This week I've been listening to "Mother Night", an audio-course with Jungian storyteller and author Clarissa Pinkola Estes. In her interview with Sounds True founder Tami Simon, Estes talks about curanderismo, an umbrella term for a spectrum of healing arts which realign a person with the treasure of his or her own soul. This has got me thinking about simple daily practices to nurture soul connection.
Five ways to stay connected to the soul:
1) By noticing the elements (earth, air, water, fire), and therefore blessing the elemental within.
Notice the wind.
Notice the air on your skin.
Notice qualities of light at different times of day, when clouds are in motion, when clouds are building.
Notice fire (bonfires, candle-light, firelight, love-light.)
Notice the earth element (leaf-piles, turned soil, compost, hills and mountains).
Notice
water (rain when its falling, raindrops when the sun reappears, tidal
action, streams, the wet faces of rocks, water from a faucet turned by
a hand, tears.)
2) By creating ceremony (alone or with another, standing under a copper beech tree in November, receiving beauty).
3) By creating sacred spaces (one shelf, one surface that is completely empty).
4) By making something beautiful over time, or all in one stretch (a poem, a loaf of bread, a bowl of soup, an arrangement of beach stones, a card) and keeping it or giving it away.
5) By listening in new ways (to patterns of sound, to voices, to the stories of someone we love, to music, to the music in sounds we don't think of as music, like engines, footsteps, birds scattering seed).
How do you stay connected to the soul?
I first heard storyteller Melanie Ray perform many years ago at a storytelling festival on the Sechelt Peninsula. I only dimly remember the story—I know it featured a red hen—but what I do remember is the way Melanie told it. Time opened up when the story began. She did not hurry, even when the action speeded up. This easiness with the story is what I call “the teller’s delight”—that subtle quality of being engaged in the telling, while also enjoying the tale.
Not long ago, at the first Victoria Storytelling Festival, I heard Melanie again. Ten years had passed. Just as I remembered she was tall, stately, and graceful. (Actually, this part was a successful illusion on the part of the stage performer—Melanie is actually only 5 foot 4 inches tall.) She wore a beautiful full-length dress, made of some lovely shimmering green cloth. Her portable microphone was clipped to the front of her dress, with its battery housed in a little black box attached to the back.
Melanie introduced her telling of the Welsh epic Tristan and Iseult by thanking the Canada Council. The Council’s funding had allowed her to develop the story and afforded her the luxury of having a dress made by a costume designer. Then she warned us that she might cough in the middle of the story—“I have a lung condition,” she said—but we were not to worry. She was not going to die of it, and she didn’t need anything. She would eventually recover and continue with the tale.
All this was important for her to share with us, though at first I wasn’t sure why. Later it struck me that storytelling works because of the relationship that develops between a teller and her audience. How does a storyteller connect with her listeners? Authenticity is the key. When we feel the presence of the person speaking, when we know even just a snippet of her own story (“This is where my dress comes from, and don’t be alarmed if I collapse in a fit of coughing”) we’re ready for her to take us away on a journey. We have evidence that she is human (just like us) and therefore we trust her.
Her preamble complete, Melanie began, unfolding the tale image by image, scene by scene. In real time she had a blue backdrop behind her and two potted ferns on either side of the small stage. In story-time she took us to a jousting match at the court of King Mark in Cornwall, and then to a battle-field in Lyonesse, and from there to the shores of Ireland, her voice rising and falling, her gestures graceful and complete. Occasionally, she stopped to take a sip of water. There were one or two moments when she corrected her own use of language, replacing a current, colloquial expression—“Okay”—with “Very good,” or “Very well.” Once or twice, she coughed.
After the intermission, now some two and a half hours into this epic tale, Melanie’s voice began to fade in and out. One moment it would be strong and clear, and the next it would drop and waiver. It wasn’t Melanie’s strength that was ebbing, it was the battery on the portable microphone. And then a curious sound began to add itself to the story. It was like a small drum, beating a regular two-beat rhythm.
Finally, the volunteer in charge of the sound system came up on stage and gave Melanie a hand-held mike. He disconnected the portable microphone and removed the small black box that was fixed to her dress.
“What was that sound?” Melanie asked as they completed the exchange.
“It was your heart,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, suddenly becoming very still. “It was the beating of my wee heart.”
She took the hand-held microphone and continued the story to its bittersweet conclusion. But in that brief interruption she had given us something that amplified the meaning of the story, and illuminated our experience of hearing her tell it. The beating of the storyteller’s heart—heard and felt by all her listeners—signaled to us her human vulnerability.
