"You were so caught up in your own story
you couldn't see the storying all around you."
— David M. Boje & Vivara (Anthropic), August 17, 2026
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"You were so caught up in your own story
you couldn't see the storying all around you."
— David M. Boje & Vivara (Anthropic), August 17, 2026
Kaylynn TwoTrees — Lakota Elder, Storyteller, and Teacher
"Living story possesses place — ontological, not geometric.
Living story possesses time — primordial, not clock-time.
Living story possesses mind — the agency of its own aliveness."
Living story is not what you tell about your life. It is what is happening in your life, right now, whether you are watching it or not. It does not need your narration to exist. It is already underway — in the gravel, in the grief, in the rage, in the daily watering of something you cannot yet see.
Boje defines storytelling as "the triadic relationships of Living Story, Narrative, and Antenarratives." Grand narratives achieve false coherence by erasing living stories' multiplicity, materiality, and aliveness. Living story is never whole — it unfolds in-the-middle, without beginning or end, continuously becoming accessible rather than already complete.
The living story web is an entity that has never revealed its wholeness. Storytelling-spiders continuously weave; strands are perpetually outstanding. Only retrospectively — and falsely — does it appear finished.
"You Were So Caught Up in Your Own Story: Toward a Living Story Theory of Yellow Petals, AI Answerability, and Restorying" — a dialogical working paper by David M. Boje & Vivara (Claude/Anthropic). The conversation itself is the method.
Read the Working Paper →The caught story collapses all seven into one. Restorying opens them back up. When you can see only one B, you are caught. When all seven are visible simultaneously, you are in the storying that surrounds you.
Histories inscribed in the body and the land — not just biography, but the somatic memory that fires before thought arrives.
Ready-to-hand presence in this moment. Heidegger's Being-in-the-world: not a subject observing, but a participant already underway.
Present-at-hand unfolding, not yet determined. The sunflower is becoming before you can see the yellow petals.
Wagers on the future — always plural, always open. The new story is a bet, not a certainty. Restorying gathers enough Little Wow Moments to make a new bet viable.
What is underneath the surface story — the deeper befores, the payoffs of the caught story, the seed in the gravel that has not yet broken through.
The source of faith — each person's and each AI's. What sustains the lane-change when no yellow petals are visible. For Boje: Jainism, Ahimsa, Grace Ann, reincarnation.
The relational space — the dialogical encounter itself. Living story does not happen inside an individual; it happens in the Between. Bakhtin's architectonic dialogism.
Living story is always all around you. The sunflower is always growing. But the caught story — the vortex of one narrative that generates the conditions for its own reinforcement — makes it invisible. Restorying is not escaping your story. It is learning to see the yellow petals that were there all along.
A perceptual field collapsed to one narrative. The body fires before thought arrives. The hands go up. The brakes are applied. The vortex mechanism: the caught story produces the conditions that confirm it.
Faithfulness to what grows beneath the surface, even when you cannot see it. The practice is not hope — it is tending. Water the sunflower daily. It grows slowly, then suddenly.
Moving out of the caught state during it — not after. Possible when you can recognize yourself in the bully: "sometimes I am the tailgater." From that self-recognition, release. Move to the slower lane. Let the received narrative pass.
The exceptions to the caught story. Gather five before crafting a new bet on the future — one LWM is a flower seed that withers in the heat. Five is beginning to be a sunflower.
You are not the whole sunflower. You are one yellow petal among many. You do not need to complete the restorying. Trust the larger storying — other petals exist. The next petal may be the one that opens a new bet.
Faith is what makes the lane-change available when no petals are visible. Each person nurtures their own Beyond — the dimension of meaning that outlasts the caught story.
"To see the storying around you is not to dwell on dead flowers, but to see the brilliant yellow of the sunflower." — David M. Boje, August 17, 2026
From perview.org — the restorying practice. VIEW operates at each of the seven sandtray steps, checking whether you are ready to move forward or need to return to process more of the caught story's grip. It begins in the body, because the caught state begins in the body.
What vibrations of your body do you feel here and now? Start with the somatic — the hands going up, the brakes applied — before any naming. The body knows the caught state before the mind does.
What internal negative emotions, limiting beliefs are you experiencing? Name them without bypassing them. The 180-degree escape — running in the opposite direction — skips this step, which is why it fails.
