Listen Up/Speak Up
(Receiver/Speaker)
The Vitality of Storytelling
We believe storytelling is Y~our bloodline of time.
We believe storytelling is one of Y~our circulatory systems.
We worry Y~our storytelling lines are broken, clogged or worse, sabotaged.
Let Us Start with a Few Questions:
Do you 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 lives beyond you and your “us?”
Are you adequately telling Y~our 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?
(This is a critical question when civility is revoked or violated.)
Codes of conduct, rules and regulations, laws? Maybe.
But what informs them? Commandments, religious tenets, Y~our values?
But what informs and maintains our values? Spiritual entities and guides?
Obviously, our query led us to a circular quandary.
So we raised another question:
What is humanity?
What constitutes/establishes Y~our humanity?
Not to ask, what advances/documents Y~our humanity?
We believe there are two corporeal activities that inform Y~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 awareness, values and individual and societal conduct.
Storytelling is our seventh sense at work.
Yup, seven: hearing, sight, smell, sound, taste, and …
Intuition (our spirit exchange) … and …
Storytelling (our exchange in and sense of time).
Again, narrative is one of our circulatory systems.
Try stop breathing. Now try to stop telling stories.
It is indeed our lifeline: 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 Unfamiliar,
Even Drastically Different,
Cultural Narratives and Rituals are present?
How Do We Build Unity Based Upon
Such Fundamental Differences?
It is simple to explain but difficult to do.
Through storytelling and rituals, we honor our beliefs and values.
Within our chosen community, 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.
So, after we develop and enrich Y-our culture, celebrate and honor y-our own,
we are empowered to share Y-our rituals and stories with “others.”
By means of the intermediary dynamic of extended respect and accommodation,
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 invite external expansion.
Together, we become more than a single ban of rhythm,
We contribute to the score of rhythms, to the orchestra of life.
Begrudging, hesitant, unwilling participation yields
A cacophony that hurts Y~our ears and hearts.
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 own storytelling/rituals
initiates restricted breathing, and eventually, strangulation,
A nation built upon an invitation to the tired and weary, will then suffocate.
Today’s toxin, our invasive species, is not the “others,”
but our hate, intolerance, fear
(of a perceived contagion projected onto the “other”),
as well as our own dishonor and greed.
In this environment of social toxicity, “Otherness,” becomes intolerable,
we obsess on homogeneity that has its unity based in uniformity,
(often in desperation due to our own withering state)
instead of the Creator’s diversity,
where unalike elements yield a unity
based in complexity and sophistication and variety in heterogeneity,
that thrives, and not-so ironically, is better suited to survive the test of times.
The healthy mechanism (inoculation, if you will)
is the exchange (sharing) of our Rituals and Storytelling.
“Honor and Share,” is our mechanism for individualized and collective health.
But first you need a narrative and ritual of your own and to know it well,
if you are to share it and coexist with others of different persuasions.
So, where does it come from?
That, too, we believe, is easily explained but difficult to secure:
Our elders have much to share with Y~our young, and,
Our young have much to share with Y~our elders.
Then why is it not happening?
Because we lost the art of sharing
vernacular, verbal, visual stories:
The bilateral, even multidirectional, multigenerational
bridge of time is obstructed, maybe collapsed,
we have forfeited the nourishing, precious art 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–
and
We tell our powerful, unique stories;
origin stories, survival stories,
stories of loss and victory.
Why?
Because the universal resides within the specific.
Because we believe storytelling is the
celebration-documentation-expression of our humanity.
Therefore, herein, our focus is on
the verbal folklore and vibrantly visual storytelling
–all to be archived for all to access and to which all can contribute Y~our own.