Jane Stoffer (Salem, Ohio) offers workshops for creating one's own Great Story Beads. Click to view a PDF of Jane Stoffer's Workshop.
Choosing
Events to Commemorate
No one, of course,
can tell anyone else what the Great Story is at this level of detail. Rather,
each person (even young children) will be moved to choose particular events
and beads that personalize the story for them. (Dinosaurs, yes! But let
us not forget the scallops of the sea, the ferns of the land, the achievements
of the bacterial realm in assuring everlasting cycling of chemical elements
vital to life.) For the most recent, Cenozoic Era, one will need to choose,
too, how much to focus on one's own bioregion, one's own continent. (See Connie's set of beads and timeline that she uses to tell The Story of the North American Continent, which begins 65 million years ago, as the dinosaurs are going extinct.) Another excellent short version of the beads would be a 40-BEAD string or necklace, to match the 40 stations in the 3.8 billion journey of life chronicled in The River of Life Experience.
Finally,
for the last 10,000 years of human history: does one focus on direct ancestors
and one's own civilization — or is a global, multicultural approach more
helpful, more alluring? Even for a single-civilizational or indigenous approach,
there will be huge differences in choices made by people of various religious
or philosophical traditions, for those inclined toward science, art, music,
feminism, wilderness, literature, poetry, mysticism, cuisine, and so on.
In this way,
we each get to truly experience this grand epic as our own Great Story
— the story that embraces and includes all the stories that are meaningful
to us. Crucial, too, is commemorating the major events in our personal lives
in the same string of beads. We can then begin to experience our familial
and personal stories as the latest episodes in thirteen billion years of divine,
cosmic creativity. Our own births, that of our children, journeys of ancestors,
and other major events (joyful or difficult) that shaped who we are can all
be signified in beads.
We have only
begun to discuss this idea with religious education and secular school teachers,
but, so far, all have been immediately excited by the prospect of turning
this into student projects — for helping children learn and experience
history, science, and religion. Might Great Story beads become the way that
the next generation takes the epic of universal creativity to heart and finds
evolution deeply meaningful and inspiring? What if creating personalized Great
Story beads becomes as freely chosen by children as playing with toy dinosaurs?
Might this idea move far beyond the schools, far beyond the reach of us elders?
For example, we can envision some kids choosing to string a bead for each
and every dinosaur name that they know!
One possible way for children to choose events to commemorate in beads would be to ask each child to identify their favorite plants (trees/flowers), mammals, birds, reptiles/amphibians, insects, animals of the sea, rock formations, people. And also to identify their favorite extinct creatures. The teacher or parent would then help each child determine the sequence in which these favorites evolved, plus adding on the precursor events of "The Great Radiance" (Big Bang), galaxy formation, ancestral stars, our sun, Earth, Moon, beginning of life. As the children are presented with more timeline possibilities, they may choose to expand their list of events. But perhaps just begin with their favorites of today's world and their favorite extinct creatures before introducing any pre-determined timeline.
We imagine many
religious leaders welcoming Great Story beads (Michael likes to call them
"glory beads") as a fun and playful way of teaching the history of everyone
and everything as a sacred story, highlighting the especially meaningful events
in their own tradition. Parents might work with toddlers to string their first
simple beads and then recreate longer loops of beads with more story elements
each year on the child's birthday, saying "And now you are thirteen billion
and six years old!"
Commenting now, July 2004, after two years of using our Great Story beads on the road, we have encountered several women who expressed an interest in developing Great Story Beads as a birthday activity for their grandchildren. Each birthday, she would bring forth last year's beads, and ask the child what new events in the Universe Story she/he might like to commemorate — and which events (good and bad) in their own life they might wish to signify in beads too.
Click to download a PDF version of a children's curriculum for integrating Great Story Beads into other story beads projects, suitable for young children.
Great Story beads might also be created for significant
rites of passage in life — notably, the passage into adulthood: teenagers
would create their own strands of beads for those moments in the cosmic, Earth,
life, human, and their own stories that are most meaningful to them, that
would guide their journey into adulthood.
Imagine a day
when we have a new way of getting acquainted: showing one another our beads
and beginning to tell our stories, explain our priorities, and share our values
bead by bead.
Information
Sources
The sources we
used for creating our timelines are varied, but we relied heavily on:
The
Universe Story, by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry (1992). This is the
classic text for those of us involved in the Great Story movement. Tom and
Brian include a detailed timeline that runs from the Fireball (Big Bang) through
the human saga. Some of the dates for the natural history events have changed
since they wrote their book, of course, as science moves on.
Life,
by Richard Fortey (1997). The subtitle of this highly acclaimed book is "A
Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth." It is beautifully
written by a senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History.
Intended for luscious reading, not as a reference text, the chapters have
no subheadings within, so you cannot easily peruse.
