A Good Story, Well Told

I have been reflecting for several months on the art of storytelling lately in both my working and private lives.

In my work, I have been helping to educate my volunteers about historic interpretation as good storytelling. Visitors to our museum do not want to be lectured. They come to learn something about the past to which they can relate to themselves or, at least to which they can compare themselves. They want to feel like they are part of the events that lead young, wealthy men to rebel against their government to form a self-government--a risk not many today in my country would be willing to take, I venture to guess. Or, they want to learn about the domestic life of a colonial gentry household that included slaves and indentured servants. Or, how a gentlewoman entertained her many guests in her fine house.

Often visitors get an interpreter who is enthusiastic about the detailed minutia of history. This is the person who loves telling all the little memories or all of the information collected on a topic over a lifetime of enthusiasm. Not all of the stories are true, but they often sound extremely appealing. It's wonderful to love history and all of its detail. I certainly do. Yet, I also want my interpreters to know the facts. The average visitor is not the connoisseur of historical minutia that the typical interpreter is. They begin to glaze over if you don't capture their imagination right from the beginning of the tour.

The writer and creativity coach, Oriah Mountain Dreamer, puts the importance of storytelling versus rambling or lecturing very succinctly:

An account of a series of events is not a story. A series of
sounds or musical phrases is not a composition. Bits of color or shape, a
string of images or random textures, do not make a piece of art. . . And I
wonder what happened to the editing process, the process by which the raw
material of stories--the words that are chosen, the real or imagined events that
are described, the sensory details of inner responses and outer settings--are
shaped and reshaped until they become something whole and complete."

--What We Ache For: Creativity and the Unfolding of Your Soul, 2005

The editing process is a vital part of storytelling. Without placing emphasis on a critical moment or object or emotion, the listener is lost in what I call the "laundry list" of factoids. It's information overload and their brain has shut down. I don't think history should be taught like peas are fed to children, "because it's good for you." I think that history is storytelling and that the story must be enjoyable and comprehensible to the listener.

The challenge for the interpreter is to assess his or her audience before the story is even begun. There are tales of bards from the Middle Ages who could enter a room and capture an audience with a sweeping gesture and nod towards the crowd. The Bard would calculate timing, cadence, tone of voice, and dramatic movement to propel the story forward and to keep the audience members on the edge of their seats, desperate to hear what happens next.

When I was a pre-teen I went each summer to a camp in the wooded hills of Kentucky. Some of my best friends from my town and neighborhood also went to this camp, but once we were there our lives were filled with new challenges and activities distant from any we did at home.

One of my favorite aspects of this camp was the evening campfires where we watched the sun and our daily life set as the embers of the bonfire began to spark. We sang songs familiar to our teenage counselors--who were children of the late Sixties and taught us folk songs and lighter protest anthems, Scouting songs and even older English or Celtic-inspired ballads. The air temperature grew cold, sometimes the wind picked up and I can still recall the scary tale of Wolf Pen and the native spirits who one of our counselors said inhabited the barren rockscape only three miles hike from where we sat. Storytelling as song and as legend fed my imagination. I think my love of folk music and of being scared by spooky tales comes from these nights in the Kentucky hills.

Later as a graduate student I researched the concept of initiation in West and Central Africa for a paper in an African Art class. It told of the way that pre-teens--girls as well as boys--of a certain age were prepared for adulthood by their separation from their village in a place distant from their homes and families. There they learned--girls with their Elder Ladies or boys with their Elder Menfolk--skills to prepare them for adult lives as women and men. The adults also told them the stories of their people--the mythology, belief-system, and fables that encourage good, proper behavior or quick decision-making. The African stories of the animals and of the Gods become embedded in the young person's mind. For these African pre-teenagers, storytelling and mythology was (is still, in some cases) there to guide them in their daily lives as they approach adulthood. History, mythology and all of the little tales we tell each other and ourselves are somehow an essential part of being human, for all cultures utilize this method of presenting information to each other.

Storytelling is an art that I love to practice especially in the dark months of the year. The wintertime seems the best time to share tales and legends. The darkness feeds the imagination. Creatures can grow. Heroes become larger-than-life. The air holds a sense of mystery and invites you to journey into the Unknown. It's not unlike the dim setting of a movie theater, where moving pictures fuel our desires or nightmares. Even in the summer, the best storytime is after dark. There is something powerful about the memory of sitting round the campfire on sultry June nights that haunts me to this day.

