I contemplated the intimacy in storytelling, grasping a
depth well beyond my previous considerations.
Only to realize that storytelling, which had been as abundant and fluid
as a well-fed stream from high mountain glaciers fed my young girl’s
imagination spilling well into adult life and subsequently nourishing Crone-time
with fertile flow. Today it pushes at
me to pull stories together to share verbally with others.
How else, I wonder, could entire cultures for thousands of
years survive intact, where storytelling brought the people’s history forward
through voice. Entire culture’s
survival thrived in ceremonial reverence, sharing stories in kivas, roundhouses,
humble churches and grand cathedrals, circled around fire, and on sacred
mountains. People listening and holding
their knowledge of their ancestors and therefore, themselves, silently,
sacredly. Bringing forward, in time,
through storytelling for their people, their purpose, their relationship to themselves,
to one another, to the earth, to the universe. Knowing that their greatness,
and the universe’s greatness, was one.
One love, one breath. A story of harmony, unification and exaltation.
Storytelling honours humanness in ourselves and in the other. There is an intimacy when the storyteller
opens herself creatively, in the moment, in heart and thought, preparing an
immediate communion of her journey with her listener. And the listener, who receives with trust and
openness–the deepest most feminine expression of vulnerability—one human to
another.
Cerebral as I am, I find this exchange equal in sacredness
and beauty to physical sexual intimacy.
The sensual components of voice—timbre, cadence, intonations, breath, and
the proximity to the teller, combined with the storytelling gifts of spinning
tales opens connections in the brain, primal and instinctual.
Whether sung or spoken, the intimacy of human voice
initiates relationship. And when revered, unfolds with a unstoppable majesty. Respect between people builds trust and
intimacy. Trust and intimacy binds. Building stronger unions, stronger bridges,
stronger individuals who, when individuated, come together with greater brightness
to bring greater light into the universe.
I fell in love with a storyteller once whose stories he told
in great repetition. Being a person
abhorring repetition, I found myself in awe that his stories could grace me
over and over with equal pleasure, time and again. He knew intimately, that repetition was the
key to stories being remembered. And the
gift of a storyteller is his stories and their value. There is a charisma to a storyteller who holds
his listener in close proximity. I felt as if I was the only person on the face
of the earth in his presence. That
magnetism he shared with the world— the gift he brought as a storyteller.
Storytellers own the whole world in their minds, weaving
tales of beauty and love, terror and history, birth and death, love and hate—the
dualities, myths, teachings, and above all, the truths we must learn one day or
another.
We are all storytellers when we look into another’s eyes,
into their soul, and share our stories.
How deeply we delve is determined by our courage to live freely, and our
love of life and relationship. Our paths
as unique as snowflakes—accessing truths and stories through our personal
perspectives and sharing with those whose receptivity and intimacies reaches out
to meet ours.
Kat
20 February 2017
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