How to Navigate By Stories: Part 1

A Guiding Force Called Imagination

New Westminster where I live on the coast of British Columbia is on a north-south bird migration route called the Pacific Flyway. My ornithologist husband, Loren, tells me that during the spring migration hundreds of thousands of birds pass overhead while we sleep, some having travelled the full length of the continent from Patagonia in South America to their summering grounds in Alaska.

How do they know which way to fly I ask.

Loren says they learn to locate north by observing the nighttime rotation of the stars.

It occurs to me that stories are to humans what the stars are to migrating birds.

Once Upon a Time

No sooner do toddlers begin to process language then they learn to follow stories.

Taking cues from the protagonist in a story they’ve just had read to them comes naturally to a child of three or four. Their imaginations outfit them with whatever is needed to take up the role: a suit of armour, a horse, a castle, a sword, a dragon to slay.

By the time they are ten or eleven a child raised on stories will have an active inner compass, jumping at opportunities for adventure, heroism, sacrifice, conquest.

When I was twelve our dorm father read James Ramsey Ullman‘s Banner in the Sky to the middle grade kids at the missionary boarding school in Nairobi where I grew up. Being read to aloud was our nighttime routine. Without tv screens or smart phones vying for our attention our imaginations couldn’t get enough of 16-year-old Rudi’s harrowing climb up the highest peak in the Swiss Alps to help rescue climbers lost in a blizzard and work through the grief of his father’s death on the same mountain.

If Rudi Matt could escape the dish pit so could I!

So when my adventure-loving grandfather, Poppa, came from Canada to visit that Christmas I begged to be included in his plan to climb Mt. Kenya with my dad and older brother, Tim.

At 16,000 feet the lowest peak of Mt. Kenya can be climbed in a weekend but involves a day of steady ascent in low-lying cloud through bamboo forests and giant groundsel to the base camp in Teleki Valley.

Even with two porters hired to carry our gear I found the climb tough going and struggled to keep up with the others. It didn’t help that the heavy tropical vegetation on Mt. Kenya had nothing in common with the edelweiss-studded alpine meadows of the Swiss Alps. My motivation slumped.

Not until we cleared the tree line and the heavy humidity gave way to crisp, high-altitude air did the inspiration return. The jagged, snow-capped summit smelled like the Alps and I knew I was in the right story.

Martin Shaw says that myths come with postal codes. That is to say, they come from a place. The ground beneath them has contours, the air has a smell.

From a quick google search I learn that smell is an important “navigational input” for migrating birds. Characteristic smells help birds recognize places they have visited before.

Smell keeps birds and stories oriented. It helps us know when we are on the path.

Gravitational Push

We made it to Mackinder’s Camp as dusk fell and after a supper of canned beans and black tea we set up our bedrolls in a large canvas tent. Despite the bitter cold and the rock hyrax running through the flaps in our tent, I willed myself to sleep. I had to be ready. We were so close now. We would scale the peak at dawn!

Looking back on my childhood I’m struck by my audacity. Who was I, a kid with zero mountaineering experience, to make the connection I did to Rudi’s story? What could possibly have possessed me?

But then again, what possesses a Bar-tailed Godwit, hatched on the Alaskan tundra to embark on one of the most impressive migrations on Earth: a nonstop transequatorial flight lasting at least seven days and nights across the Pacific Ocean to New Zealand 12,000 kilometers away without any help from more experienced birds?

The answer to both questions is an invisible force.

For birds, it’s called magnetoreception. The magnetic field generated by Earth’s molten core.

For children it’s the imagination. The great networker of the right brain: the go-between, connector of dots, weaver of strands, maker of the seemingly impossible, possible.

And children have it in spades. The world in stories and their own world are capable of being one and the same.

It’s why they jump off the couch after story time and start stabbing at furniture with the end of a broom handle.

Where the grown-up sees their child doing damage to the dining room chairs, the child sees a swamp full of crocodiles that need to be beaten back. The incongruities don’t deter them. Nor do the risks.

No wonder the youngster doesn’t want to go for his bath. Not when there are crocodiles to battle.

Imagination in a child is instinctual. Which must make it a survival skill for the species.

Blown On Course

At 3:00 a.m. I emerged from the warmth of my sleeping bag and joined Dad, Tim and Poppa in the darkness outside the tent. As we didn’t need gear for the final ascent our porters slept on. The four of us started up the gravelly scree moving in a steady line. If we kept up our pace we’d summit in time to watch the sun rise over the Maasai plains. The loose rock on the high slopes was slippery, as easy to slide backward as it was to gain ground. But I was determined to keep up, placing one foot in front of the next.

Then, about an hour into the pre-dawn ascent, dizziness and nauseous hit. My vision blurred and I started throwing up. Dad had me sit down and put my head between my knees while he conferred with my granddad and brother. “Altitude sickness,” I heard them say.

The decision was made. Poppa would take me back to the base camp. I protested. But it was no use. It was too dangerous for me to press on, nor did I have the strength.

Back at the tent Poppa wrapped me in blankets. We sipped hot tea in silence and kept our eyes on the peak that Dad and Tim would summit without us.

I learn another thing about birds: if they get blown off course on their first migration they aren’t able to recover. Their navigational inputs fail them. It’s one of the reasons only 30 percent of small songbirds make it to their wintering grounds and back again.

Aging In

In a left-brain dominated world where the rational mind prevails, it is little wonder that the imagination is spoken of with an undercurrent of contempt. Sure an active imagination is tolerated in children but for the most part we consider it something to age out of, and the sooner the better.

“You know it’s not real?” adults like to clarify. Or, “you are just pretending aren’t you?”, a tinge of concern in their voice. Or “It’s just a figment of your imagination,” they’ll say dismissively. Or “don’t let your imagination get the better of you,” as though the imagination is something to be on guard against.

It could certainly have been said of me. Banner in the Sky? Nonsense. More like Burden in the Sky. I was no mountain climber and Kenya was no Switzerland.

But Poppa made no mention of the loss the whole way down the mountain. Instead he stopped along the path and pointed out plants endemic to Mt. Kenya. “This gentle giant,” he said admiring a massive rosette, “only grows in the unique eco-system created by this mountain. And we get to stand here in it’s natural habitat, admiring it’s beauty.”

He understood that when you drop out of one story, your imagination is there to catch you and carry you to the next.

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms,” Muriel Rukeyser famously said.

I’ve always believed that. And that the work of the imagination is to lead us from one story to the next and the next then back again if necessary.

And that, if a culture is old enough and deep enough, this great network of stories will turn out to be all one and the same Story, ready to catch, hold and, like a map, reorient us, as we move deeper and deeper into our own truth and into the truth of the world.

But that is next week’s reflection, Part 2 of How to Navigate By Stories. Stay tuned.

In the meantime I’d love to hear about the formative stories in your own childhood? What adventures did they launch you on or how did they shape you into the person you are today?

Photo by Markus Voetter on Unsplash