Memory

Every culture currently and ever on the earth tells stories. For some cultures, there are sacred stories, stories only told in specific seasons or on specific occasions, even by specific members of a group. These stories go back a long way. They hold wisdom and meanings each generation within a group needs to know or learn. In some cultures there is a person who learns, hold, and transmits stories from one generation to another. Stories in such cultures form the human web of community with knowledge and identity. Such care of stories is less practiced in many cultures. For cultures such as modern day U.S.A. a “story” can be anything from a photo on an Instagram feed to a spy thriller at a cinema to something you share among friends in a restaurant. Story has such a vast meaning it hardly holds, you could say, meaning at all. Wait, though. Story is story. Story connects us in whatever form it takes. Maybe what gives story meaning is not so much what the story tells but how we listen to it or view it. Maybe we click “like.” Maybe we cry or laugh. Story is an experience shared between teller and listener. It may not need any more definition than that.

That may seem simple. And it is. We don’t need to have a degree in anything to tell a story. (In fact, the best stories I have heard were told my child before they even went to school.) We don’t have to study anything in order to tell a story. Nor do we require any special training to there for someone who needs to tell. To tell, speak. To listen, be present. This is the newest, latest, evidence-based medicine. To be there in the moment together.

Every single one of us emerge from an indigenous ancestry somewhere on this planet. People from cultures that have successfully continued aspects of this indigeneity know their culture’s songs, dances, artwork, and stories. These are the four global practices among indigenous cultures, alongside community-supportive acts such as generosity, reciprocity, and mutuality, as Alastair McIntosh notes in his beautiful book, A Poacher’s Pilgrimage. That these practices and community acts remain after hundreds and thousands of years of invasions, migrations, occupations, and colonizations speaks to just how very strong they are–all we need, actually, to survive.

One very beautiful aspect of these is they continue with us even when we do not consciously know it. After all, we are talking about traditions that go back tens of thousands of years. Is one iPhone going to undo it all? One laptop? Ten laptops? One lifetime? No. These are deeper than technology. Deeper than all six-thousands levels on an X-Box game. Deeper than anything we might try to do to escape them. They are always there. They are always serving us and supporting us in loud and quiet ways.

Like shepherds, our stories guide us, call to us, remind us where we belong. No matter how far we have wandered from the flock of humanity, we can still hear that voice. We may try to quiet it into silence, struggle with it insisting we no longer need. But we need. Just as we need one another. Just as we need a place to call our home.