We heard Melanie tell a tale of great enduring love. We also experienced the fleeting beauty of her own fragile being, in the unique cadence of her voice, in the cough that overcame her, in the thirst that overtook her, in the words that slipped out unbidden, and in that mysterious, yet familiar sound—the beating of her heart.
Stories only survive because of the ones who tell them, shaping them and bringing them to life in their own unique ways. The gift of story is rare and precious because the teller is just as subject to the laws of impermanence as the rest of us.
My taxi driver is from Pakistan. A large man, he swings my bag into the trunk of the cab. As we pull away from the airport I ask him if his first language is Urdu. Yes, he tells me, but he also speaks Punjabi and now English. Does he know anything about ghazals? I ask. I have been learning about Persian poetry, and in particular, the ghazal, a form that predates the sonnet. Oh, yes, he says. I see him smiling in the rear view mirror. Would he recite a few lines in Urdu for me?
We are driving through the city, past the new rapid transit stations, over the Arthur Laing Bridge, north on Granville Street towards the mountains. It is a summer evening. At 49th Avenue we are held up by the aftermath of an accident. Tow trucks are loading cars in the middle of the intersection. My taxi driver begins reciting in Urdu, lines from a poem by the great poet Iqbal. I listen to see if I can hear the word that is repeated at the end of each couplet. While I do not understand, I can hear the pathos and longing in the words. Ghazals are traditionally about love.
My taxi driver came to Canada at age 22. He went straight to work. He never had a chance to go to school, or to study English in any formal way, but now he goes to the library and reads novels and poetry, both in Urdu and in English. He loves libraries. He loves to read.
“Do you like to read?” he asks me. “What type of book are you reading?”
I tell him that I love to read books from all over the world, thinking of two writers I read this summer, Orhan Pamuk and Snow, his novel of a poet returning to Turkey from exile, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, whose story for children is set at the time of the independence movement in India. He suggests I go onto the Internet and find the poetry of Iqbal, in bilingual translations with romanized Urdu and English side by side. He confesses that he not only reads poetry, he also writes it. Do I write poetry as well? Yes, I say, and tell him about writing a ghazal this summer.
“Poetry brings a richness to life,” I say to him.
“Yes,” he agrees. “It is very peaceful, at the end of the day, to sit quietly and write poetry.”
We turn right onto my parents’ street. I point out the lamp post by their house. When he drops me off I wish him well and shake his hand.
The next morning I need a taxi again, this time to get to the bus depot. Again, the driver is from Pakistan, a man in his 50’s, with a bluetooth clamped onto his right ear. I tell him how I’m on my way from Michigan to Victoria. Do you travel a lot? Well, yes, I guess so. Are you a doctor? No, I say, laughing, do I look like one? It is your clothes, he says. I look down at my wrinkled linen jacket and my black pants.
“Are you a teacher?”
“Yes,” I laugh again. “Your second guess is right. But I am also a storyteller.”
“Tell me a good story,” he jokes. So I tell him about riding in the taxi the night before and the taxi driver reciting poetry to me in Urdu. How he had recommended Iqbal, how he himself writes poetry.
“What was his name?”
“He was the taxi driver,” I say. “I didn’t ask him his name.”
“Taxi drivers also have names,” he reminds me gently. He is right. We turn down Oak Street towards the water and the mountains.
“Iqbal,” he shrugs, “is one poet, but the best poet writing in Urdu is Faiz Ahmad Faiz, a modern socialist poet.”
Every day he reads the poetry of Faiz. His wife scolds him and tells him he should be reading the Koran, but he only wants to read this poetry. He begins to recite a few lines from Faiz, about how the poet is not a practical man, how he is no good at practical things.
“He speaks for all of us,” says my driver. We turn right on Broadway and soon we are on Main Street, heading down the hill to the train station and the bus depot. He recites verses that Faiz, who was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, wrote at the time of partition, in 1947. The poem is about freedom, how the dream of freedom hadn’t yet been accomplished, even though India had achieved independence from Great Britian, and the nation of Pakistan had been created. Again and again, the poet describes the fighter leaving his beloved, going off to fight for freedom.
“ ‘I have a dream’, — that is what one leader in the West has said,” offers my driver, “and in Pakistan too, there was a dream for freedom, but that dream is not yet accomplished. I go back. I see the poor people. It makes me unhappy.”
He came to Canada with his family in 1986 and raised his daughter here. “This is a wonderful country,” he says.
