Restorying the Earth

Some Days Etsy Sellers Save My World

100x100 A couple of years ago a friend asked me if I’d ever been to the Etsy site. “Etsy? What’s that I asked?”

Etsy was fairly young back then. Now it is a global phenomenon.

Etsy is a site where crafters from around the world can sell their stuff. At last check there were over 150,000 shops on Etsy selling everything from hemp lip gloss, to upcycled clothing, to children’s toys, to four-poster beds. Everything sold is handmade (except for crafting supplies and some vintage gear).

This is all very good, you might think to yourself, but what does it have to do with stories?

Since that fateful day when I was introduced to Etsy, it has become one of my touchstones, grounding me in possibilities when the future of the world starts to look bleak. You see, I don’t want to live in a throwaway world. I want to live in a world where everything is made with love, is cherished and used with love, is patched-up and fixed-up until it is too beat up to repair and then is returned to the Earth with love–that’s what I wrote when I took the handmade pledge and I meant it. Etsy is a community of hundreds of thousands of people around the world who feel the same way and are doing something about it.

When I’m having a particularly bad day, I visit the featured sellers. As a way of rendering their ebusiness community a little bit more face-to-face, Etsy posts an interview with a different seller each week. These read like mini autobiographies, stories of how people have opted out of consumer society and have not just survived but thrived. These are people who are writing and living a new dream.

There is a lot about the handmade lifestyle that makes it softer on the Earth than the rampant globalized consumer catastrophe that it stands in contrast to. However, many sellers have gone further than this and are actively seeking ways of reducing their footprint through using organically grown or re-used materials, to give just a couple of examples.

So if you ever need a story or two to remind you that another world is possible, I suggest you check out the Etsy Featured Sellers Archive, and have yourself a better day.

Being Inspired by Contemporary Oral Storytelling at Newbattle Abbey College

Two weeks after I moved to Edinburgh last September, I found myself down at Newbattle Abbey College, attending the first weekend of their Contemporary Oral Storytelling professional development programme. I signed up because I wanted to hone my storytelling skills and because I thought it would be a great way to find out how storytelling is being used here in Scotland. I was not disapointed. However, I discovered–pretty much immediately–that we would not be allowed to just sit back and learn. We were being groomed to go out into our communities and our places of work and be ambassadors for the love and value of storytelling.

In order to complete the programme, each of us had to implement a storytelling project. This past weekend we reconvened at the College to share our projects: what we had set out to do, what had worked well, what obstacles we’d encountered, and what we had accomplished. With no exagerration I can say that the presentations were truly inspiring.

Quite a few projects involved bringing storytelling to schools, either by teachers or librarians. The phrase “Curriculum for Excellence” was mentioned more times than I care to count, but a good case was made for the contribution that storytelling can make to implementing this Scottish education policy. The schools projects involved all ages from nursery children through to secondary students.

There was a truly inspiring presentation of the impact of bringing storytelling to a special needs school on the West Coast. We all had tears in our eyes after we heard about the unforeseen improvements in behaviour, socialization and communication brought about through storytelling. A similar impact was seen in another project with adults with special needs. Two other projects that stood out, were the establishment of a storytelling course for fathers in a prison for young male offenders, and the integration of storytelling into work done with homeless people in Glasgow.

As you might have guessed, my project set out to bring storytelling into environmental work. The meat of my project was the workshop I gave to people from Transition Edinburgh (see the blog post below). However, this web-site has also become an important way of communicating the value of storytelling in environmental work and so I included it in my report.

I would strongly recommend the course to anyone interested in integrating storytelling into their paid or voluntary work. And if you’ve never been to the College, it’s worth a visit. The grounds are gorgeous–I fell in love with a very old beech tree while I was there–and the building itself has a fascinating history, most of which is visible in its architecture if you know where to look.

Links

The course can be found on Newbattle Abbey College’s website, as well as in the Training and Development Programme for the Scottish Storytelling Centre. (BTW, the bus directions on the College website are wrong, you actually need to take the 95X First Bus and ask the driver to let you off at the College).

If you’re interested in the sights and stories of the College, there will be a storytelling festival held there the last weekend of August.

Guided tours of the College are available every Sunday from 31st of May until 23rd of August at either 1:30 or 3:30pm, but you must book in advance by contacting Rae at raem(at)newbattleabbeycollege.ac.uk. On Sunday June 20th a heritage walk (scroll down) will be held starting at the College at 10am. The walk will be 10 miles long and will finish at approximately 3pm. Again contact Rae if you are interested.

Storylistening Podcast Added: Allison Galbraith on Storytelling and Climate Change

crow by canal I caught up with Allison Galbraith when she hosted the Scottish Storytelling Centre’s March Storytelling Café. She had recently facilitated a workshop on storytelling with park rangers at a conference on climate change hosted by Scottish Natural Heritage. In this podcast, I ask her about the conference and about the role storytelling can play in shifting individuals and society towards more sustainable ways of living.