Sacrosanct Stories

Excerpt from Lightning's Words as Medicine: "I invite you over this threshold of words, into a safe grotto. Over a path of peace and love, painted with beauty, which might help your feet to feel belonging. "Follow your feet," when seeking, I was once counseled. When I listen, my feet and heart seem to walk the same direction.

I dwell here as a guest... just as you... in this cavern of story—hewn by time, with passion, and reason. The walls have told me, in the language of the earth, the cosmos, and the ancestors, that to breathe is a story...

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I'll share three drops of medicine with you, glimmering like dew... A birth of story, the life of story among humans, and my poetic dream for healing. These circumstances, hopes, and dreams are so ensorcelling to me, that I bequeath them between us with as much joy as a lover's ardent hug.

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A Birth of Story: In cosmogonic (cosmos origination) narratives around the earth—incredibly precious accounts, and surviving parts of accounts, assiduously caretaken since time immemorial—there is a frequent theme that human ancestors could converse with nonhuman relatives. Our ancestors understood all beings 'speak'. In those accounts I have been privy to, other beings did not lose their ability to speak... we lost our ability to understand them as we had. In most of these teachings, 'humans' are 'the younger siblings' among the hoop of our relatives. For a small bit of perspective, there currently lives a rare being called a stromatolite, who offers fossils relatives from, so far that we've found, 3.45 billion (in the Pilbara region of Australia) years ago.

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What did the rivers of ancestors who carried these teachings into the present want to convey to their descendants? Whatever the message... the modality was story. And story served as a cherished mnemonic teaching tool for information worth remembering.

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According to studies of genetic and fossil data, language as we know it is estimated to be around 200,000 years old, coexisting with visual storytelling via red-ocher and shell use. While a 2013 study cogitates on how, in rhythm with the appearance of sophisticated stone tools, language may have emerged closer to 1.75 million years ago. Story is not a new friend.

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The Life of Story among Humans: Some stories date themselves—such as of the globally reoccurring constellation which I grew up hearing the Grecian version of (the 'seven sisters'). Today, we can only see six stars in this constellation—since one has moved behind another. The story is at least as old as the last time the hidden star was seen. 50,000 years old. That is a long time for a story to be passed down... What is worth communicating for 50,000 years?

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I am a continuation of lineages of storytellers. So are you. Their enduring medicine of storytelling shows itself to me as a teaching tool to demonstrate interconnection, to culturally enshrine interbelonging, and to invoke mindfulness of the hoop we are a part of, and cultivating good relations with our relatives, especially. Almost all stories from our ancestors have to do with balance.

My Poetic Dream for Healing: When I met Lyla June Johnston, a Diné (Navajo) scholar and activist circulating healing and joy, my belief that we could live harmoniously, ecosystemically, took a directional turn. She offered a cloak of words, about ancestors who had been linchpins of diversity, gently weaving forests into gardens, and begemming deserts with oases. It was a cloak I had put on, in my stories about people living closely with the earth...

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Potawatomi scientist and scholar, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Diné elder and historian, Wally Brown, and others spoke stories I had never heard, about hope for our interrelation... I began listening deeply, to people who knew of old things that still live.

 

The novel Of Wolves and Men showed me how one might recognize the color of a wolf by the size of a pawprint, or whether a wolf is a nursing mother from afar, due to stained belly fur. To tell such stories, to pass such information, we must listen.

 

We are living ancestors, memory walkers of this world. When I interviewed the current cacique of an Island of my ancestors, he spoke about the earth, how the beings he and his family depend on, are becoming less abundant...

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People are still living close enough to the earth to notice...

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My goal as a writer is to help make the world a more beautiful place. I write, in a quite way, for the joy of learning, applying what I learn, endeavoring in difficult diction and narrative challenges, and luxuriating in ecosystems, cultures and moments that inspire me! And, in a wide scope, I write stories that bring hope, balance, love, and synergy, ones that can be read over and over, deeper and deeper, that are meant as medicine to the spirit. They are the stories I would have wanted read to me, and the stories I would want to read to the next generations... They are my gift, and my gift to the world.

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Around us, everything is speaking. Our ancestors knew to listen.

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In my writing, you may find wild synonyms and rhythms, and these, I embrace like the sun;​ story, especially in song, or poetics (which I'll loosely define here as: language in which style and rhythm are particularly utilized to communicate feeling and idea), is one of human being's most ancient cultural gifts for memory retention.

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I am listening... I am remembering..." ~Maddox Lightning, Words as Medicine

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