I started writing this piece several months ago, in part inspired by a phone conversation with my friend, Don Miller. About two weeks ago I received the devastating news that Don had died – that phone conversation was the last time I would speak with Don. Even writing those words hurts. Breathe…

Despite the sadness that I feel, there is also some joy: what a rare and beautiful thing to witness a life lived well. To come into contact with a human doing their best to live a good life, guided by love… and who helped others try and do the same.

So, remembering Don, I will share below some of the thoughts I’ve had that bubbled up after that last conversation, and in the days since Don died. Appropriately, I was thinking very much about what it means to live a good life – rereading what I wrote, I can hear Don’s voice and I am grateful.

Some years ago I read The man who mistook his wife for a hat by Oliver Sacks: a brilliant book, and a fine option if you’re playing charades. Sacks is a neurologist and the book is an account of some of the fascinating people he has encountered in his professional life.

One of these people was a patient of his who, for a reason I can’t recall, had lost all of his short-term memory: he could remember his childhood but he could not retain new memories for longer than a very short period (5 minutes?). All of his recent past was a complete blank to him.

As Sacks contemplated this man’s terrible affliction, he mused on the place of story or narrative in human life. Could it be that, in some sense, humans are defined by story? We use story to make sense of the world around us; we place ourselves and those we encounter inside narrative arcs that explain who we are and give meaning and purpose for what we do and are. What must it be like to be human and, like this man perhaps, unable to construct a story in which to dwell?

I was reminded of this, recently, while reading Susan Fletcher’s beautiful book Witch light. It tells a fictionalised story of a real woman, Corrag, who lived in Scotland in the 1600’s. The Corrag in the book is a beautiful character: richly alive, wild, full of love. But she is also an outsider, called “witch” by local people, like her mother before her, and blamed by them for all manner of misfortune. They do not see her beauty but, instead, revile her and force her to flee.

The book is told from the point of view of Corrag and one gets a clear sense of her bewilderment at the way people treat her: she sees love and life in the natural world that surrounds her and cannot understand why people feel so threatened by her. It is as if Corrag does not fit into the story that the “ordinary people” of the day inhabit – she has a way of being in the world which cannot be accommodated by their sense of how to live.

Is this, perhaps, what the word “witch”, this poisonous centuries-old epithet, really signifies? Your story does not fit ours, and so we mark you, we cast you out. We feel threatened by your different way of living because it shines a light on the choices we have made, the boxes within which we have chosen to dwell.

How many have been cast out in this way? For being Jewish, or black, or gay, or being a wild woman, or a wyrd gender… From this point of view, bigotry and prejudice are a consequence of a failure of imagination: We let our stories set too hard, become too rigid, and we lose the capacity to let them flex and bend and take new and different and unexpected turns.

Well, that’s not quite right: in fact, our imagination can be all too vivid when it comes to telling stories of the “other”. When I first arrived in the UK in 2001 I remember an eruption of tabloid outrage at reports of migrants killing swans in parks and eating them. This was seen as particularly egregious because, according to some ancient law, the monarch is the “Seigneur of swans” and the migrants were effectively stealing from the queen.

The same story erupted again just a few months ago. There were reports in the newspapers for a few days… until, just as happened 24 years previously, it transpired that there was in fact no evidence whatsoever that any swans had been killed, by migrants or anyone else.

But, evidence or no, how delicious is can be to tell someone else’s story for them! Especially, when it is an “othering” story: by attributing shame and disrepute to someone else, we take the moral highground for ourselves. We give affirmation to the story we tell about ourselves and, in so doing, that story sets just a little harder.

What would it mean to allow the stories we tell about ourselves to be open, soft? I’m currently half-way through Sangarakshita’s “Vision and transformation”, an account of the Buddha’s noble eightfold path. The first step on this path to enlightenment is typically translated as “perfect vision” or “complete vision” or “right vision”.

There are several thousand years worth of thinking and writing about this idea, so I won’t attempt a precis… but my sense is that the impedance to complete vision could be characterised, in some sense, as our attachment to the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. If we are ever, truly, to look at the world around us, at the table on which our hands lie, and truly see it, we have no choice but to abandon the complex of filters and pre-conceptions that we have spent a lifetime weaving into story.

Which brings me to that final conversation with Don: in the last decade of his life, Don spent a lot of time translating and retranslating the gospels from their original language into English. In that last conversation he told me about the journey of understanding he has gone through with regard to the word “repent”. The call to repent is a central notion in Christianity – it is the refrain of prophet after prophet throughout both testaments – and is typically interpreted as an injunction to feel and express remorse for sinful acts.

However, in that last conversation, Don shared how he had come to see the call to repent as a much more general exhortation for us to change our minds. It is a demand for us to re-evaluate, reassess and reconsider. We must turn our gaze upon the story we tell ourselves about the world around us, and our place in it, and we must tear that story down.

With what, then, do we replace it? On the one hand, I’d like to say “with as little as possible” – maybe this is how one takes a step towards the Buddha’s complete unfiltered vision? On the other hand, though, we all still need stories within which to dwell, that help us to understand the complex world in which we live. Where do we source these stories? Who are today’s prophets and how do we recognise them?

Clearly, for all that no story will ever be perfect, perhaps never as good as no story at all, still some stories are definitely better than others. In the current marketplace, there is a plethora of demagogues and influencers who are happy to provide a narrative for the willing listener. But these false prophets have a “tell”: they offer too much certainty. The Buddha said “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” So: a true prophet will actively undermine herself, will encourage your critical faculties, your doubt and dissent.

The other “tell” of a false prophet that occurs to me pertains to the othering I describe above: a false prophet’s stories exclude: they draw boundaries and they shout “witch” at anyone who trespasses outside. Any prophet who devalues a human for who they are, whose story denies love, is telling a flawed story.

Don did neither of these things for he was a true prophet: This was a man who lived a large portion of his life at a cultural interface – the meeting point of aboriginal Australia and white Australia – where “othering” is a pestilence. Yet, for all that, no one was “other” to Don. He refused to construct other people’s stories for them; rather he was relentless in his commitment to critiquing his own way of life and how he needed to shift and change to more truly love the people he encountered.

How hard, when everyone else is scrabbling to cast the first stone, to be the one who refuses! Who doesn’t just refuse, but actively stands in the way. Who refuses the easy way, because it’s wrong, and instead does the work needed to tread the more difficult path.

Thank you, Don, you are an inspiration. Remembering you with love.