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THE BIRD IN THE GOLDEN CAGE: A Storytelling Experiment from Odds Bodkin’s Workshop

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THE BIRD IN THE GOLDEN CAGE: A Storytelling Experiment from Odds Bodkin’s Workshop.

The experiment begins with a vivid memory: the room where you sleep at night. As a very familiar place, most people carry detailed visuals of it, even if they don’t think about it often. The bedclothes, the closet and drawers, what’s outside the window on a summer day and how that sounds. Even how the screen smells if you press your nose against it.

All this suggested visualizing among participants takes place while listening to 12-string guitar music––not a song, more like colorful splashes of emotion. Combined with the story, the result is a musico-literary doorway to imagination. Imagining begins when a small sphere of blue light appears above the bed in your room. Eventually you journey into it, imagining yourself in a bird’s body in a golden cage, then seas, caves, clear fruits in various flavors and a multitude of other opportunities to discover your Five Sensory Imaginations.

For the storyteller, these are your paints. The more you practice, the more the door to them opens into a creative state. Telling your story is simply describing that state by using those paints.

Just one cognitive experiment among many in Odds Bodkin’s weekend workshop in Colorado this coming May, The Bird in the Golden Cage doesn’t talk about using the mind’s eye, it experientially draws you into it. It’s instinctual.

If you’ve ever wanted to learn to tell stories in your own voice, here’s a chance to study with a master. No music required, or experience. Just a willingness to experiment with your mind. Based on Odds Bodkin’s graduate courses and workshops conducted worldwide.

On May 26-27, 2018 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, CO, Odds will be offering his weekend workshop in storytelling for beginners to experienced tellers. You’ll also learn the secrets of ancient tree lore. Space is limited, so plan your weekend now!

 

 

 

THE MUSE APPROACH TO STORYTELLING

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THE MUSE APPROACH TO STORYTELLING

Seven years of teaching adult grad students how to tell stories at Antioch in New England showed me one thing: if they can locate their Muse, they’re golden. I’ve seen it many times. Given a few lines of story on a slip of paper––a folkloric fragment from somewhere in the middle of a tale they’ve never read––students often end up telling a 45-minute long original tale, crafting origins and endings. No kidding. It’s as if an acorn sprouted and instantly grew into an oak

It’s a glorious act to watch. How, without rehearsal and in their own words, they enter the image-rich Muse in their minds and become like jazz musicians of story, making it up as they go along.

The Muse, least Calliope, the Muse of Eloquence as the ancient Greeks thought of it, is a fusion of imagination and a certain kind of memory called “event memory.” Once you learn how to summon it, what James Joyce called “the smithy of the soul” fires up and off you go.

This coming May 25-27 I’ll be offering a full weekend workshop in storytelling in Colorado. Along with its emphasis on ancient tree lore, it provides a step-by-step process for Muse discovery.

Registration is limited to 30.

Details are here.

The Helpless Sky

Posted on by Odds Bodkin

In the last line of a story I’ll be telling at the Climate Symposium in Boulder next fall, Gaia, the original Earth Mother, reflects on how uncomfortable anger makes her feel. Bad things happen when she senses injustice and she’s been implacably rough on her husband Ouranos and grandson Zeus during the story. What, she asks herself after she goes into hiding now that the Titans have fallen, could ever make her that angry again?

 
I guess the time has come. Our atmosphere is definitely angry nowadays. Basically, it’s drier dries, wetter wets, windier winds and hotter hots. Fire seasons continue to lengthen. Whether rain or snow, precipitation is heavier, hence floods in new places. When they do begin to spin, hurricanes and tornadoes are more destructive than before. Insurers are desperate for forecasts. For thousands of years, farmers and herders in Africa, South America and the Middle East counted on rainy seasons to avoid famines. Slowly drying out now, those lands are forcing migrants to flee what are essentially climate wars. We haven’t even mentioned our own great population centers, built at the sea’s edge.

 
Ever cooked spaghetti in a pot? You turn on the heat and wait for the boil. Long ago I learned that if I cover it with a lid, it boils twice as fast. Instead of letting heat escape out the top, I trap it in a closed system. Smart, right? It might be hard to imagine, but Earth’s atmospheric pot had no lid prior to the Industrial Revolution. Over the last 150 years, though, we’ve installed an invisible one made of greenhouse gasses from fossil fuels. It’s not anyone’s voluntary doing. We only figured this out a few decades ago. Up until then, all that exhaust was progress. As vast as it is, we’re slowly closing off Earth’s heat release system, high above our heads. Not completely yet, but we’re getting there, busily tossing tiny carbon footprints by the billions up into a helpless sky.

 
There has to be a way to figure this out before the thing boils, with us in it.

 
I’ll also be conducting a workshop designed to turn climate-aware people, including scientists, into The Cadre of Science Storytellers.