The Circle Way

CHAPTER7Story as Core Communication

Story is a map of human experience. It has chronology, character, scene, and insight. A teller needs a listener; a story needs to be “caught” to be complete—and circle provides the perfect container for “catching stories.”

Stories anchor learning. Human beings are storytelling creatures. The well-known twentieth-century anthropologist Laurens van der Post is said to have proclaimed, “Ninety percent of everything we know about being human we have learned through story.” We are the only species that relies as deeply on communication of experience as on actual experience. You can teach a child to look before crossing the street by the power of a story—by explaining consequences and telling stories of what has ...