I'LL HUFF AND I'LL PUFF

I served in the military for 4 or 7 years depending on how you count reserve status, worked in factories for several years, spent 5 or 6 years at college or university again depending on how you count. Then there was that 30 + year stretch, depending on how you count that I went to school because it was my job. But I have always been a storyteller. If all my mother wanted were facts she asked my brothers, but if she wanted the story, she came to me. 

About the time I retired from teaching I experienced a calling, not unlike righteous minded pilgrims who feel chosen to do the Lord’s work. I have been writing for a long time as well and writing is important, you don’t stop writing because you sense a new or different calling. Nothing takes the place of writing. Writing is a utilitarian endeavor that links language with information, then comes understanding. Story has a life and a purpose of its own. As a writer I am a source. As a Teller, I am an instrument. In the 20 years since, I’ve traveled the world with a bag full of stories. In all that time I’ve never made money, seldom broke even. Like Johnny Appleseed, I was planting story at my own expense. All those years in the classroom, the downside was low pay. But in retirement, the upside is good benefits and time to explore, wherever you want to go. It is not an extravagant life style, if you are frugal and if you live modestly, you can do just that; wherever you want to go. 

Inside the storytelling community the craft unfolds much the same way preachers accommodate religion. In many cases, preachers are the best tellers in the business. Their story can be so digestible, so satisfying, for thousands of years civilization has taken it to heart, both its fiction and its fact. But religion is only a small slice of the story pie. Story is the archive where human history is preserved, with an ever so thin, muddy boundary between myth and truth. When the story is so complicated or so big that the ear and the mind can not process it, there comes a simple story with metaphors and fictional characters to fit the need. Story-Teller-Listener, if they join hands with the teller in the middle, the circuit is closed and a light comes on. A window to possibility opens that otherwise the listener would never discover on their own. 

Beyond the fiction, history more than suggests that evolution has employed a BigBrain imagination and recently (at the time) acquired language to share complex ideas and experiences. Think of it; one person can describe to another, the differences between the footprints of buffalo and zebras, miles away from any foot prints, in the dark. They shared information on where it was safe to cross a stream and which roots were good to eat and which were not. Those stories and every other story have been linked together and they bridge the gap between campfires and solar panels. 

Can you imagine a chimpanzee trying to tell a rain forest version of the “Three Little Pigs”? What would, “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.” sound like? We are, as far as we know, the only animals to tell stories. Whales and primates certainly do communicate, very well as their needs be. They can show how to do but they have no language to thread together like beads on a very long string. They can’t use the same words to tell very different stories. The fact that humans have such a rich history is more about language than it is about intelligence. Without story, every generation would have to reinvent the wheel. I am a StoryTeller and I want people to know that story is as much a part of our legacy, maybe more so than any other smart thing we dreamed up. Flush toilets are irreplaceable but without the story, we would still be squatting in the woods.