tall tales

Spent a lovely couple of hours with the ever-so-lovely Mo. Mo makes me feel happy and safe. She’s sunlight. And kindness.

We dandered ‘round the market, talked over coffee and headed over to the waterfront and explored the co:ordinates exhibition together. She asked me what I knew of the artists and we both felt the same warm rush of inspiration at the individual and collective beauty of it… of the courage in it, the craft… the honesty, the quirkiness… the colour, and texture…

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when i was getting my degree and taking a class in what i think was called organisational behaviour, synergy was defined as, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts"…

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Mo reminds me that we humans are the creatures who have story, are story … we break down our walls and differences by listening to the stories of other’s lives and letting them entwine with our own… of not being afraid of the hard edges of some of our stories, of the loss and pain… but in the hearing we are called to an embracing of the other…

It’s so much easier to love when we remember we are unfolding stories… so much easier to bear pain and loss… to accept and live with others…

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But so often our tales are colliding…

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Another wise woman in my life says, "most people never set out to hurt one another… they are doing the best they can at the time… you can let go of blame and anger and hurt when you look back and see that" … after grieving comes a maybe kind of peace making… with ourselves and others… a letting go…

So perhaps forgiveness is wrapped up somewhere deep within these stories… We can’t live with the stories of others til we live with our own…Perhaps we can only let go of the dark stuff by first meeting it, accepting it, feeling it…

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Resistance is futile…those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it…

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For so much of my adult life this far, I lived in an imaginary future because the present wasn’t a place where I flourished… the greener fields always lay ahead… I was always wishing for… I see now that I wouldn’t or couldn’t deal with the past, the story of what had come before… as I learn how to narrate the story of the past, the present becomes a much more satisfying place to live and the future… well, whatever will…be will be…

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Chris tells his boys stories… wild, exotic, ridiculously silly tales in which they are the protagonists, the stars… as he tells his sons stories like his father did with him, they make weekly trips to an underworld place. in this secret magical land, reached by a clearing in a forest where vanishing daisies are the portal to a kingdom of imagination, there are always 2 great armies poised for battle…
this week the toothpaste army is ready to lock horns with the battalion of toothbrushes… next week, it’s the warring regiments of pencils and erasers, or it’s salt and pepper shakers ready to tear each other apart… whoever is at war, these particular adventures have a common dramatic turn of events… our young heroes will step into the space between and cry, “stop! In our world you two go together!” the armies are astonished. How shocked and amazed are these enemies when they hear of how there exists another place where they make so much more sense together than apart?
These laughing boys are the courageous peacemakers inside a story… learning to understand that life is about dealing with conflict… learning to look at things differently and help others see things differently… to see the complimentary nature of our difference… to be protagonists of another way… it’s hard to avoid thinking of another kingdom I heard of as a child… these boys travel in their father’s storytelling to a place where we understand what it means to ‘go together’ and stop our fighting…

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LB,x