© 2006 Bente Mirow
            Published in Vision Magazine May 2006  

                                                                                      

                The Gift of Broken Stories

“Don’t fix anything if it isn’t broken” goes the saying, and so advises us to not stir the water in calm seas.

Take a life, perhaps a life examined, maybe yours, and listen to it’s recounting of what it is, what it was, what happened. Put it in a frame and hang it on the wall.

The waters of this life are not agitated, but constrained by keeping it together as seen, as heard, as presented, as experienced.

Inside the picture, inside the life, waters might be unruly and rising and falling without ever turning into a cleansing storm or a still and peaceful element.

Now place a troubadour beside the picture and have him sing your life. In a duet of visuals and words, yours and the troubadour’s, your story is told.

But since this was my story, I told it all. And the story you told in my story, your story, you told alone. The same one as you have told before. Many times.

The stories we tell become the stories we live.

Now let’s actually give the troubadour his own voice. Allow him to listen to your story as he sees it, and tell it to you. You trade places, the troubadour is the teller, you are the listener.

The interplay among the listener, the teller, and the story becomes a triangulation, with eye contact and living energy.

You may think the teller shapes the story, but it’s the story that shapes the teller. It’s your story after all.

And the troubadour tells a different story. You don’t recognize your tale. But he only recycled your words. And your story he had heard so many times before. Only it wasn’t yours.

As you and the troubadour are trying to see eye to eye, you break the frame of your static picture of your life on the wall. From the edges without frame and through the broken glass flows freedom, a freedom to flow. A freedom to listen and re-phrase.
And you are separated from the confinement of old and overused words and you let new words describe what happened.
What you thought was broken is not even scratched when you look from the other side.

And you let the story happen to you.

As I with mine, this one. And as I see your story through my eyes, I see reflections of mine. And as you listen to my story about yours, you see you could have told it too, this way.

Our simple stories are embedded with guidance and hints about the complexities of life. Complexities we share, whether we are from here or there, old or new, he or she.

There are no “new” stories. Only new to us when we are ready for them.
When we are ready for our own story to be new, we meet a troubadour who tells us what he sees.

But there are new storytellers. The storyteller is someone who passes on something, recycles a bit of culture, a bit of wisdom or humor. Stories cross borders and become a global cultural recycling.
The modern bards, descendants of troubadours and other tellers of tales, must tell the tales of universal and timeless values, and communicate the spirit of nothing less than the community of the entire planet.

And as we tell and re-tell the stories of our lives, each story fragment the shape of the whole story, and each story a fragment of all the collective stories, we weave the broken stories together into one story of wisdom and hope and courage and joy.

But of course this is my story, and that is how I chose to tell it. Now it’s your turn to take the story and re-tell it your way. But be careful to keep your focus and tell the story right, so you don't end up like Coyote in this Cheyenne story:

Coyote was just walking along when he saw a man take his eyes out of his head and throw them up into a tree. They hung there until the man called out “Eyes come back!” Then the eyes returned and slipped into their place.
Coyote begged the man to teach him the trick. And the man did, but warned him to not do the trick more than four times in a day.

The man left and Coyote took his eyes out and threw them in the tree. He could see Forever itself, and much more. After the fourth time Coyote hadn’t had enough. He thought the man’s warning was silly, he was from somewhere else. So he threw his eyes in the tree for the fifth time. And he called “Eyes come back!” But the eyes didn’t move. They just hung there and looked at him.

Coyote stumbled blindly about until he met Brother Mouse. “Look up in that tree, Brother Mouse,” he said, “do you see my eyes up there?” “Yes,” said the mouse. But just as he had said so, a crow descended swiftly and gobbled them up.

Coyote was feeling sorry for himself and begged Brother Mouse to give him one of his eyes. The mouse thought Coyote pitiful crying like he was, and figured he could do just fine with one eye, and so gave one to Coyote. Coyote slipped the little black ball into his eye socket, but he had to hold his head at an angle to prevent the little eye from just rolling out.
And the world looked ten times smaller.

Coyote walked very oddly, when he came upon Buffalo Bull. “Why do you walk so strange, Coyote?” asked Buffalo Bull. And after listening to Coyote’s broken and not yet finished story, he too took pity on poor Coyote and gave him one of his eyes. But a big chunk of it stuck out far into the forest. It was so heavy that it bent Coyote down on the side. The other side.
And when he closed the eye which saw everything ten times smaller, the world looked ten times bigger.

And because he could see the smallest in the biggest and the biggest in the smallest, new stories became possible, and that is how Coyote became the wisest animal of all.

And this is how Coyote’s broken story was put together with new eyes.

                 
                   © 2007 Bente Mirow
              Published in Vision Magazine August 2007