“I’d like to tell you and your brother about how I grew up so that you can learn about my life,” said my dad a few weeks ago. My dad is a man of few words. Over the years, he has told few stories about his growing up. The memories are not all pleasant, and life was hard. I had heard the stories from other family members. I had heard snippets of the story from him, but I could feel the shift in his attitude to the stories.
Rite of Passage
I glanced at the powerful bronze collectible that I had brought so many years ago. It sits in my parent’s house now.
The first in the series by Thomas Blackshear, “The Storyteller,” shows an African old man in flowing robe with stick and parrot sitting down surrounded by kids listening in rapt attention. I could not afford that one at the time since it was already retired from production.
The one I bought is the second in the series, “Rite of Passage.” The kids have grown up, now in their late teens and twenties. The storyteller is standing up with one of those kids, now a young man, kneeling down before him. The storyteller is holding the stick in both hands in front of the young man as if passing on a blessing. The young man is reaching up to accept the stick. The role of the storyteller in the tribe is being passed on to the next generation.
I took a breath as if to take in this moment with my own father. “Where did you grow up?” I said, seeding the conversation for stories.
My dad began his story, “It’s a place called…”
In the Middle of Living
I tell personal stories about my self and my family to audiences. My parents have heard me perform. My father had slowly realized the stories that he had not told us his story. When you are in the middle of living your life and looking to the future, the stories do not come easily.
Taking the time to reflect back on the past is a shift to preserving the lessons of the past, passing on who you are, passing on what the family is about, passing on where we came from. With each story, I feel more solidly planted on this earth as a part of the web of life. I am beginning to know my ancestors through my father.
“I figured the past is gone and done. Why bring it up again now?”
My grandmother said those words to me long ago when she went through the shift in how she saw her stories. Why pass on the painful stories? Life is better now. Let’s just forget it and move on. Yet the past haunts us and affects our present, and my grandmother had begun the healing process of finding peace from the stories. When her stories of survival came to me, I began to realize the rich (and difficult) life that she had before I came onto the planet. As I came of age to really understand and hold these stories, I began to look back and recognize the “rite of passage.” As she has passed on from the planet, I now hold some of her stories. She lives on through me and all that I pass on. The strength and resilience that runs through her life flows directly into me.
Exploring Storytelling
As I have studied storytelling more consciously in the past several years, my attitude to stories shifted. I now reflect more consciously on my own past to unearth the stories of meaning that I would like to pass on. Stories don’t all end with “happily ever after,” but that does not mean they should not be told. The gift of time creates healing when we can bring the stories of the past into the present moment.
In this present moment, I have new wisdom and experiences and some of those moments “look” completely different to me now. I can extract the lessons and the meaning that they have in the context of life today. When I tell it out loud to others, they keep me in the present moment and in their faces I see the many different ways this story can be interpreted in the context of other life experiences. My past self could only see one. As my perspective on my own story expands, the healing can begin.
I explore and listen to personal stories and world folk tales (our collective wisdom). I decide which ones I would like to pass on. I consciously devour, digest, integrate, and then gift stories to others.
Leaving a Legacy
Part of my mission is to spread the power of storytelling as a healing modality, enriching and holding community together. As we release the burden (and the joys) of our stories into community, we feel lighter and the community is more connected.
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