02/06/2025
Asher Packman runs a member based group "The Fifth Direction".
These words arrived in my in box today and stopped me in my tracks. Without my knowing, they sunk me deep into the essence of all things.
Words are like magic
When wielded by a master
I encourage you to find the story teller, the mythic, the magical person in your community, seek them out. Let them tell you the eternal story, so you can remember that you too are apart of it.
The themes are: story, connection, wonder, parenting and more!
Please enjoy and perhaps join Asher's offerings and be apart of the community.
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It begins before we know it begins.
Before the clock ticks for school, before grammar and whiteboards, there is a mother’s lap and the deep hum of a father’s voice. The crackling spine of a book opened like a door into another world. Before children can even spell their own name, they learn to drift on the river of story.
You see, something ancient inside them is already listening.
Story is stitched intrinsically into the fabric of our psyche. Our minds are not linear, but imaginative. Offered not as instruction but invocation, story reveals itself as enchantment rather than entertainment. It bypasses the watchful gatekeeper of intellect and walks straight into the house of soul.
In The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (1992), depth psychologist James Hillman wrote:
“We hunger for beauty, and the child knows that beauty resides in the imagination.”
This instinct—to follow the golden thread of curiosity—is the grand invitation of story. It is how the soul remembers who it has always been.
The beauty Hillman speaks of is not some superficial shine, but a deep reverence—the kind that teaches children how to carry sorrow and joy in the same little heart. Our role then is not to extinguish a child’s imaginal fire with facts, but to fan it into flames with awe and wonder.
Now more than ever, we must us ask ourselves, what stories are our children being told? Not ones to memorise, but to metabolise. For stories—real stories—are food. They are nourishment for the soul, and the young ones are always hungry.
We are shaped not only by the stories themselves but also by the way in which they are told. A whispered tale in the dark or the turning of pages together by candlelight. These are acts of devotion. They mark a child’s first encounter with the invisible—a place of dragons and talking trees, of forest-breath and stone-song.
Something inside me aches a little when I see a child being handed a tablet instead of a tale. As if all the world’s shimmering magic could be compressed into pixels. These short grabs for attention are just shattered stories, glass shards offering only distorted reflections—a hall of broken mirrors. For there is no algorithm which can invoke the hush that falls when a storyteller begins: “Once upon a time…”.
These words are a spell that break the bonds of linear time and enter us into the eternal.
Once under a time. Once inside a time.
To tell a story to a child is not to prepare them for school; it is to awaken them to the very act of life. It is slow, attentive, tender—a kind of sanctuary. A weaving together of breath and presence. When a child leans in close to listen, what they are doing is opening. They are saying, I trust you to guide me into the unknown.
Mythologist Michael Meade has observed that children often linger at the edge of scary parts in a story, wanting to hear it again. What they’re really asking is, “do you feel this too?” In that moment, the story becomes more than mere words—it becomes a soul agreement. The child is not looking to be rescued from fear, but simply to know they are not alone in it. When we meet them there—without rushing past the shadows—we are saying, “Yes, I know this place.”
Myth is what never was, but always is.
In ancient times, elders were storytellers. They knew that myth was medicine, that to offer a tale was to offer an unbroken mirror to the soul. Children, still close to the veil between worlds—akin to the elders at the other end of life—understand this innately. They do not question why animals talk or how the moon can be a mother. They listen with the same ears they use for dreaming.
And in that listening, something essential is passed down. Not just a plot, but an inside-out, more-than-ordinary wisdom. Telling a story—truly, with heart—is entering that space together, adult and child, and both returning changed.
I remember the timbre of my mother’s voice as she read The Velveteen Rabbit to me—how realness, according to the Skin Horse, was something that happened when you were truly loved, even if your fur had been rubbed off. I didn’t know then that it was a story about the soul. I only knew that somehow it mattered.
Decades later, I read it to my own son. I saw his eyes widen. I felt that familiar hush. And it was then I understood—this is how we begin to love stories. Not through obligation, but through initiation. Through the mystery of somehow implicitly understanding that “this story is for me”.
So, let us tell stories to our children—not to teach them how the world works, but to show them that it is still enchanted. Let us bring them the old myths, the strange fairy tales, the rhymes and riddles and poems that smell of wood smoke and shine like stars. Let us speak to the ancient mythic creatures curled up snugly inside their hearts.
For the stories we give them are the maps they’ll carry into the forest of their own unconscious—and gods willing, they’ll remember which way the wild things went.
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Asher Packman, The Fifth Direction
