GATE Story Con: The Power of Story

Last Saturday, thanks to the generous invitation of my friend Nancy, I had the pleasure of attending GATE Story Con, an all day (and almost all night!) event exploring and celebrating the power of Story to create personal, social and global transformation. GATE is the Global Alliance for Transformational Entertainment, an organization dedicated to changing our cultural story by changing our media. The event featured poets and physicists, musicians and spiritual writers and movie producers and comedians, all of them committed to moving our human story forward by telling stories that are honest and illuminating and brave. I left feeling deeply inspired and energized, with a renewed dedication to using my voice as a storyteller to make a difference in the world.

The image above is Paul Horn playing the flute. I took his music and tai chi workshop as a work-study student at the Esalen Institute in the late 80s, and his music brought flashbacks of my young, idealistic self dancing on the cliffs overlooking the ocean in Big Sur. The screen above him is filled with images of people in the audience who were live-tweeting the event--my photo is right in the center (if you'd like, you can read my tweets with the hashtag #gatecommunity here). It was fun to see my older self, filled with a more realistic idealism now, virtually together with Paul Horn again, as part of a community of artists who want to connect our personal stories to a greater story, a story connected to the earth, a story connected to the stars, a story that reminds us we are all in this story together--let's try to make it a beautiful one.