When I lived in the Bay Area and people asked what I did, I answered with, “I’m a storyteller.”
They often assumed I worked in marketing—that I helped entrepreneurs sell their companies, raise money, or build their brands.
Storytelling had just become the it girl. It was going mainstream, with increasing attention being paid to how effectively story could be used to influence people’s minds and behavior.
But many years before, I had made a clear choice:
I never wanted to use storytelling.
I wanted to engage people through the practice of Sacred Storytelling.
I was learning about story from bards like Michael Meade. Martin Shaw was revealing the intimate relationship between wilderness, myth, and story. Caroline Casey’s language was electrifying. Stephen Jenkinson was illuminating a path home through language. And, of course, the books of Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Sean Kane, and Joseph Campbell never left my desk and bedside. Ariel Spilsbury, through her mystery school, gave me a place to practice this unusual calling: story as ceremony.
Sitting at the feet of these teachers activated the storyteller within me.
At the same time, I was living deep among the redwoods of Marin, along the Lost Coast, and in the jungles of Hawai‘i, where I was learning about storytelling from the land.
I imagine this is how our original storytellers learned: through the running tongue of the river, the whisper and howl of the wind, the wisdom waiting to be listened to from stone.
But more than anything, it was the trees who became my guides.
They led me into an understanding that when we treat stories as sacred—and approach them as living beings who are gateways to the divine—they can become a way of communing with the unseen world. They can become a way of serving the spirit of Life through every word spoken. It is not lost on me that our books are printed on the bodies of trees.
This is where I began to understand what it means to be a conscious creator through language.
In a time when storytelling and the arts are increasingly being consumed by capitalism—when stories are engineered as clickbait, content, branding, and persuasion—it feels more relevant than ever to distinguish the intention behind their creation.
I have come to understand that to be a Sacred Storyteller is to tell stories in service to Life.
I have come to understand the role of the Sacred Storyteller is a guide through the pathways of consciousness: someone willing to travel into the bowels of grief, to set a place at the table for the unexplainable mystery, and to invite more joy, love, wonder, and connection into our lives. That the stories we tell will carry listeners into the wilds of our consciousness, and then home again with new perspectives and tools to meet the world.
And that Sacred Storytelling is an expression of kinship—where our relationship with the land is woven into our way of being, where the past is woven into the present, where the wild ones are still allowed to roam free through our stories. It is a way of weaving in all of life.
That, for me, is why I use the words Sacred Storytelling.