Julie | The Way of the Mountain

Teller: Julie K.

Julie is a wife and mother, researcher, writer, and the founder and editor of Lala Letter, a newsletter curated for mothers who are paving into their second lives.

Told: A Story of Origin and Regret

I recorded my first story- Julie’s story in 2021, virtually. She’d made time away from family on a Sunday, sat herself in a fully-occupied cafe of masked strangers, and thanks to the generosity of 5G powers from Seoul, South Korea, I managed to hear her story from here in Singapore, a story I will forever remember.

Not only because it was my first story, but also for how deep the storyline ran - I saw how it planted roots of the woman, daughter, mother that she is today.

The prompt that invited Julie’s story is ‘Regret’, and when the story drew its end, I realized how big it was. Its trajectory, its nature, its legacy. Julie narrated with compassion- a quality that grows onto regret, and is entirely necessary in reliving it, to stir fraught memories of loss bookmarked by time-worn longing.

To admit regret is to understand we are fallible, that there are powers in the world beyond us; to admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past but of the very story we tell about our present.

-- David Whyte. “Regret”, Consolations.

Art Print for ‘The Way of The Mountain’ © 2022 The Inner Workshop.

Written: Story of Worth

The story written for Julie was ‘The Way of the Mountain’ - of the Grey Goral Doe and the Dwarf Blue Sheep and their home in the mountains.

While the story’s magic was in its very affect in the present, it was overwhelmingly clear to me from Julie’s recount that the past was alive, or a ‘living memory’ as my friend K would often surmise. Yet the past was in ways limited for memory, so picking up on its threads: tough love, absence, being lost in the world - I reclaimed all that in a mythic world.

This story was made into an art print.