We all have stories to share. Our lives unfold like stories. What is your favorite story?

La llamada (The Call)

The surrealist Remedios Varo painted a fascinating canvas entitled La llamada (translated most often as The Call), literally meaning "The One Who is Called" in 1961. [You can see this and a number of other images by this artist here.] In the image, a woman glowing with red-orange aura walks down a tight alley surrounded by mysterious figures of men and women whose bodies are attached to the walls of this cramped, urban canyon. Some of these citizens have closed eyes and some look sleepy others are oblivious to the progress of Varo's woman who accepts The Call. The protagonist's fiery hair spirals upward towards a planet which hovers in the night sky like an omniscient Creator. Varo was a dedicated surrealist (with a lower case "s") who never subscribed to the subservient roles assigned her gender by the French Surrealist men. Her works speak of the power women hold as creators and as dreamers, subverting the misogynist message of her male counterparts on the European Continent with whose paintings and philosophies she was well familiar.

My comments on Varo's painting, La llamada, come as the result of a conversations had with two friends yesterday when we were driving through Maryland's Eastern Shore on the way to a festival. That painting burst into my mind as we spoke about the various gifts, talents and skills we have and of how we find the condition of contemporary women's lives difficult (acknowledging that men's roles are also difficult too). So many women like ourselves struggle to be healthy, to find meaning, to nurture creativity in ourselves and in those around us. Instead we find ourselves overworked, underpaid and feeling very unwell and incapable of helping others. Or worse, we give all of our energy to working for others at the expense of our freedom and sense of well-being.

I do believe that our lot is easier than the women of the mid-twentieth century whose struggle to fight for better jobs, better pay and to tamp down on sexual-bias in all areas of live is to be applauded and honored. Here we are, however, in the year 2006 still struggling to fight fires of this nature on a smaller scale: on the home front. Women are indeed an integral part of the modern workplace, yet now the pendulum has swung over to the point where trying to find time to tend to your domestic family life or personal life has become precious. Gone are the days of Mrs. Cleaver housewives only to be replaced by frantic women who have little time to take care of their own health, their loved one's needs, and their own pursuit of happiness.

The three of us conversing in the car concluded that the best way to find a balance between work and home life is to find a job that requires the minimum sacrifice of personal life while providing enough pay to support you, so that the rest of your time can include the activities that make you feel alive and healthy such as spending time with family and friends, supporting those around you in need, and attending to the inner voices of creativity and play.

Remedios Varo was a woman who understood the need for creativity and play. She might be a poster child for the life author Virginia Woolf outlined in the famous essay, "A Room of One's One." Varo was born in Spain at the beginning of the 20th century (1908) and was fortunate to have a good education thanks to her father, a hydraulic engineer. As an adult, her life-course was altered by war: she fled to Paris during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and fled the Nazi's assault on Paris to find refuge in Mexico in the 1940s. Surrealist painters in Europe influenced her style, but like the other great Mexican artist of her day, Frida Kahlo, Varo forged a new and personal language from the methods observed in Salvador Dali and his crowd.

Varo was not only a painter who achieved a measure of success in her own lifetime, but also one with a complicated life lived in pursuit of freedom and sense of well-being. She married at age 22 to another painter, but the marriage failed. She had an abortion as a young woman (a choice likely made from hardship due to her unfortunate economic circumstances during the pregnancy) and was thereafter unable to have children. She loved several men and at least one woman, fellow artist Lenora Carrington.

She painted and wrote about the intersection of magic and mysticism with science and technology--in a surrealist style, that to my mind, demonstrates perfect understanding the the contradictions of the era in which she lived. Her paintings most often focus on a central female character. She places her women in a variety of roles: The Traveler, The Musician, The Scientist, The Temptress, etc. Then there are the floating figures of men and women who surround her; they are The Masses, The Crowd, The Unbelievers, The Judges, The Critics. Given the independence of Varo's life, it's not so surprising that these themes emerge. These images are fantasy, but they are allegories for the circumstances the artist herself, and probably her friends too, faced.

La llamada, or The Call, is about a woman who walks without fear down the path of her own choosing because she is called to do so by a Higher Power. That disembodied Voice may come from within her or from the Universe at large, or from Deity, but it is a call that may not be denied. Her path is guarded by the throngs of people who don't hear this voice and who don't even notice her, yet she glides forward on unafraid. Varo was in her fifties when she was working on this painting; she was at the height of her power as a visual storyteller.

