How the Tale Feather Stories work
The connection between storytelling, reincarnation and fractals - oh my!
This essay has three beats - and likely that third will take you by surprise.
Here is an overview of what is ahead:
First is a short story about my life as a storyteller and educator.
Then I quickly pivot to my understanding of the narrative field (and reincarnation.)
And then the final section describes how and why I tell stories consciously pulled from my “narrative field”. I call these Tale Feather Stories.
That last part will certainly raise some eyebrows, so feel free to skip ahead if you wish. I can say that the context of the first two chapters will hopefully put the practice into perspective.
I’ll add stories here as I create them:
Beekman Misses His Chance is about a 12th century cobblers shop boy who is quietly invited to advance his rank in the world.
Herbs and Honey is about a 14th century girl navigating the effects of the Black Death, who witnesses her neighbor performing something holy and transformative.
Part One: My Storytelling Life
I have always been a storyteller, a teller of tales. The skills and capacities of storytelling came naturally to me and though my life experiences certainly contributed to developing those skills, I knew there was something else happening as well. I knew that these skills and capacities were bigger than what my resume reflected.
When I was an elementary school teacher, I marveled at how easy it was to find and tell just the right story to my flock of first graders. I used storytelling in my lesson preparation and even in my presentations to parents and colleagues. This facility only became more fluid when I co founded Sparkle Stories and I produced four high quality audio stories per week. I have since written and recorded nearly 1500 using the same process, skills and tools.
As an official professional storyteller I seemed to be able to mine wisdom in these stories beyond my life experience and understanding. I was like a channel of something bigger than me, I could “land” spiritual stories essentially by getting out of the way and telling them out loud in real time. I wrote them down and tested them on editors to make sure they were coherent and clear. It was a functional and efficient system.
Though my first taste of conscious channeling came before I became a professional storyteller, I did not understand the storytelling process as an act of channeling until much later.
I simply told stories that made sense to me and were built on my experience as a parent and teacher and artist. I had fun and the stories had a kind of lived experience and truth to them.
Martin and Sylvia stories were about a family very similar to my own. Junkyard Tales were about a community of animals based on characters I had encountered in my life. When I wrote the So Many Fairies series of stories, however, something was different. With these stories, I actively listened to the natural world and told stories in response to what I “heard”. This was channeling the nature spirits and I was clear about this. They were an act of my telling the natural world’s stories, and included the wisdom of the natural world.
Then came other story series where I branched out to characters in times gone by, and soon after I wrote about characters that did not have my lived experience. The flow continued, the stories were coherent and powerful and I enthusiastically dove into representing people and animals from far away places. These included stories of immigrants and indigenous people. They included BIPOC stories and people who practiced a religion or lived a life that I could not. I crossed a line into appropriation because I felt that I “knew” the truth through channeling.
I was not entirely wrong.
Though I approached the storytelling in an inappropriate and deeply privileged way, there were themes and truths and images that were indeed channeled. But I did not have permission to share these stories that were not my own. I was taking from other people and profiting from their stories. This was very wrong, and I chose to stop telling those stories. I chose to stop telling stories in general, and to focus instead on teaching others the skills that I had developed as a professional storyteller.
But I chose not to teach channeling as a component of this work. I did not teach people how to reach into the timeless and spaceless place where stories live and tease out something mythically true. I didn’t because I did not understand what was happening.
Part Two: Reincarnation and our “Narrative Field”
Look at a peacock tail feather and you will see many smaller feathers along either side leading to what looks like an eye. Each of those smaller feathers is called a barb, which if you look up close, has yet smaller feathers stemming off of it, called barbettes. Feathers within feathers within feathers. Feathers are examples of fractals, which are considered the building blocks of reality. A thing in a thing in a thing has been demonstrated in fractal design, in quantum mechanics and also described in many spiritual traditions.
I was shown a peacock tail feather long ago as a model of one’s life. I was told that we are a tail feather in the making. Each lifetime we experience is represented by a barb, or smaller feather - each lifetime is a little different but aligned along the same quill leading to what could be called a culmination, or according to a hinduism perspective, self-knowledge and spiritual liberation. The cycle of reincarnated lifetimes concludes at this point and then you are free.
This impressed me.
I did not know where I was in my cycle of reincarnated lives, where I was on the tail feather of a peacock, but I felt motivated to do the best I could toward reaching the eye and finding spiritual liberation. This seemed like a good goal.
Since that introduction so long ago, I have studied spiritual texts, practiced spiritual exercises and have most recently landed in this understanding of reincarnation and karma:
This body, this life and this moment happens at the same “time” as everything else.
In other words, experiencing linear time is a choice and a more accurate picture of time, is as a plane. The past and future are on the same plane and right now. And right now. And right now.
This, I believe, is our own “narrative field". It is the wide, tall, and deep network of the stories that make up our life (lives). Nothing is forgotten here. All the stories you experienced, collected, integrated and even pushed away, are here. They are stored and ready to be re-collected at any moment.
So past lives are happening, in a sense right now. Our futures are happening, in a sense, right now. And I believe that these potentially infinite moments in infinite lives can influence each other. This is my current understanding of our personal “narrative field”. All that we are and all that we have been and all that we will be is here in this field.
And we are doing this right now. And right now.
If you think about it, it isn’t the entirety of a story that we love, but a moment within the story.
And sometimes we love similar bits of different stories and connect them. We love the moment the lovers find each other. We love the moment of revelation. We love the moment a bad man makes a good choice. This is how I understand reincarnation - like a wide collection of stories. Our “lives” are the barbs of a peacock feather. And the moments in each life are like the barbettes. A wide collection of moments, stories, lives that are contained in one moment in one life. This moment in this life. This fractal within all that is.
Part Three: Telling Tale Feather Stories
Which brings me to Tale Feather Stories.
In addition to my decades of writing, telling and producing stories for children, I have practiced forms of channeling for quite a long time. I’ve meditated, done psychic and spiritual exercises for many years and after becoming schooled in the practice of “reading” the Akashic Records, I can consciously and intentionally tease stories out of the “narrative field” that can bring myself and others alignment. Healing. Reorientation. Integration. Forgiveness.
I essentially enter the vast library of my “narrative field” which includes my own barbs and barbettes, and then I tease out information. I can answer questions like “Why do I have this recurring health condition?” or “What is this relationship dynamic I have with my son?” or “I have a block in my professional life—is there precedence for this?”
With permission, I do this for others. There is a long list of ethical matters to consider, but I’ve been doing this for a number of people and its quite profound.
Most readers of the records will get answers in the form of an explanation or list of information. I get it in the form of a story. I can see “what happened” in one or a series of lives and see the golden thread that connects it to the question. And like fractals, the entirety of an answer is held within a moment in time. Even if that moment happened long long ago, or well into the future.
My understanding is not developed enough to give a better explanation at this point. Just know that I have rigorous ethical standards for this practice and I love doing it.
Perhaps if you read some of the Tale Feather stories in the Spiritual Sunday collection, this would make more sense. If you’ve read this far, you might be open to experiencing the stories as well. I love them.
And I love telling them.
I hope you enjoy them and find them useful as well.