“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.” ~ Ben Okri.

My father was a storyteller.  He was also a Minister, and so had the opportunity and the venue, each Sunday morning, to intersperse his preaching with anecdotes and parables of his own, collected Monday through Saturday wherever he came in contact with humanity.  As the chaplain of the local high school in Jamaica, after he had transplanted his entire family there from the UK, on Fridays he led morning devotions at the church-founded school, and just as he did on Sundays, he injected something from his life experience into his message, ending with his disclaimer (with a Jamaican twist) ‘And is true, you know’.

In the last decade of his life, dementia robbed him of his ability to tell stories.  At first they had become jumbled, familiar stories with new endings, or two stories blended into one, which gave them a new edge.  And most of his listeners were not troubled by the change in characters, or setting.  We were aware that he enjoyed the telling, revisiting times and people past.  My mother, who was a little more rigid in her expectations of her dear husband, would get annoyed, trying to correct him.  But it was a symptom of his disease, and as time went on, even his stories faded.

When we were very young, my mother had instituted a family tradition, that on Fridays my father was responsible for preparing ‘tea’ (the English evening meal), and since his cooking repertoire was limited to ‘egg and chips’ (the giant version of ‘French Fries’ that bear little resemblance to the US version), we looked forward to his meal.  After ‘tea’ he then had to put the kids to bed, and for the younger ones, that included a new chapter in his never ending creation about a mouse called Ben Tup (pronounced Bent Up!) who was always getting into mischief and causing his teacher, who had a lisp and thus pronounced her name as Mith Thmith, a headache which caused her to have to go and lie down. 

When you grow up hearing stories, and books are your main form of entertainment, it is only natural that you become a storyteller yourself.  After my father died, I got the urge to start delivering my own Friday Morning Messages, and somehow have managed to keep this up for more than ten years.  Storytelling helps us to make sense of our world, and ever since humans learnt to communicate, they have  passed on parables, history, connections, through stories.

The activist, author, and prophet Audrey Peterman has been advocating for the National Park system for years.  She and her husband have been movers and shakers for decades in conservation movements, in environmental concerns, and most of all in inspiring people of color to become engaged with and active in Nature.  They were inspired by a road trip they took to visit many of the National Parks in the US.  But what they recognized was that not only are these parks place of great natural beauty, areas to reconnect with nature, to be in awe of the splendor and the diversity of the natural environment, they realized that the National Parks are also repositories of history.  If you have ever been to a park and listened to one of the Park Rangers on a guided tour, you will come away informed and educated, hearing the history of the place and the people.  The history represents the contributions of all Americans, from the ‘First Nation’ Native Americans, through the colonizers, the African Americans who were brought over as slaves, and through all of the immigrants who have contributed to the creation of our current US nation.  Some of the significant places of the Underground Railroad are commemorated in the National Park system.  In Atlanta, the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park includes sites related to the life of the civil rights leader. 

In our current times we receive endless amounts of information each day, now delivered straight to our fingertips through our smart phones.  We are providing (whether we know it or not) endless amounts of data for companies who want to know our spending habits, our reading habits, our entertainment habits.  Data mining is the name of the game, and statisticians now have amazing resources from which to predict future activities, trends, correlations and links.  But most of us are not moved by numbers, by percentages.  What gets to us is the anecdote, the human connection, the story.

I listened to a program recently where musicians are interviewed about songs which influenced them, and I had to jot down one woman’s description of Stevie Wonder (and I apologize, I do not recall the name of the woman who said this).  She rated Stevie Wonder as her most iconic role model, for the way he ‘…transmutes experience into an art form, tapping into the universal…’  How can we not relate to this, whether we are moved by a poem, a painting, a song, or a story? 

There are times when a group of oppressed people feel that their voices are not heard, that their stories are not known.  Recently we have had many states implementing book bans, threatened by the power of a story to stimulate independent thought, to widen horizons and promote empathy.  We have seen states dismantling programs that were created to enlighten people about the history of this nation, and the systemic racism that continues to make it harder for some groups of people to achieve their highest potential.  It is only through education and dissemination of information that the population can become informed and thus make good decisions.  We are running the risk of repeating old injustices when we do not expose and illuminate them. 

In my current role as ‘recently retired’ I have been given the opportunity to travel and to read more fiction than I have probably read in the previous ten years! I have been ‘forest bathing’ (did you know that was a thing? To immerse yourself in the natural world) and camping, and have tried to identify the songs of birds in the early morning.  I have read stories and shared stories and hope to continue to do so.

This Friday morning I hope you can also share your stories, and read those of others to better understand the world in which we live.  I hope you can find a National Park near you to go and learn the history of your community.  And if you are suffering in the aftermath of one of nature’s severe storms, I hope you have, or will soon have, the amenities that we usually take for granted. 

Have a wonderful weekend, Family!

One Love!

Namaste.