultimate truth. Truth, when it appears at all, tends to be rare and startlingly simple. And the one truth underneath all of it is that we are here, as humans, in the physical realm, creating and living out countless different stories. Each one is unique. Each one hands us one more clue toward what we call the human experience.
My Story
For example, I spent a good portion of my own life searching for purpose. Looking for the story I wanted to connect to, trying to make sense of the good times and the suffering both. I wanted more control over my life, and I wanted to understand my contribution to the larger human story. Explanations mattered to me, for my yearnings, my actions, and my place inside everything unfolding around me. What I was really doing was searching for a language to describe what I was going through, a way toward truth, whatever shape that took.
The search turned up story after story, not all of them, by any means, but enough to see clearly what was actually happening. Humans have been trying to explain this experience since the beginning, in every language they could find, and every one of those explanations was really just another story circling the same fire. Some of them fit. Some used vocabulary that finally worked for me.
A Story Has Meaning
Certain stories helped me come to terms with the shadows I came here to work through, individually and collectively. Those shadows became my deciphering code for the great human story. The lens that shaped my perception of life and the world, the reason I walked through the darkness I walked through. Meaning lived on the other side of that darkness, along with reasons for decisions I once couldn’t explain. Even the hardest circumstances became something I could hold with appreciation. Other people’s shadows grew visible to me there too, and their stories alongside them. Living inside this has become its own kind of novel.
Along the way, I discovered talents, skills, and aesthetics I genuinely love. Necessity taught me other skills, ones that, in hindsight, built my appreciation for the talents and skills other people carry. Philosophy, anthropology, sociology, spirituality, psychology, economics, religion and belief, practice and system, creativity, science and innovation, words and writing, reading and the quiet observation of the human story; all of it, I discovered, I love. Every skill gathered along the way explains the shape of what I notice now, and the appreciation I hold for life in all its detail.
Every experience, mine or someone else’s, deepens the understanding a little further. A tiny bit more added to the questions of why and how.
Is any of this true, or false?
Some of both, probably. Stories are how we make the experience make sense. Our shared experiment in how to live and how to connect. The truth underneath is simply that we are all here to do exactly that. What you’re reading now is written in the framework and vocabulary I love most: in a spiritual, witchy, and natural way. It is the story I enjoy living inside. The Crossroads Movement is another story built to record how we, as humans, are living through the shifts now reshaping the collective story itself. A great deal of change arriving just as most of us were getting comfortable with the old one. My own story’s vocabulary is simply the tool I reach for to help figure out where we fit inside the new one.
Are these stories real? As real as we are, inside this human experience. They are us. They are our record of existence, and our way of meeting our shadows, individually and collectively. People living inside entirely different stories can still walk together inside the Crossroads Movement, because the movement itself is built on admiring and observing every story, and understanding how each one feeds the next. All of them are chapters in the same great book. They influence each other. They inspire each other. And just as no two characters in a book are the same, neither are we.
Kristi
High Priestess Agape Covens
Founder of Crossroads Movement
