Story Making
The power of story continued
“The story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’ He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter.” ~J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories
Story-making. My faith in this act grows. Every religious tradition relies on story to some extent. Stories of humans wrestling with each other. Stories of humans wrestling with the divine. Stories of humans trying to make sense of both other humans and the divine, make sense of creation and disorder and death. But there is more.
One of my favorite il dolce far niente opportunities is that of story-making. Last week I wrote of the way that a good story-maker can bring and keep people around a table embracing nourishment through food and word. But, as I said last week, this sustenance requires that people are willing to embrace a pause in what is normally deemed productive, to embrace the nothing that is full and spacious enough to land us more deeply into a moment.
I like this term “story-making” more than story-telling. Story-making seems to me like an act of creation. It relies on both the person offering the story and the person or people receiving it. Story-telling feels more one-sided, with someone directing others to feel or think a certain way. Telling is an act of informing through verbal communication. Making, however, is an act of forming by putting parts together. The words and memories and emotions of one person coming together with the facial expressions, understanding, heart, and emotions of another. Story-making happens because we’re paying attention—we’ve paid attention to the world and we give that attention to others to offer a bit of the world to them. And when they step into this domain with us, they offer their own attention. The offering of attention, then, builds and forms that secondary world.
I am still considering this after the funeral for the mom of my friend, Theresa, this past week. Theresa’s mom was called Dody. She lived to be 93 and was a lover of a good story. I discovered from the sweet and humorous account of her nephew. The account he told was of a woman who really knew how to live, loved to a laugh and revel at a good party, loved the color yellow, bright flowers, birds and deer and nature of all kind, harmless practical jokes, drinking Manhattens, and commanding attention in any gathering. All of this while living in a disabled body. Her nephew spoke with a twinkle in his eye and a smile throughout, while all who knew Dody best nodded and smiled and laughed.
When the account was through, the priest gave his own account, a homily as it’s called in the Catholic church. This priest understands the importance of story and I’d wager to say he likely has faith in what story-making can do, too. Story, he said, gives us a domain. Story locates us. This domain of story begins in the body, where all stories are lived out. So the body is the first domain of story, and, it would seem, also the last.
Funerals are a good place to consider this, a good place for story-making. Indeed, connective tissue is put back on flesh, air back into lungs. We get to remember together that we have lived stories, and perhaps even acknowledge that one day we no longer will.
It’s a fleeting, temporary domain, that of the body. But the domain of story? It’s a domain that evolves and is a place that can be returned to, with trails and threads that shift and wind together and apart and in various new directions over time.
I am wondering, then, how am I making stories with my own body, my own living? How are these stories making me? How are they living inside my body?
Have you considered this yourself? I wonder, and I can’t help but be delighted by the possibility that at midlife I might get to be the sub-creator of a secondary world that others might find beautiful to enter someday, with or without my body here.
Story, I suppose, is something that only humans share in the act of. Yes, story-making is a great connecting force between us humans, this way of making sense, of remembering, of making meaning and laughter, offering a domain to become anchored in when life so often feels placeless and de-centering, meaningless and overwhelming. The mind enters this world where it can settle, this is true. But what Tolkien leaves out is that the whole body enters this domain. When a good story is made, every sense comes along, and born in this domain, along with so much else, is wonder.
The sweetness of doing nothing, of making time to not fill my mind, is allowing me space to continue considering that question, what do I have faith in? Another answer I would add is wonder. It is another great connector that allows the heart to stand up and notice the world more brightly, to notice people more fully, to see and witness the whole of creation as more alive. This is certainly a domain we enter with our whole body.
I said that the domain of story is the birthplace of wonder, but who knows, perhaps it’s the other way around. Really, does it matter? Perhaps it’s all an opportunity to enter this domain of life more fully—story, wonder, the body, all entrance points to the sacred.
When Death Comes, by Mary Oliver
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.