Ancestor's Tale, by Richard Dawkins (2004). Imagine starting back on a journey through time, as if flowing down a watershed all the way to the Ocean of Origin. Other streams join ours, one by one, by measure of their life forms' relatedness to us. Because all the mollusks and arthropods and worms join together well upstream of meeting our branch of the river, they all join our current (rather, we joint THEM, as there are more of them than us at that point) as one vast group all together. For this reason, there are only 40 such "confluences" in The River of Life journey, and thus only 40 beads need to be selected and strung.
The Evolutionary
Biology of Plants, by Karl Niklas (1997). This is a technical book,
well written and with excellent illustrations. Here we learn, for example,
that plant speciation and extinctions followed a timeline distinct from the
"mass extinctions" that set the pace for animal evolution.
Aquagenesis,
by Richard Ellis (2001). Subtitled "The Origin and Evolution of Life in the
Sea," it is very well written by a marine biologist and artist at the American
Museum of Natural History, and easy to use as a reference guide. Because Ellis
is primarily an illustrator and writer of popular science, you can trust him
to present all credible sides of scientific controversies. For example, his
portrayal of the range of interpretations of the ediacaran creatures that
lived just before the Cambrian "explosion" of animal evolution is superb.
The Eternal
Frontier, by Tim Flannery (2001). This is an ecological, evolutionary
story (a wondrous story, not just a series of facts) of the North American
continent during the last 65 million years -- the entire Cenozoic Era. Plants,
animals, geological features, landscapes: all are in here. As with Fortey's
Life, it is not intended as a reference tool but for full-out reading. Connie
is in awe of this book, and has used it as the scientific grounding for a slide show presentation on the North American story that she created. Flannery's book was also the scientific source for developing our own Coming Home to North America ritual.
"Life's Top Ten Greatest Inventions", multi-author 2005. Published in the 9 April 2005 issue of New Scientist magazine, this is a terrific and short overview of some of life's greatest achievements: multicellularity, the eye, the brain, language, photosynthesis, sex, programmed cell death, parasitism, superorganisms, symbiosis. Access the article online at:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/mg18624941.700
A
Briefer History of Time,
by Eric Schulman (1999). This paraody on Steven Hawking's international bestseller,
A Brief History of Time, tells "the history of the universe in 100
words or less" and expounds on what he considers the 50 major moments of cosmic
transformation in profoundly delightful and humorous ways.
Introduction
to the Timeline
Linked below
is an annotated version of the timeline we used in selecting our Great Story
Beads. It is annotated because, where helpful, we explain the science and
the significance underlying particular events. We have not yet attempted to
work into this timeline values and virtues that may be contemplated and taught
in association with particular events. Rather, we look forward to receiving
from others (and for years to come) amended versions of this timeline that
flesh out the value/virtue associations, along with stories of how people
have used their beads in spiritual practice. For those drawn in this direction,
a careful viewing of any of Brian Swimme's videotape series (Canticle to
the Cosmos; Hidden Heart of the Cosmos; Earth's Imagination),
with this timeline project in mind, would surely yield an abundance of value
teachings keyed to particular moments of transformation. For example, in Hidden
Heart of the Cosmos Brian offers generosity as a value that can be appreciated
in contemplating the Sun's conversion of billions of tons of itself into radiant
energy every second.
* * *
In this timeline,
we use CAPITAL LETTERS to highlight the short titles for events that one might
choose to celebrate with a bead. Great Story aficionados will probably want
to use many of these and will surely add or substitute other events that are
important to them, or that we overlooked, while parents and teachers will
want to greatly simplify this timeline, inviting their children or students
to choose perhaps only 15, or 25, or 50, or 100 transformational moments in
the Great Story for their beads. You will notice that we tend to group events
by geological time period, rather than listing specific dates, as science
changes fast enough that it is safest to simply know whether something happened
in, say, the Devonian period rather than in the Carboniferous. We also sometimes
ignore first appearances of life forms, and simply wait to put a bead where
the group suddenly takes off in diversity, size, etc. But that is a matter
of taste.
You will see
that the timeline carefully documents the major mass extinctions, along with
the pulses of localized "extinctions of the massive" that mark the entry of
humans into frontier lands all over the planet. Connie learned a lot about
these modern extinctions in the course of working on her 2001 book, The
Ghosts of Evolution.
Beginning in
the Cenozoic, 65 million years ago, our particular timeline highlights events
in the story as it plays out on the continent of North America. We envision
very different Cenozoic timelines being created by enthusiasts who live on
other continents. North Americans can click for a more detailed NORTH AMERICAN TIMELINE (with beads photos) that Connie completed in July 2004. You can also supplement the timeline here with several dramatic story forms of timeline in our Coming Home to North America ritual.) The human phase (Holocene epoch) notes major developments
in non-indigenous religions and in western scientific and philosophical thought
that contributed toward our present understanding of Reality and of ourselves
as part of an emerging cosmos of nested creativity. In other words, we chose
to tell the story of our species' coming to know and celebrate the Great Story
-- what Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme refer to as "the modern revelation."
This works well for us, given who we are and what we have chosen to do with
our lives. An entirely different cultural story may work better for you.
