The Vitality of Storytelling:
We believe
storytelling is
our lifeline in time.
We believe storytelling is
one of our circulatory systems.
We worry our storytelling lines are
broken, clogged or worse, sabotaged.
Let Us Start with a Few Questions:
Feel like you belong to an “us?”
What are your parameters of “us?”
Are you exchanging amongst yourselves?
Are you exchanging with the “outer” world
that supposed/appears to live beyond your “us?”
Are you adequately telling your tales
and adequately listening to one another?
Most concerning, is ritual and storytelling
used against you to alienate and exclude you?
These Questions Only Lead to
More Questions:
What keeps us civil?
(A critical question when
civility is revoked or violated.)
Codes of conduct, rules and
regulations, laws?
Maybe.
But what informs them?
Commandments, religious tenets, our values?
But what informs and maintains our values?
Spiritual entities and guides?
Obviously, our query
leads to a circular quandary.
So we raised another question:
What actually is our so-called humanity?
What constitutes/establishes our humanity?
What advances/documents our humanity?
We believe there are two corporeal
activities that inform
our humanity:
Ritual and Storytelling:
Rituals
are our emblems,
practices, symbols
of our beliefs and faiths.
Rituals are our choreographed,
danced, designed and staged values.
These staged signs serve as our signifiers
of the Eternal which we use to signify
–celebrate and worship–
that which we perceive
as the core and source
of our values as well as
individual and societal
conduct.
Storytelling is our seventh sense at work.
Yup, seven:
hearing, sight, smell, sound, taste,
… and …
Intuition (our spiritual exchange)
… and …
Storytelling (our exchange in and sense of time).
Narrative
is one of our
circulatory systems.
Try stop breathing.
Now try to stop telling stories.
It is indeed one of our vital lifelines:
It is how we live/work/love/thrive,
individually and collectively.
It is our exchange between
the corporeal and eternal.
It is our community breathing.
Inhaling and exhaling.
It is our rhythm.
Together, through narrative and ritual,
we express and share our beliefs and
in so doing, we build community.
What About Diverse Communities,
In which the Unfamiliar,
Even Drastically Different Cultural
Narratives and Rituals are Present?
How Do We Build Unity Within
Such Fundamental Differences?
It is simple to explain but difficult to do.
The seeds for unity are already
containedwithin the differences.
We cannot ‘think’ our way through it.
It is an experiential phenomena.
Through storytelling and rituals,
we honor our beliefs and values.
Within our chosen community,
through our hard work,
me becomes we.
Our exchanges build community
based upon homogeneity.
Once we
are strengthened
by our community commitment,
we are empowered to extend outward and
exchange our narratives and values, to
consider, evaluate, learn and appreciate
difference, symbiotic heterogeneity.
After we develop
and enrich our culture,
celebrate and honor our own,
we ARE empowered to share
our rituals and stories of
our communities with
“others.“
By means of the
intermediary
dynamic of extended:
Accommodation, Respect, and Empathy,
We ARE Empowered
to Coexist and Honor Others.
Hence, exchange within and you will
grow and yearn to exchange without.
It is the very nature of
initiating internal expansion
that will compel you to seek
External Exchange.
Together, we become more
than a single band of rhythm,
If our seven senses are tuned,
we will hear the melody of invitations
to contribute to the score of rhythms,
to the orchestra of life.
What is the Potential Danger?
What are the Risks?
If our storyline brakes, what happens?
Without narrative and ritual, we
wither within our homogeneity,
and without, our exchange with those
outside our community, will extinguish.
In its place, its antithesis takes root, and,
the weeds spread and strangle what’s left.
For us, this is the mechanism of darkness.
Just as forfeiture of our storytelling/rituals
initiates restricted breathing,
and eventually, strangulation,
for a nation built upon an invitation to
the tired and poor, and the
huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
begrudging, hesitant, unwilling
participation yields
a cacophony that hurts both
our ears and hearts
until our country suffocates.
Today’s invasive species, is not the “others,”
but our own hate, intolerance, fear
of a perceived contagion
projected onto the “other,”
in place of our review of our own
dishonor and greed.
In this environment of social toxicity
“Otherness,” becomes intolerable,
we obsess on homogeneity that
has its unity dysfunctionally
based in uniformity,
(often in desperation due to
our own withering state)
instead of the Creator’s diversity,
where unlike elements yield a unity
based in the complexity, sophistication and
variety of heterogeneity,
that thrives, and not-so ironically, is
better suited to survive the test of times.
(Consider, at a far greater external scale,
the Creator is not going to allow the
Extraterrestrial Aliens (ETAs) to visit
Earth until we embrace our minor distinctions.
For then, we will have to negotiate
some really vast differences.)
Hear this, herein,
the healthy mechanism
(inoculation, if you will)
is the exchange (sharing) of
our Rituals and our Storytelling.
“Honor and Share,” is our mechanism
for individualized and collective health.
But first we need a narrative and ritual of
our own and to know it well,
intimately and rigourously,
if you are to share it and coexist
with others of different persuasions.
(Then, heavens forbid, we just may begin
to appreciate the similarities, maybe?)
So, where does it come from?
That, too, we believe,
is easily explained but difficult to secure:
Our elders inherently have much to
share with our young,
both insight and questions,
and,
our young inherently have much to
share with our elders.
both imagination and questions.
Likewise, for everyone else who
are supposedly at opposite ends
of a supposedly dichotomous range.
For all, inspiration and awe await
once we spiritually migrate.
Then Why Is It Not Happening?
Because we are stuck at the first step.
Because we lost the act of helping,
and the art of sharing
vernacular,
verbal,
visual,
spiritual
stories.
The bilateral,
multidirectional,
multigenerational
bridge of time is obstructed,
maybe worse, maybe collapsed.
We have forfeited the nourishing,
precious, crucial arts to others who
commodify and use it for their own
political and profitable intent.
How Do We Share?
We dance, perform, pray and sing our rituals,
We help one another and those in need.
We tell our powerful, unique stories:
origin stories, survival stories,
stories of loss and victory.
How Can We Trust It Will Work?
Because the universal resides within the specific.
The individual is the infinite!
Why?
Because we strongly believe our acts of assistance
and our storytelling and creating are indeed
the celebration-documentation-expression
of our humanity.
How Do We Start?
Herein,
through
your
contributions,
101HOPE
caretotell
create+make
justcareforalllife.
will grow, as we act to help and focus on
verbal folklore and vibrant visual storytelling
as we discuss/debate our six life-care services
and archive our contributions for all to access
and to which all can contribute their own.
We Will Go First!
We will tell the story of
The Seerz of Wazizwilbi
(But only after a few more POVs.)
Stay the Course:
(For now)