Have you ever felt held in the ways that your heart has always longed for? Have you ever felt safe to drop into your innermost being? The places you’ve hidden, the parts you barricade, the tender holdings of the painful moments you’ve endured and existed within. The art of story is to offer hope and healing to these parts of our souls that have felt entangled and lost in pain of experience and harm.
Snow falls in those big chunky flakes outside my window sill, adorned with sparkling lights on a mid-January day. Books pile high around our reading corner and fill our walls on the floating shelves we’ve purchased in the last year. I’ve read more books and listened to more fiction stories than ever before due to these years of pandemic. Stories of siblings facing dragons and lizard men, embracing their darkest moments. Death. Resurrection. Life and the fight it takes to stand in resiliency for the hope of goodness. The art of story is to find footing and strength in a world of dragons and lizard men.
It mostly feels impossible to offer the words that my heart feels when I begin to imagine and envision how personal story entwines and dances within and around the realm of fiction and poetry, beauty, and beginnings. And endings. The ancient echos that reverberate within our soul. As humans and partakers of this world and its nuances we not only need our stories to be heard and held but we must learn ways to listen well too. We must dance through the aches of anxiety, we must write our way through the grief of loss, we must create meals and camaraderie in joys and excitement, marking the stories that are orchestrated on our journey through time and space.
We must invite good guides to join us. Those who will listen without judgement. Those who will co-create along side us but not for us. Those who will hold our paper still while we spit and cry and laugh and find the mysterious truths hidden within our souls. Those who will watch the entire story unfold, sit back, and smile “good work, dear friend.” This is the art of story.
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