It all means more than I can tell you.
So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.
-Marilynne Robinson
When Charlie King, the great American folksinger, was a little boy, he used to tell his grandmother tall tales. She would ask: “Are you telling the truth or are you telling me a story?” As he got older, Charlie realized that, actually, the best way to tell the truth was to tell a story.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that everyone and everything has a story to tell – children, cats, old people, trees, teenagers, birds, rivers, the lot. If we haven’t heard what the dolphin or the disabled child or the prisoner or the meadow next door has to say, our book is incomplete.
Just because we don’t understand the way someone tells their story, doesn’t mean they have no story to tell. A rock absorbs a river’s story and changes its own shape to show how well it has listened. A dog who cowers and whimpers whenever its owner goes by tells a story written in fear. A child who raises her hand with eager enthusiasm whenever the teacher asks a question proclaims her story as eloquently as the one who slumps in her seat and takes no interest in anything. Watch. Speak. Listen. Learn. Stories are being heard and told everywhere.
Our stories are what we have. They are our maps, our passports, our tickets, our cameras, our baggage claims. They hold our memories, our beliefs, our reasons for being. They tell who we are, where we’re from and where we’re going. Telling our stories, some of us need help from an interpreter; others use technology. Some of us listen with our eyes; some of us speak with our hands.
Some of our stories are misinterpreted so that we don’t recognize them as our own and some of the stories we heard growing up had “happy endings” that actually made us miserable. Some of us started out with one story and ended with another, as countries, conditions, languages, genders, births, deaths and loves transformed us.
Our 2022 calendar celebrates stories: the ones we tell and the ones we listen to; the ones the wind carries and the ones the ocean contains; the slow stories proceeding at the stately pace of a hand-propelled wheelchair and the fast, clever ones with the trick endings; the stories told in sign and the ones the night sky spells out in stars to aid those navigators who travel from one hemisphere to another, summoning up in us all that we shared in common, once upon a time.
