We don’t tell enough stories. I do not mean the entertainment that is produced for us, and that we consume. I mean the stories that are playing out in the midst of your life and that need to be told. The sacred story that unfolds in the ordinary moments, and in the midst of the joy and tragedy of being alive. Because yes, sacred stories are not a thing of the past.
Let me tell you a story.
It is the story of a world and a people balanced on a knife’s edge. It has no beginning, and it has not ended but we begin in the last tired days of summer. These people you see were tired, to their very bones. Not from the good labor of summer’s bounty, that is a good sort of tired. They were tired because a pandemic had raged unchecked, and often ignored, through their midst. Because the death toll had grown so great they could hardly conceive of it and there was no end in sight.
They were tired because black and brown people had been dying for so long. Dying violent deaths at the hands of officers of the law, and “good upstanding” citizens. As the balance on that knife edge grew ever more precarious the killings seemed to accelerate. And great throngs of people, hearing the cry of the Divine dying in the bodies of black men and women, marched in the streets calling for justice and safety.
They were tired because for too long their Mother had been used, and abused by faceless corporations that care only about profit and nothing about the creatures (human and so many other) who rely on her for their lives. Some of them, had felt that knife tilting for a long time and now up and down the coast of this once wild continent fires raged greater than ever before. Smoke, thick and choking, cloaked the skies and poisoned the air.
In those last days of summer even the people crackled, dry and crumbly and ready to combust. The moon rose orange-red through the choking clouds of smoke, and over the pain of broken hearts and suffering souls mourning a great life, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary (sacred) lives lost. In the hard end of summer.
The world spun on because that is what the world does. And the seasons come one after the other with absolute reliability. And so, as autumn dawned on the tinderbox of our hearts the rain pushed its way in off the ocean, rolling on a great front of cool air, pushing the smoke before it and rain bathed the baked soil, kissed the brittle faces of summer’s spent flowers, washed the grit from the oak leaves, and rolled laughing down the apples.
And a people dried up and nearly blown away walked blinking out into the rain and their own salt tears mingled with the gentle fresh showers and the pounding, cleansing, downpours. Ferns unrolled, dry brown moss became green as emeralds, the skies cleared, and the hot sharp wind became a gentle cool caress.
The rain did not end the suffering, or bring back the lives lost, it did not heal the damage that had caused those fires. But it brought cool relief, and new life; and the reminder all beings need that life follows death. That the seasons come and go with no help from us. The Earth turns, and there is morning and evening, a new day.
The rest, well we must tell the rest of this story.
After the rain, children will ask, what happened after the rain?
And that too is our story to tell.
We tell it together, with this sacred world on which we walk. She weaves stories from the sentences of mayflies, the novels of Redwoods, the flashing tales of a sardines and the epic of the whale. And we are part of her story, our lives sacred narrative not separate from but woven with wren, maple, sand fleas, and basil. Telling one another sacred stories, listening for the thread of this great tale all around us.
We forgot, we thought that we told our stories by ourselves, isolated islands of Human speaking the only story that mattered. Cut off even form each other, individual and distinct. We trampled the words of spruce and saguaro cactus under our legal documents and great unspeaking machines. And we trampled the stories of each other. But if you know how to listen you can hear her still Cailleach striding the misty Scottish hills, and all her cousins all around this globe stepping beneath our noses unnoticed, stories catching around our ankles, torn by our fists but still, still telling.
Our stories are one great narrative, told together, a billion threads that hold one another up, and make the warp and weft of this great singing tapestry. We are in this together, all of us: Western mountain blue jay, apple, cottonwood, and salamander, and you, and I, all of us.
We must learn to tell stories together with our world, and we must remember that these are sacred stories, our sacred stories and let them put down roots in the soil where we find ourselves, let them bind us to the land and teach us to love it and each other. We can, if we let them, learn to heal the tears we have made in this great narrative quilt, to bind up the wounds and repair the breaches, and cross the chasms we thought were unbridgeable.
To be a storyteller friends we must learn to listen as much as we speak, to grow quiet and still for the quietest stories. And we must learn to speak, sometimes softly, sometimes loudly. To speak truth, to share what we have heard. And we must learn to join our voices with the human choir. And that requires a whole other skill of listening, and modulating our voices to blend, not drown.
For some of us that means learning to grow softer, quieter, to let other voices lead. For some of us it means speaking out, raising voices that have been silenced too long. Weaving, weaving the threads together into one great and beautiful tapestry.
I (and you) are not foolish enough to believe it will be easy, or that the work will be over soon. But that is no reason not to begin, right where you are.
