Opening
Somewhere between the packing lists and the unfamiliar streets, travel does something no ordinary week can. It loosens the story we have built around our own life.
Kim Holl has crossed continents in search of hers, and she joined me for the very first Rediscovering Connection conversation to share what the road taught her.
The idea
Kim Holl is a filmmaker, storycatcher, and creative activist, and a friend here on Vancouver Island. Raised on Celtic myth, music, and poetry, she crisscrossed Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa to discover her purpose, her opus, and she did it with children in tow.
In our conversation she traced how the journey outward became a journey inward, and how the stories she gathered from strangers became the raw material of her work catching and telling stories on film. During the Covid pandemic, Kim found a virtual community of film-makers that kept her going.
What emerges from her telling is not a formula but a permission slip. Purpose is not usually found by staring harder at your own navel.
It is met in motion, through the people you meet when you have left your routine behind, and through the stories you are trusted to carry for others.
She described how Celtic myth, music, and poetry gave her the language for a life lived in questions, and how travelling with children turned the search for purpose into a family inheritance.
The stories she catches now on film are the continuation of that search, and her generosity with other people’s stories is itself a form of connection. The road, she suggested, is less a destination than a discipline of staying open to what each place and person offers.
What I took from it
Beginning this series with Kim felt right, because her story mirrors the one I was living. I had moved to Canada from the UK in 2021, and I was learning that a new place does not hand you belonging. You gather it, conversation by conversation, story by story.
Kim taught me that being a storycatcher is a form of connection we can all practise, wherever we have landed. Her story gave me the courage to begin this series by listening rather than by declaring.
Three things to try this week
- Ask one person this week for the story behind something they carry, a photo, an object, or a habit, and give the story your full attention. Give the story back to them in one sentence, so they hear how it landed. Stories are offered where questions are safe, so ask gently and wait.
- Take one unfamiliar route, to work or on a walk, and greet the place with a traveller’s curiosity rather than a commuter’s hurry. Curiosity is a practice. The route matters less than the attention you bring. Notice one thing on the new route you have never stopped to look at.
- Write the story you would tell if someone asked what brought you here, in five sentences, and share it with one person this week. Five sentences is short enough to tell and long enough to matter. The telling matters as much as the writing, so choose a kind listener.
Watch and go deeper
Our first conversation is embedded here. Watch it for the journeys and the storycatching. Explore Kim’s work at storiestoldonfilm.ca.
Explore Kim Holl’s website.
New conversations land on the Rediscovering Connection channel most weeks, and you can subscribe at the Rediscovering Connection channel.
Close
Purpose often arrives through the stories we gather rather than the plans we perfect, and every story we carry quietly connects us to someone. Every story you gather makes the next one easier to hear, and the purpose you chase may already be travelling beside you.
Explore the research, then sit with the question this article closes on.