Heart-Lifting for Disheartening Times – Storytelling Holds Up a MIRROR

It’s all so overwhelming and it seems everyone is tired, discouraged, maybe angry or cynical or depressed, maybe confused or disheartened…just weary.
Each day during this April A-Z Blogging Challenge I’ll offer a short musing on an aspect or two of the many ways the ancient-yet-very-contemporary experience of storytelling – both listening and telling – is an enjoyable, fortifying and heart-lifting practice, for anyone!

M – Storytelling holds up a MIRROR for us.

And just like a physical mirror that reflects back an image we can see with our eyes, sometimes we like what we see…and sometimes we don’t…! Sometimes we change things, sometimes we go with what we see. Sometimes we find we can see new things from a different angle

It can be astonishing when I hear a story that might be generations or even centuries old, and I can see an image of myself, or of something I do or think, in that story.

That is part of the power and beauty and relevance of traditional tales, and folktales in particular: they deal with very human behavior, and foibles, and aspirations…that are as true today as when the stories were born.

Now, one is not going to see oneself in every single story, that’s for sure.

But maybe, for example, when listening to “A Calabash of Wine,” one might (reluctantly? or with an epiphany of sorts?) see oneself in the man who assumed that everyone else would do their part (in the story’s case, contribute a calabash of clear palm wine to the community pot for the chief’s celebration), and so he chose to pour in a calabash of just water instead, thinking that it wouldn’t make a difference.

[It turns out that everyone thinks that everyone else will contribute palm wine, so everyone poured in just water….so all that anyone got out of the pot to drink was…water.]

 

Seeing oneself in that story might be an uncomfortable realization, and the MIRROR the story provides might help one to make a change.

Sometimes, though, we are affirmed by what the story MIRRORs to us…

Very early in the pandemic, as we were all befuddled and maybe frightened as we were staying home and social distancing…many of us in our different contexts had to learn how to function online with digital platforms, such as Zoom. There were procedures and new equipment and learning curves involved…

In an online storytelling class I was teaching (after scrambling to learn how to make it happen online!), I told the story of “The Falcon” – and we discovered that it held a MIRROR up to me and the people I told it to: In the story a particular falcon is put on a branch and won’t fly, no matter what the king or the falconer tries. Finally, someone cuts off the branch it’s on, and it HAS to fly – and it does, beautifully soaring into the sky.

And we realized that that’s what we were finding ourselves doing – since our reality had changed, we HAD to “fly” with the new technological ways of doing things remotely. It was really affirming and almost inspiring to have that story reflect that to us!

The MIRROR of storytelling can offer reflection, clarification, a sharper image of what’s going on… It’s pretty great, actually!

Thanks for reading – Pam

Top photo of monkey by Andre Mouton. Girl mirror image photo by Bekah Russom. Falcon photo by John Bell. All on Unsplash.