Part 1_Episode 2: Stories are attention


Story Hunter, episode 2 how it looked to Amber. Stories are attention. Moods are for the benefit of others. Anger, frustrated, sulking, skulking, bulking all moody moods for the benefit of others. A mood is non-verbal communication. Moods are imposing your energy on a space while acting like you're not. And I guarantee you, your moods are for others, and you know how I know this: 


In 2020, I lived alone in a tree for 40 days and 40 nights, totally alone in the African wilderness. Some of you will remember this. And one thing you notice living in that kind of solitude, no moods. There's no one around to enjoy them, slash, impose them on, so they just don't show up. Sometimes you'll have a little outburst, stub your toe, burst of rage, but then it's gone. Moods just do not hang around in solitude. When I went to the tree, people were really worried about me living in the wild alone. What about lions, snakes, scorpions? Anything could happen out there. You know I wanted that. I wanted something to happen. It's a very masculine sort of thing, right? There is a part of us that wants to test ourselves in nature. We want to find out what we're made of. 


Now, Barry was an old buffalo bull that lived in the reeds below the tree house. He had blunt horns and he was blind in the right eye. He was grumpy and you had to be very wary walking around the camp at night. A black buffalo on a black night is a good way to become a kebab, a ke-boyd, a keboyd, kebab. On my third day in the tree, I decided to do some naked sunbathing. You know, commune with nature, no mood, just naked and rude. Stretched out in the sun, silent sounds of the birds. And I will tell you, as I lay there in total solitude, naked in the African wild, I was about as happy as I had ever been. I remember somewhere nearby a fish eagle called Anything could happen out there. I heard the voices of all those alarmists “Anything could happen out there”. Didn't they know I was a wild man perfectly in tune with nature. I'm as at home out there as a leopard, I thought as I slid my underpants back on, failing to notice a hairy caterpillar that had made its home in this particular banana hammock. 


The onset of the pain was sudden, a mixture of itching, burning, singing. I knew I was in serious trouble and I knew I must not scratch, but the itch was too much. Huge red walls, blistering red walls start to appear all over me and I break. I start scratching. Now moods might be for others, but the sound I was making at that moment was just for me. I called it panic drone. Ah, I'm on fire. 


I run to my supply kit rummaging for antihistamine. Fuck, no antihistamine. Ah. Cut to annoying people in my mind. Anything could happen out there. I turn to an image of me punching that person in my mind's eye. Cut back to reality. Panic drone. Ah, no cream except sun cream. Fuck. Start ripping clothes off. 


Run to the river from the treehouse in underpants. I look like a pork sausage, dipped in the hair of a freshly shorn wolf and then singed on an open fire. Not attractive. As I run to the water, rip underpants off and throw them into the reeds. Ah, leap into the water, surprising, blind. Barry the buffalo. He charges at me, probably just afraid. Run from the buffalo naked and wet. Buff, breaks into the reeds, picks up underpants on one of his horns. Runs back to first aid kit. Decide I need cream, sun cream, whipped cream, any bloody cream. Spray myself with sun cream and lather it over my naked body till I looked like a cream scone, made love to a ghost and had me Right then a supply land rover arrives into the camp to find me naked and covered in a inch of suncream from head to foot. 


This was close to the end of my trip. The driver drove up and just looked at me for a long moment. Are you okay? He said, and I remember looking at him covered in cream. ‘Yeah, I'm totally fine.’ ‘You seem a little weird’. He said. ‘Nah, I'm fine, just a bit sunburned.’ Just then, to add weirdness to the moment, a blind buff walked slowly, but like painfully slowly, into the scene with underpants on his horn. ‘Are you sure you're okay?’ ‘Yeah, man, all good here,’ I say. Moods are for others, but shame can last a lifetime. 


This is a classic storytelling bit. The gimmick is there are unrelated chords that start to come together. The characters are me, the buffalo, the skeptical voices of other. The story has threads. These threads can stand alone, but ultimately will need to intersect. Each thread creates a context, but you must also trust an audience to catch up and co-create with you. If you had been there that day, it might not have looked exactly like this. 


I relate to this not as a series of events, but rather as the colliding of elements, hence situational comedy. Yet this is the way the situation lands on my eyes. I need to pay attention to find the comedy. My friend Amber used to laugh when she would hear me tell stories about a dinner we had both been at together. Wow bear, she would say, you got all of that from dinner, were we even at the same dinner? Now, everything I said was true and happened. 


If the story is a lie, it won't feel authentic. The art of storytelling is to have an attention that sees these details and threads. It's all there if you can look deep enough. If the truth is stranger than fiction, then the art of storytelling is not to make something up, but rather to really see what is there. Reality, if you look close enough, is almost always hilarious. That is why, in some fundamental way, stories are not narrative, but attention and self-awareness. You are the seer, the translator, the narrator. If you are a story hunter, you are an instrument for meaning, a way to make the village understand. Storytellers are context creators. 


More on context. As a boy I grew up in the safari business. My father and mother were the proprietors of our camp in the wild and my father was, in fact, the lead guide. And the lead entrepreneur - he had started the business and had worked tirelessly to get it going. Guests would come from Johannesburg down on a Friday afternoon and by Saturday morning they would find themselves on foot-tracking lions. One of the guests, by the name of Jerry Brown, had an old Nikon camera. When they eventually found the lions, all hell broke loose and a big male charged at the group. What followed was 30 seconds of terror and my father screamed at everyone to stand still as the lion charged. The lion was growling. He came right at them before turning and running back into the thicket. The guests were somewhere between terrified survivors and exhilarated safari girls. 


That night, around the fire, my father would tell the story, as is traditional in the safari world. I remember snippets from that. Him lit by the firelight. It was incredible, he said, leaping out of his chair. The tracks were so fresh, beautiful pug marks in powdery sand. His eyes would be a light with excitement. Then, there in the grass ahead, this lion rises out, tawny and beautiful. He comes straight at us and I knew he was just warning us to move back. My father, so excited, now has recast the event as he retells the story. So few people have ever seen a lion like that. He says, and all of you stood your ground. Amazing. No longer are the guests scared urban dwellers, but instead they are part of a wild adventure. Jerry Brown leaps to his feet and tells the crowd ‘I pulled my wife behind me as she snapped a shot’. 


My father, as the storyteller, is helping the group understand how they should feel about what happened. He is contexting and meaning making. If you are a guide, a CEO, a father, a mother, a leader, most of your job is to pay enough attention that you can see what's really going on. Storytelling is a discipline of attention to help people understand why something happened and how to feel about it. If you can help people understand how to feel about anything, you become a guide. Those guests would go back to the city and retell the story at every social event they went to and, as a result, new guests poured into the doors of our safari camp, people seeking adventures like they had heard about. I understood then that so much of life is how we cast ourselves into the story. Storytelling is seeing, storytelling is context, storytelling is leading, storytelling is life, and that is why you must become a story hunter.