Part 1_Episode_6: The Personal Collective


Story Hunter, Episode 6, The Personal Collective.


If you have begun the journey of becoming a story hunter, you have become a character who finds characters, switched on your attention, learnt to see with the right kind of eyes, become someone who can create context. You are now ready to touch the core of what makes the story elevated. I call it the personal collective. There is a strangely universal truth that the more in touch you are with your own unique personal essence, the more what you have to say becomes universally meaningful. The most private things are the most universal things. Any type of trying to be commercially successful or thinking about the end user while you work will kill an artist's freedom. Yet if you are a storyteller, you want the story to be listener friendly. I always think about how a listener could put their own story into my stories. This is not a rule but rather an orientation. Like a compass, I point personal story towards a subtextual, universal story. A story always has an archetypal core. 


For example, I remember the story of a young woman named Jessica Shillaw who came to work as a safari guide at Londolozi when she was 23. The training was brutal, starting with a week-long military style selection to find out who could handle pressure and to test the base level of capability. She scraped through. She made it into the next phase, which would be six months of intensity, learning the ecology of the wilderness, how to walk and be safe amidst dangerous animals, the intangible skills of guiding and lots and lots of presentation skills. Jessica hated public speaking. It was extremely difficult for her. Walking in the wild she enjoyed, but speaking to groups of people terrified her. 


Jessica is a tall, brown-haired woman with dark skin and a disarming demeanor. She has the strength of a warrior and the softness of a heart. From her youngest days she has communicated with animals in an almost mystical and psychic way. Her best friends have always been wild creatures, starting with a terrier named Shashi, when she was a girl. When Jessica entered the training programme, tragedy struck at Londolozi. 


A pride of lions that had lived on the reserve called the Tsalala Pride were attacked by other lions, leaving only one of the lionesses, a soul survivor. That lioness became known as the Tsalala female. She grieved the loss of her pride members for about eight weeks, returning constantly to where they had been killed and quietly contact calling for them. She was suddenly alone. Jessica could feel her grief, every time she saw her. The lionesses coat grew tick-infested, as she had lost her sisters and pride members to groom her.  She was forced into solitary survival. She had to change the way she hunted because now she was alone. She had to hunt by day to avoid other predators stalking and charging out like a leopard. 


Everyone said that the Tsalala female would die now that she was alone. But when Jessica looked at her she knew something different. She felt something in her bones. Suddenly they were both in the wild, trying to survive in their own ways. There were two feminine beings who had to find strength in isolation. 


Tsalala female, the lioness, began to be Jessica's spirit guide and strength.  Watching that lion adapt and survive each day, Jess saw an embodied power. It was not so much a rational thought but a transmission of energy from the lioness's body to her own. In that lioness she saw courage and strength and resolve all modelled. 


One day Jessica was sitting in the camp when they heard the sound of a buffalo groaning in alarm. The guides rushed out in landrovers and found the Tsalala female killing a fully grown male buffalo by herself. It was an awesome sight. Later that day the Tsalala lioness walked past the open land rover. She was so close to where Jessica sat. She stopped and she looked up at Jess, staring for a long time into her eyes. Tawny eyes melted together in that moment. When Jess told me the story she still gets shivers to this day. It was like a current of energy ran from that gaze into me. She said it was all there in that look- feminine power, courage and strength. It was a single look that changed Jess's life forever. The lioness's strength became her strength. 


Shortly after that day she passed her guide training with composure and confidence, as if the spirit of Tsalala was inside of her. The Tsalala lioness went on to mate and had cubs, seeing one of her cubs to adulthood before she was killed, protecting that cub from a male lion. Even in death, she was the archetype of feminine ferocity and power. 


I tell you this story because, while it's true that most of you listening will never be training to be safari guides and it's highly unlikely that you'll regularly be interacting with a wild lion, and yet you understand what it means to feel alone. You know what it's like to need to figure it out by yourself. Many of you understand abandonment or that sense of being out of your depth, and some of you may even have experienced the drawing of strength from an animal or from a person who, without saying a word, touches you. Someone whose very presence shows you and makes you strong. I, as the storyteller, don't need you to have ever been to the African bush to understand this story. In this story, no words pass between Jessica and the lion, what travels is primal energy, primal wisdom, and we all know what it's like to see a power that inspires you. 
There are universal energies we all recognize, and the lioness is such an image.


And still you can relate deeply to the personal universal within it. This is a story of resilience and feminine strength. A story of mentorship, a story of human-animal connection. I haven't really even built out the characters. In some ways I've glossed over details, but there you are. Maybe you're already starting to think about who inspires you. What images of power and courage speak to you. Thinking of who you draw strength from. The story takes you to your own encounters of those archetypal energies in your own life. The anecdote takes you to Africa, but, way more importantly, the story takes you to your own life. 


What about something like this? 
I have suffered with severe depression in my life, severe at times, the type of depression that is accompanied by crippling anxiety. It started when I was 17, after a series of terribly traumatic incidents. Part of the experience of being depressed for me was that my mind moved from a get-to to a have-to consciousness. Even things I liked were things I had to do. I realized, in fact, that everything I was doing, even sports or martial arts, were acts of refusal to give up entirely versus joyful pursuits. I remember feeling vacant. It was often worse in the morning, when I would wake up with no joy for the day ahead. I wanted to be alone a lot, but being alone made it worse. At night, I would often find it hard to sleep, entering into a brainwave state that felt more like a numb trance. I was somewhere between the land of the waking and sleeping. I would tickle my own arm in this unconscious need for comfort. Sometimes I would wake up running my index finger over the soft skin on the inside of my elbow for hours as I lay in the dark. Psychologists call this self-soothing. Primates disconnected from their innate nurturing start to exhibit this type of behavior. It was my body unconsciously giving me what I needed. 


The story is less archetypal and, of course, it's very, very personal. My bet is you related even more deeply to these strange idiosyncrasies that make us human. The detail of my finger on the soft skin inside my elbow brings us closer. Even if you have never done this, it's intimate enough that you relate to it through the human experience. Deeply personal is deeply universal. I tell you this, and I reiterate at this time, that being a story hunter is a practice. It's a way of being that is constellated through a disciplined attention. The story hunter is always aware of how, with attention, the personal can touch the universal. The story hunter must notice. The story hunter must know their own nature and in so doing, they know the nature of life. One mind. One mind ties us all together.