The Importance Of Stories

As I sleep Sherman Alexie dances through my dreams.  To be exact his words, poems, and stories dance through my dream-time space.  He teaches the importance of the story where anyone can create a story from life that shows the importance of the daily, and sometimes seemingly mundane, happenings of waking, sleeping, and waking again.  I add Sherman to the list of teachers who have impacted my life.

A story that is woven through the fabric of daily life becomes a living story; a seemingly ordinary event becomes important by its weave in the story.  The man who is falling down drunk, the parent who abuses their child or the woman who leaves her man are each an integral parts of this weave.  From such occurrences the myth of life is created.

Each of us have our own myths, legends, and weaves that are the fabric of our lives.  When the weave of our lives intersect the weave of others lives a richly colored and interesting fabric is created.  To know, understand, and remark upon these stories insures the continuation of each life through the stories that appear in the fabric of this weave.  We validate each other’s lives.

Gathering stories is important for the survival of culture.  The collecting, keeping, and sharing of these stories allow us to see and understand ourselves in the larger picture of the family, community, culture, and world.  Stories connect us to past and future and allow the present to culminate in the wisdom of being here now.

Preservation of stories and through this the preservation of culture often is done by the least likely person.  The preserver of stories is not the heroine/hero, but is the one who takes the place of the witness; the observer, who watches without judgment and reports the events that make up the story.  In Sherman Alexie’s movie “Smoke Signals” the character Thomas Builds-the-Fire is the story keeper.  The little, nerdy guy, the seeming misfit of the reservation, who by being the outcast has a vantage point for recording/remembering the stories that brings cohesiveness to his tribe/community.  Thomas’ willingness and ability to do this for his friend Victor allows them to reach their goal.

Our stories, individually and collectively, are necessary to our survival both locally and globally.   The world around us is filled with all that we need.  If we become still and listen we will hear the heartbeat, the rhythm, the song of life.  Stories, our stories, surround us; we need only to pay attention to life as it moves through and around us.  Our paying attention is what will make us all the story collectors, keepers, and tellers in our lives.

A myriad of events and experiences present themselves daily.  If we are mindful and pay attention these things become the fodder to feed the stories in life.  In my family of origin my great grandmother, my grandparents, my parents, aunts and uncles were the story tellers to me.  I would ask visiting relatives to tell me stories and would clarify my request by saying, "not from a story book, but from your life".  As a child I was preparing for my adult career as a therapist; I was collecting stories of peoples lives as well as my own history.

Because we are all different our memories and recall are different, but a story recalled from different perspectives adds richness and texture to  the fabric of life.  My sons recall the history of events in our family slightly different from each other and from me.  Again this creates a unique weave as our memories are woven together.  No one is right or wrong. Memories are made by our own perceptions and are remembered and shaded in different colors making life interesting.  Accepting that when nothing is for sure then everything is a possibility we create an abundance in our lives that certainty robs us of.

We learn through stories of our humanity.  Stories told by Sara, my great grandmother, to my grandmother, to my father, to me, to my sons are the makings of personal legend and myth.  The characters in these stories that are told and retold take on the markings of myth.  They are alive and live through the retelling and the being heard and reheard.  When Thomas Builds-the-Fire tells Victor the memory of Victor's own life a small legend is being created.  When my relatives told me stories from their own lives I began collecting the legends of my history.  When I weave these stories into my sons lives these legends live on through them and through the people who have been shaped by the stories being told and retold.

Like ripples in a pond our stories reach out and touch the next ripple, and the next, and the next, and...  A living story will do this.  From ancestors to future generations is how this thread is past through the loom of life.  As stories are woven we can change the thread and the texture as the fabric of our lives unfold.  This is why these are living stories.

Our presence gives them life.  Remembering and telling these stories makes them our personal history.  Story telling, like history, is an oral tradition, and it lives through its being told and passed on to others.  As long as there are those who have voices to speak and others who have ears to hear the stories will live through their many incarnations. 

 It is good - mitakuye oyasin