Today I am launching my first weekly “story email.” I'm nervous and excited and, as I wrote to a good friend a few days ago, nervous is excitement spelled backward. He loved that phrasing, and I do, too, except for the fact that swinging between the two emotions has my head spinning and belly churning.
But it is the heart that matters and that's where the stories take us, to the heart and then even deeper into the soul.
What do I mean by the soul? Let me tell you a story. Last night I was looking through the stories on this website, changing a word here and there, checking for goofs or gaffes. Even though I had read the stories a dozen, maybe a hundred times, I found myself spontaneously sighing, crying, gasping in wonder, or laughing out loud.
It never fails -- I see myself in these stories. They are mirrors into a commonality of being, an understanding that what the people in the story feel, I also feel, that what they see and understand, I can also begin to see and understand.
The stories transport me to another place, a time long ago or just yesterday, to spend time with strangers who in the few minutes it takes to read the story become my friends. My teachers. My community of fellow imperfect human beings. That is a “soul” response, that sudden and inexplicable experience of connectedness, not just to each other but to something larger than ourselves.
And so it is to the stories I turn, with gratitude for this life abounding, in all its oldness and newness, its darkness and brightness, its confusion and clarity. I'll end this first reflection with an excerpt from the book I wrote with master storyteller Ernie Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection:
Once upon a time, people told stories. In the midst of sorrow and in the presence of joy, both mourners and celebrants told stories. But especially in times of trouble, when a “miracle” was needed and the limits of human ability were reached, people turned to storytelling as a way of exploring the fundamental mysteries: Who are we? Why are we? How are we to live?