Within one day of posting my Thought of the Day about winter and our need to rest, to crawl into bed at 8:30 and listen to stories (have a look in the archives), I received an email from my good friend Michael Jarvis, in Sutton’s Bay, Michigan. He was forwarding this audio of a story he’d just recorded with another friend, Eric Miller, a brilliant, young musician and filmmaker for Eric’s new podcast, A Man Called Trouble.
Auspicious coincidence, love it.
After posting it on my Facebook page, I wrote them both and asked them to talk about both podcast and story. As we turn in and rest during these dark winter nights, we need to allow our mind to unwind and travel the road of imagination and creativity. Energetically, our mind wants and needs to go there at this time of year, water time, into the dark mystery of story.
Eric Miller talks about his new podcast, A Man Called Trouble:
At present, there’s an unprecedented abundance of stories. Snapchat champions the ten second documentary, video games customize narrative to the will of the player, and streaming services upload a lifetime of content daily. While informed and inspired by modernity, our podcast is a return to storytelling in its most basic form: stories orated from memory. The podcast also considers stories to be storehouses, and tries to discover what they might contain. The hope is that by mixing a caricature of the present into stories from the past, timeless, relevant, and relatable elements will stand out through the overlap.
Michael Jarvis, master storyteller, and his story presented here:
The Loathly Lady is a 1,500-year-old tale about privilege and the power of those who have it to curse those who do not. It also speaks to the roles that both those with and without privilege have in creating non-violent change,
Perhaps controversially, it speaks to an important role that men must play in feminism. It
could be seen as one more example of a man rescuing a woman, but I think that is too simplistic. In this story, there is truly a peaceful transfer of power, that changes everything.
Crawl into bed and have a listen.