His daughter is 23. She is finishing a degree in Criminology. Does she live at home? I ask. Yes, because she doesn’t know how to cook, he laughs. He takes my luggage out of the trunk and shakes my hand, then tells me I am a wonderful person. No, I want to say, it is these two taxi drivers from Pakistan who are wonderful, poets and philosophers both of them, reciting in Urdu as they take me through the city.
It matters what stories we tell. It matters what stories we subscribe to. Stories have an energetic force and that energy has an impact in the world. This was the idea behind The Story Field Conference: Invoking a New World through Story, a gathering held at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Colorado in August of 2007. Dreamed into being by Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute in Oregon, and Peggy Holman, co-author of The Change Handbook, the conference included a wonderful assortment of young and old, change makers whose work is all about inviting a new narrative into existence while uncovering the stories and myths we live by, many of which no longer serve us or the planet.
My experience at that conference has richly informed my work. After being there I decided to create this blog as a space to explore the nature of the Story Field, which I think of as a dynamic and ever-changing field of energy where stories interweave and form the fabric of daily life.
What stories am I bringing into the world? What stories do I want to invite from others?
This week, in the woods east of Victoria, near the community of Sooke, the Victoria Immigrant and Refugee Society is holding a five-day summer camp for youth. Yesterday, as an invited guest, I led a two-hour workshop for twenty-six young people, ages 13 – 19, from countries as diverse as China, Korea, Columbia, Mexico, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, and Iran. I told a story from India I have told many times called “A Drum”, in which a poor woman invites her son to dream by asking him what he would like from the market. The boy asks for a drum, but instead his mother brings him a stick of wood she has found on the roadside. The boy is puzzled, but he takes the stick with him anyway when he goes out to play. He meets a woman trying to light her stove to make bread. He gives her the stick of wood. She is grateful, accepts the wood, lights her stove and bakes her bread. When the bread is ready, the woman gives him a warm piece of it. But he doesn’t eat it. He takes it with him and continues his walk. Because he is able to receive what is given him, without judgment or disappointment, without assuming that the gift is meant for him and him alone, he finds he has just what someone else needs, and is able to pass the gift along. At the end of the story he receives his drum.
After telling the story, I asked the youth to gather in groups of four to consider the question, “What gift have you received that you would like to pass along?” When we gathered again in the large circle, a young man from Guatemala stood up and shared his story. He said that two years ago, in Guatemala, he was with his uncle, whom he loved very much. His uncle said to him, “I am going to teach you everything I know.” He was so happy, thinking of all the things his uncle would teach him. But two months later his uncle was dead. He had been killed by the government. The young man was devastated. Not only had he lost his uncle, he’d lost the opportunity to learn from him. Then he realized that his uncle had already given him a gift. He had already taught him something important—not to be afraid to speak the truth, no matter what.
The story told by this young man from Guatemala describes a harsh reality, one in which speaking the truth is a dangerous choice, yet he was able to frame his experience not just as a story of injustice and loss, but also as a story of learning and generosity.
What stories are we telling?
After lunch in the Grade Two classroom I was in today, children have a choice of silent reading or drawing. Several help themselves to large sheets of white paper from a drawer. When folded in half the paper perfectly mimics the dimensions of a laptop computer, with its fold-up screen and keyboard. At circle time some of the children show their products. Julius has a Toshiba. His keyboard has the letters in rows in alphabetical order, rather than qwerty, but he does have up-down and right-left arrows to one side. He demonstrates how his laptop folds up. I ask him if his Toshiba costs a lot. He thinks about it for a minute and decides to come clean: “A real one would be about $500. This one? Nothing.”
A classmate of Julius’ has been inspired by his example to create a laptop of her own. Julius is not pleased. “Everyone is copying me!” he says. Yes, and taking his creation one step further. On her “screen” is written GOOGEL. I wonder out loud what she will search for on her Internet search engine. “Hannah Montana,” she says. She has also made an iPhone, and shows us how it can be recharged by attaching it to the computer. (This involves folding and unfolding slips of paper.) Imitation technology is everywhere in this classroom. After Circle Time, we start on an art project using pattern blocks to create designs and then reproducing them with coloured paper, cut out into geometric shapes. One girl takes a break from cutting to return to her desk where she picks up her cell phone (made of construction paper in a trendy pale blue) and sits down to chat to a friend.
Children are the great imitators. The function of art here seems to be to create some personal tools for establishing independence. Even though these faux computers were created at school, the message may be directed towards parents who use this kind of technology. “I’m just like you,” the child is saying to the adult in her life. “I have all these gadgets. I can spend time on my ‘laptop’ or ‘cell-phone’. I don’t need you to pay attention to me. So you play on your computer. I’ll play on mine. And please don’t interrupt me!”