I find this painting a comfort whenever I am confronted with critics who don't understand my personal mission in life or the type of life I have chosen to lead. I think of how Varo understood that our hold on the goal is tenuous, that responding to The Call is not a choice everyone could be brave enough to make. But once you have begun to live a life more in balance and listen to the (inner or outer) Voice, you are compelled forward carrying your precious objects, just as Varo's Woman carries symbols of alchemy and of precious liquids. Taking The Call, accepting it, is a risk and one that many people, like the figures affixed to the city walls in Varo's painting, will refuse to hear. Finding one's calling--and for many people today that might mean finding balance--is risky, but there are rewards for success in this journey. The powerful glow of success in Varo's Woman shows that she is gaining and even spreading her light, her energy into the world. She is the candle that spreads light into the corners of her world.

Creativity illuminates if only you will accept The Call.

Re-creation

From

Webster.com

Athlete

Main Entry: ath·lete
Pronunciation: 'ath-"lEt, ÷'a-th&-"lEt
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin athleta, from Greek athlEtEs, from athlein to contend for a prize, from athlon prize, contest
: a person who is trained or skilled in exercises, sports, or games requiring physical strength, agility, or stamina

For the first time in my life, I am finding an enthusiasm for athletics. I stop to think about why I never liked sports as a child and recall unpleasant moments of being the last kid picked for any team sport and of gym teachers with whistles around their necks yelling at me to do better, try harder. I was never good enough. I was never an athlete. I hated my body as a teenager and grew very fat and very, very depressed.

Not all of my early experiences with sports were unhappy ones. I loved swimming in the pool and learning yoga with a very patient instructor at the local YMCA. I can even remember having fun in gym class during kindergarden and first grade. But after lower elementary school, I suddenly felt inferior based upon my inability to run fast enough, kick or hit the ball well enough, play rough enough to keep up with the neighborhood gang and the kids at school. I wasn't competitive enough. At a certain point, I never even tried anymore. I did the minimum in gym and didn't play on any sports teams until one summer during high school when my best friend's mother found us a softball league which was less high-stakes competition in the town just one over from ours. We played as well as we could. Sometimes we won, and sometimes we lost. I enjoyed playing shortstop, but I wasn't a great hitter. It didn't matter.

But none of the physical activities I did really caught on with me except hiking in the outdoors. I wanted to be in wilderness, away from suburbs and away from the traffic and people. The problem was I wasn't able to go hiking often enough for it to be sufficient exercise. I had a poor diet at school, where I couldn't stand the food and so loaded up on sugar and starches. I didn't much like the healthy foods my mom fixed, but I made my best effort for her sake and snacked heavily in between meals.

That seems like so long ago. In fact it was half my life ago: 18 years. Today I don't even recognize my body when I glimpse myself in the mirror. It's like another person has grown in my place. It's been a five-year struggle, but finally I've managed to become a healthier, happier body as a result of learning how to exercise with weights and machines properly and of experimenting until I've finally found physical activities that I can love, not merely do competently. It helped to have a partner who was not only encouraging, but who actually took the time to show me how to safely use weights and machines and to demonstrate proper stretches.

After I made progress with the weights, abdominal stretches and such, I realized that I wanted to be athletic without the activity being so boring. Last year I began taking yoga after a 30-year hiatus. I actually remembered some of the poses and taking the class dredged up old memories of the young man who taught this YMCA class of five- and six-year olds about forming the poses of animals and trees (Hatha Yoga). I also remembered how much I loved the relaxation at the end, where he would have us imagine a glowing ball of blue light. This man must have been the Pied Piper, or how in the world did he get a class of bouncy preschoolers to lie down and relax?

My latest daring adventure into the world of sports is kayaking. My husband and I have gone out on at least one short kayaking paddle since the beginning of August. We began on our vacation in Central Coast California and have taken weekend trips to local rivers and creeks every weekend since our return. We took a half-day lesson in sea kayaking in Monterey Bay, and recently decided to go for the full one-day basics course. It's now that my muscles are looking toned and I'm beginning to sculpt myself into a real athlete for the first time. I can hardly believe it, but I'm falling in love with this sport. It allows my husband and I to spend time together, while combining our love of the outdoors with the enjoyment of freely moving through the water.

I think the noun "recreation" is a very appropriate word to summarize my feelings about this process. I am re-creating myself and relieving many of the angry feelings I had toward my body. The mind-body connection is so powerful that I feel like I am becoming a whole new "Me."