On Stories and Shelter

Two weeks ago, the Older than I Am Old  Woman I Meet With who shares poetry with me, listens to my stories, regards my art expressions, and asks me how things are with my soul, read a poem to me from the book In the Shelter, on finding a home in the world by Padraig O' Tuama.   When I returned home I ordered a copy and it arrived last week from England.  This stood out in my reading yesterday:

Sometimes, in the telling of stories, we injure and cure at the same time  Once, people from a village in the wake of a murder gathered and told their stories of their trauma.  They got telling other stories too, and one night we told stories of a time when we realized, 'I will be able to measure my life before and after this moment".  People told stories of jobs, divorces, marriages, children, bodies, changes and death.  Some of the stories told were told with aching and they were heard with an echo of that ache.  At the end of the night, one of the participants looked around the room.  Up until that point, the group used to call itself 'the two groups'--the Catholic group and the Protestant group.  'Well' the woman said, looking round, 'we're one group now'.  And she was right.  Another person had left the room.  For her, the timing wasn't right and she couldn't stay.  That wasn't failure, it was just a different kind of truthtelling. 

I'm told linguists debate a particular question.  One way of saying the question is:  'Do different languages carve out unique systems of thought, meaning, and value because of the cadences, histories and concepts within the language?'   Some say 'yes'.  The ones who say 'yes' say that because Irish has a particular word, ochon, to mean 'croon in grief', leading to a particularity of grief expression in Irish culture.  Most say there is a  deeper set of meaning indigenous to all humans and all languages circle this deeper set of meanings.  For the latter group it doesn't matter that the Irish language has no word for 'no'; we're still stubborn bastards.

Myself I don't know how to know an answer to the linguist's question. What I do know is that I believe the woman who said, 'It's good to talk' and I believe the man who said 'I hate it when you say that' and I believe the group who said 'I'm glad the talking has begun'.  These groups are often battered by murder and double battered by the disbelieving of the story of the murder  They feel far from caring, and feel far from therapy, health and encounter.  The ones who come to hold the story-spaces come with time and technique, but these can only go so far.  It is in the shelter of the story telling that the people live, and that the people see their shadows.  And sometimes the shadows are very long.

The dictionary of Etymology tells me that the history of the word story holds meanings of 'wise-man' and the verb 'to see' .  To tell as story is to see wisely, I say to myself.  I don't know if it needs to be true, but I believe it.  If a story is a beginning, there might be a place it leads to, a deeper truthtelling about the essence of ourselves, and the essence of ourselves-in-relation-to-the-other, particularly the feared other.  Some stories start off in rooms and end up in Narnia, Never-Never-land, Wonderland or other little hells.  But if we stick with the story it will tell us something.

We can never tell the whole story--and we never try.  I don't know if the story of our griefs has an ending, only the next chapter or perhaps, the careful telling and retelling of the recent chapters.   We tell stories in groups so that people can be believed,  so that people can make meaning, so that people can carve and create kindness for another and eventually themselves. 

We hope that our storytelling can be a little shelter amid the trouble.  We hope that we can tell stories of our troubles.  We hope we can say hello to our shelter.