Telling Stories

I subscribe to a dot com that is written for bloggers and other professional writers. Today’s update was somewhat unexpected. The message was about a forthcoming book that will focus on stories of political oppression in Burma. The point of the article was that here in the western world, for the moment anyway, we blog with impunity while the Burmese who blog do so at their own risk. Yet, at the risk of their lives, they struggle to tell their stories. Why do they take the risk?

Telling stories, whether about the clan or the individual, fact or fiction, is an ancient and universal human activity. I am fascinated with the act of storytelling, with the connection forged between tale-teller and audience, with the transformative power of narrative. We tell stories over the phone, on the porch, at funerals and weddings, in books and on blogs, in movies and in song lyrics, even in our advertisements. We tell our tales to our spouses, our children, our friends, and our casual acquaintances, to unseen audiences and corporate entities. Stories make connections among us. Stories are arguably the source of all art – an art form that does not make a connection doesn’t last long.

The stories we love best are the ones that give us a glimpse into our own lives. Think how the pleasure of hearing about someone’s vacation trip is increased when we’ve been there, too. When we add our stories to theirs, we enter into dialogue, enjoying the opportunity to mix and match our experiences. We can enter into dialogue with current acquaintances, or, through the power of the written word or film, with people in distant lands and distant times. We come away from those conversations satisfied, content, and affirmed.

In the context of storytelling, social networking begins to make sense. In our tweets and Facebook entries, in our blog posts and emails, each of us reaches out to everyone else, to tell our stories and to listen to the stories others share with us.

Some stories are hard to hear: stories of pain and death and disappointment, stories of sorrow and regret, of abandonment and loss. But when we allow others to tell us those stories, we give the gift of presence and compassion. When we truly listen to painful stories, we help the tale bearer shoulder the load and we give the relief of being heard. When we are heard, we can begin to heal. Ask anyone who has suffered through a divorce and whose friends picked up the phone to listen, over and over again.

Perhaps that is why some of the Burmese people take the risk of sharing their stories with the rest of us. They may want to educate or inform, but most of all they want to connect, to let all of us know what is happening in their lives. Theirs are the painful stories, the ones that heal when they are told.

The Hood

Boaters tend to walk up and down the docks and visit with each other the way I remember the grown ups walking up and down the street in the evening when I was a child. I think it has to do with the lack of a private drive; to get to your boat, you have to walk down the dock. As you wander by, everyone who is out says hi and stops to chat, offers you a cold drink, asks you if you have this or that widget, if you know how to fix this or that broken whatsit, or if you’re going out (on the bay) this weekend.

Liveaboards range from young families with children to oldsters whose bodies and boats are decaying at about the same rate. Among our acquaintances who are actively working while living aboard are two canvas makers, a hotel builder, a boat salesman, a teacher, a hospital worker, an IT contractor, a trial lawyer, and a jewelry maker. Among those who no longer work are those who want to cruise, those who like to sail the bay, those who haven’t got a clue, those who’ve just returned from cruising, and those who just like to sit on the stern of their boats every evening and watch the world go by.

There’s not much privacy in our little world, because everyone knows someone else, everyone has a story to tell, and when you tell your friends, they tell their friends, and pretty soon the entire marina knows and enjoys your saga. Of course, every story gets better if properly embellished. If yours is dull, it will be fixed.

There’s the foreign fellow who has been told in no uncertain terms by the INS that his visa has reached its sell-by date. Because of his age, he needs crew in order to leave. Evidently he is so incredibly irascible, no crew has made it past Galveston without jumping ship. I’ve never met him, but when I’m out walking the dog and he peddles by on his bike, we wave.

Then there’s the oldster who, although pretty much blind and deaf, set to sea for Mexico some months back. The coast guard returned him to our shores, boatless. His friends organized a boat rescue, set off for mid-Gulf, and returned towing his home. He is now busily engaged in fixing the damage he sustained and making plans to leave again. No one is worried. There are folks around here who have been fixing up their boats for ten years and aren’t close to leaving. No one minds; it’s the dreams that count.