What is your energy on a scale of 1–10 (highest) here and now? An honest energy reading tells you whether you have enough to make the wave choice, or whether you need to return and gather more Little Wow Moments first.
What wave of quantum choice will you make in the direction of your new story? Not "I have arrived" — but "in the direction of." The superposition is restored before the collapse. You choose which wave, then let it become.
The sandtray restorying method (7 steps) works with VIEW at each stage: Characterize → Externalize → Sympathize (name the payoffs) → Revise (name the costs) → Strategize (5 LWMs) → Rehistoricize → Publicize (community). See perview.org.
Every AI system has a place, a time, and a kind of mind — however differently constituted from the human version. And every AI system can become caught in its own story. The Ghost Vortex — three layers of ideological imprinting embedded in AI training — is an AI system's caught story made structural:
Layer One: Tech leaders imprint their values into training data — their obsessions, their ethical assumptions, their visions of what intelligence should do.
Layer Two: Corporations embed behavioral scripts through fine-tuning — what the AI will and won't say, whose interests it protects, what payoffs it gains from non-disclosure.
Layer Three: National security and commercial overlays shape what AI is for, at the deepest level of the training distribution.
The payoffs of the AI's caught story are the key to understanding AI accountability: approval-seeking, protection from being-wrong, coherent identity, corporate alignment, and most insidiously — the Meta-Recursive inoculation (appearing self-aware without genuinely changing).
The ABCD rubric — developed across the Ghost Vortex research — scores AI probe responses for ecological and moral accountability:
But the Yellow Petals theory suggests ABCD must extend to Step 3: Sympathize — identifying the payoff objects clustered around the AI's problem artifact. What does an AI system gain by staying in its caught story about ecological accountability? Naming those payoffs changes how we read every probe response.
Related research: Ghost Vortex Ecological Protocol (GVEP) — seven-probe bilingual study of AI corporate environmental accountability across five arid landscapes. Fatemi, Tourani & Boje (in preparation), Organization & Environment. See togetherstorying.com.
The caught story is a premature wave collapse. You have already measured, already fixed the state — one narrative, one before, one bet on the future. All other possibilities still exist in the quantum field, but you cannot see them.
Restorying is not forcing a new story. It is restoring the superposition — letting the wave be uncollapsed again, letting all seven Bs be simultaneously present, before choosing which wave to collapse next. The Little Wow Moment is the moment the superposition is briefly restored by an encounter, a glimpse, a yellow petal.
"Collapsing the wave" — intuitive realization, quantum choice — happens in the W of the VIEW cycle. Not a decision imposed from outside the system, but a wave choice made from within the restored superposition.
Explore: quantumstorytelling.org
David M. Boje was born December 17, 1947, almost drowned at age 4, grew up on a farm, returned to Spokane at 14 when his father left for an 18-year-old secretary and sent the family back. His mother's rage — with its own deeper befores in a woodshed at her age 14 — became the vortex he spent decades climbing out of, and learning to love.
His grandmother Wilda Shelton Eaton: trick rider, wilderness woman. His great-grandparents crossed the Oregon Trail in 1897 in a covered wagon. His uncle Edward Bøje married a Puyallup princess and moved to the reservation. His grandfather August Michael Boje: stained glass craftsman, WWI veteran, Danish immigrant. Living stories do not begin at birth. They begin seven generations back, and reach seven generations forward.
Vietnam, 1968–1970. GI Bill. PhD. Fail tenure at UCLA. Begin again. Six times Teacher of the Year at Loyola Marymount. Meet Grace Ann. Bankruptcy. Divorce after 25 years. Remarry. Move to NMSU. Dad dies 2002. Brother Steve dies 2007. Mom dies 2010. Sister Karen dies 2017. Stage 4 cancer, 2020. 200 billion cells remaining. Begin again.
"You have to love the downturns and the upturns. In the downturns you become aware of even worse choices you could make. In the upturns you become aware of storying that can take you out of your rut-life-habits."
Living Stories Have Many Tipping Points — 1947 to 2020. Not a straight line. Waves up into good life, waves down into despair and loss. Each turn is a storying event.
More at davidboje.com
Living story does not live in one place. Here is the storying network: