From Wonder Unto Wonder: Living A Storied Life

From Wonder Unto Wonder: Living A Storied Life

Margaret Wolff

Though I am an Art Therapist by training, I am, on a cellular level, a storyteller. It’s not just what I do as a writer; it’s how I move through the world. Everything about my life—about Life itself—is a good story.

I began writing stories and poems and plays as a young child. It felt natural. It felt “true.” My family and teachers frequently described me as “such an imaginative little child,” but I intuitively knew there was more to it than that. 

What “that” turned out to be, became clear when, as an adult, I read The Courage to Create, by Rollo May and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth. It was then that I realized storytelling was a glittering catalyst for personal and organizational transformation, that everything ever written—even the wide-eyed, unsophisticated poems of my childhood—could be springboards to the hidden treasures of the soul.

May and Campbell did far more than inform my intellectual understanding of this process; they gave me a lived experience of it, a primal realization that I was not the only one with an entrenched appetite for stories, for wonder itself. For “magic.” I was no longer alone in my longing.

It was this realization that led me to the, then, emerging field of Art Therapy, to a personal pot of gold that ended up being, as every experienced adventurer knows, right under my nose. My “pot “was taught by the women who pioneered the field at a university forty minutes from my home. This whole experience—finding the modality itself that fit me to a “T,” the coursework, and what I came to understand about myself—was also how I learned that when you believe stories have the power to guide and to heal, the right story—the one that can teach you what you need to know—finds its way to you. Like attracts like. What goes around really does come around. 

Sometimes it takes a while for your right story to find you. Sometimes the Universe has to align in a particular way for your story to reach you. This is what happened when I “decided” to write COMING HOME: Finding Shelter in the Love and Wisdom of Paramahansa Yogananda. I had been hearing stories about how people find their spiritual path for forty years but had never been prompted to curate them. Then, suddenly, in the summer of 2019 writing that book was all I could think about. Eight months into the writing, COVID struck. As the magnitude of this crisis became clear, I realized these stories had “waited” to take form until they could be read at a time when people were longing for something to believe in. 

Sometimes you have to, as Joseph Campbell might say, apprentice yourself to life—go into the forest and slay a few dragons, clear your personal path so you can recognize and claim your right story when it comes ‘round. This apprenticeship includes a period of initiation, of learning who you are “not” so you can accrue the clarity and courage to call in who you are. This is one of the things a story can reveal to you.

For example, when I was seven years old, I wrote the following poem:

The Lion

I wish I were a lion

The king of all the beasts.

I’d have a great big party

And invite everyone to the feast.   

Not a terribly profound little ditty, I grant you, but forty years later, this little poem rose up from my unconscious to show me that cultivating my inner life had helped me become more “lion-hearted,” better able to reign over my inner beasts, then share my hard-won transformation—my feast—with others. This innocent wish to express my LionSelf had been guiding my life for years without my knowing. Such is the power of any story we tell ourselves to shape our life.

Joseph Campbell believed that the most important part of the hero’s journey is the hero’s return to their community to tell their story. Telling your story bears witness to our unlimited human potential. You now know you can trust unseen forces—including your own inner resources—to help you make sense of chaos. You now know you can resurrect your own life and that it is important to help others do the same.  

Change begins—personally and globally—with the simple act of talking about what you deeply care about. Stories are richer than explanations because they originate in the metaphorical right brain that sees connections. They build bridges of thought (synapses) within you and to new opportunities in the world. When you mythologize rather than catastrophize your challenges, you learn to take what ails you responsibly, but not personally. 

Mark Twain, one of the world’s greatest storytellers, said, “Books are the liberated spirits of men.” We have to let our stories happen to us just as the storytellers in COMING HOME did so we can grow the “depth, and breadth and height our souls can reach.” Grace can happen to anyone who sincerely wants to change their drifting into pilgrimage, their fear into confidence and calm, their questioning into the self-realization that ultimately satisfies the soul.

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Margaret Wolff is an art therapist, retreat leader, and author of COMING HOME: Finding Shelter in the Love and Wisdom of Paramahansa Yogananda and In Sweet Company: 

Conversations with Extraordinary Women About Living A Spiritual Life. Her work celebrates the collective wisdom and the power of creativity to reveal the truth and beauty of our inner lives. Visit ComingHomeStories.com.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips