RaceBridges Studios is an amazing project run by Susan O'Halloran, devoted to using storytelling to build bridges across divides of race, culture, religion, sexuality, and more. They offer a wide array of stories and other free materials to teach diversity. This is storytelling making a real difference in how people interact. Susan is saving the world, story by story.
It has been my honor to contribute two stories to RaceBridges. This is the second.
When I was 13, I visited friends who lived in rural North Carolina. I arrived full of northern urban misconceptions about the people who lived in Appalachia, and encountered some misconceptions from them about people like me. I was fortunate; I was able to learn from the experience and I hope they were, too.
You can find a variety of teaching materials to use with this story at the RaceBridges site. I hope you find this story interesting and maybe just a little bit useful.
I thought, in light of ongoing world events, we could use a little Monday morning help keeping body and soul together.
I learned this story from Patricia McMahon, many years ago. We both were attending Tuesday night storytelling with Brother Blue in a basement bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Those were formative days for me, learning to listen and tell stories from some of the best storytellers around. It was before storytelling had become a buzzword; storytelling venues were few and far between and so this was sacred and rarified time. I went one night every week crammed in with others who were hungry for story. It was nourishing in the deepest of ways.
Patricia was one of my favorite storytellers. Every time she got up I knew I would hear something well-crafted and interesting. For the most part she was working her way through a novel, telling it eight-minutes at a time, but every now and then she'd tell something different. This is one of those something different stories.
Patricia heard Body and Soul from another teller, who had heard it from another teller, and so on. She knew it as a Sufi story and so I tell it as such. I've not been able to find a definitive source for this story, but there is a reference to a similar Arabian story in The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan: Sufi Mysticism, by Hazrat Inayat Khan. I like the version I learned from Patricia and now tell, because it explains how to best keep body and soul together using tools we all have available to us all of the time.
I hope you enjoy this story.
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www.laurapacker.com
www.thinkstory.com
(c)2017 Laura S. Packer
We are surrounded by wisdom, even if some of it comes from places you might feel a little weird about. Kevin loved Woody Allen. I used to, but grew tired of the neurotic humor and then the whole controversy about his relationships with his children, his wife and his child/wife broke. I gave up on Woody Allen. But he said some things very, very well.
Like this.
I think of this often, that the heart is a very, very resilient little muscle.
When Kevin died I thought I would never be in another relationship. I didn't think I had it in me. Frankly, I couldn't imagine being alive in the world without him, so the thought of ever letting someone else into my heart was beyond comprehension. A bit over a year after he died I moved from our shared home to my own apartment. A lot of things drove the move, including economics, but at the heart of it was the knowledge that I needed to start figuring out what it meant to be alive in the world without him. This seemed, and sometimes still seems, impossible.
The move was a nightmare, though I was very well supported by people who love me. I was lucky.
Once I settled into my new home I wrote up a list of what it meant to be alive in this world. If I was to accept that I am still here, I needed something to do with the years in front of me. The list was pretty wide-ranging, including work, writing, good food, being outside, spending time with people who love me, travel, etc etc. Buried in there was flirting. Not being in a relationship, but flirting, that lovely little back and forth fed by attraction and possibility. It wasn't even really about sex, but about knowing I wasn't invisible in the world.
But where does a middle-aged, overweight widow go to flirt? I've always hated bars. I've never liked crowded places and I don't really have a social group here. I reminded myself that this is the modern world and set up a profile on a dating site, expecting and wanting only online flirtation. That felt safe.
It was safe, so much so that I was bored and frustrated. The number of people in the world who cannot spell or construct a sentence is astonishing and this is apparently my low bar. I was about to call the experiment a failure when an intriguing profile popped up in my feed. Smart, funny, geeky, cute, can write the hell out of a personal ad. I wrote. He wrote back. His sentence structure was complex, layered and grammatical. Beyond grammar, he was interesting. It was quickly apparent there was real chemistry between us. And he was thankfully far away, so I didn't have to deal with a real person.
Except everyone is a real person. It soon became obvious that something could really happen between us and I didn't know if I was capable of it. Remember, when Kevin died, I died too in many ways. And I still love Kevin, is it fair to even consider another relationship? So I wrote to him (for the sake of this essay and his privacy we'll call him C) and revealed that I was a widow. I didn't know if I was able to be in a relationship and I didn't want to hurt him.
C wrote back with the only thing that could have kept me going. I don't remember the phrasing, but he said something to the effect of, "I can't imagine how hard that must be. Of course you don't know if you can do this, your marriage never ended. I believe the heart is capable of a great deal of love. I'd like to see where this can go; at worst we get to be friends. I'm willing to risk it if you are."
So I did. We did. And here we are, about a year and a half later. Friends, lovers, partners. In a relationship.
None of this means I don't still love Kevin. I always will. I also love C. It's a very strange place to find myself. I am passionately in love with two men. Some days I panic and am afraid that loving C means I am somehow dishonoring Kevin, that I am betraying him. I know he would want nothing other than my happiness, but that knowledge doesn't always balance the emotions. Other days I fear that I will drive C away by still loving Kevin, though he understands and accepts me so thoroughly I know that won't happen. So I take some deep breaths. Sometimes I cry. And I continue. I do my best to be resilient. There are days when resilience means crying and taking a nap. That is good enough.
These coming days will be very hard. It is the third time now I have lived through the anniversary of the last of Kevin's life. It will be hard to remember the 15 years of love, companionship, friendship, hard work, and joy; instead I will be thinking about his face when he realized he was at the end. I will be thinking about the faces of his children as they tried to do the terrible work of saying goodbye to their father. I will be thinking about the love that surrounded us. I will be thinking about everything he told me with his gaze when he was too weak to talk. I will cry and write and feel stunned, angry, shocked. Alive. How can that be?
Throughout this tumult I will not be alone. I know Kevin will be with me. I know you will. I know the many people who knew and loved him, as well as those who have come to love him through this blog, will be there. And the amazing man who loves me now will be there, holding me while I cry for another. I will feel such conflict, such gratitude and guilt. I will be reminded again and again of just how lucky I am, in so many ways.
I was listening to an extraordinary podcast recently, Terrible, thanks for asking. This is, perhaps, a more comfortable source of wisdom. The producer, Nora McInery, tells her own story of loss and love in the very first episode. I wept (making the person seated next to me on the airplane rather uncomfortable) because it was so damned familiar. Nora says, "I am in love with two men." She is right. One love does not deny, eliminate, lessen, mitigate, or undermine the other. The heart is a very resilient little muscle. It is capable of marvels. So are we all.
With love and gratitude,
Laura
www.laurapacker.com
www.thinkstory.com
(c)2017 Laura S. Packer
One of my favorite things about storytelling is the way it functions as a magic trick. A well-told and well-crafted story evokes a very specific kind of neurological response which makes us more predisposed to building relationships or acting in the way the narrator hopes to move you. This makes storytelling an incredibly powerful tool, moving the audience to action. Like any tool, it can be used for good or for ill, but you will use it more effectively when you understand how it works.
The following video is by Paul Zak, the leading researcher on brain chemistry and narrative; I refer to his work extensively in my own consulting, coaching and teaching work, using science to support better storytelling. This video clearly and simply explains some of what happens when you hear an emotionally evocative story with a clear narrative arc. This may be useful for you in your own work as you think about how to craft meaningful stories.
I will come back to applied neurology and storytelling in the coming months.
For years, one of my favorite songs has been Once in a Lifetime by the Talking Heads. The sense of confusion expressed by the lyrics has long resonated with me, but never before has it been this appropriate. I find myself in an ongoing state of discomfort and awe that this really is my life.
This is real.
This can't be real.
Maybe I'm living someone else's life.
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack And you may find yourself in another part of the world And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife And you may ask yourself Well...How did I get here?
I am living in another part of the world. I am living in a lovely home, one Kevin has never seen, and loved by someone who is not Kevin.
Who am I?
How did I get here?
How can this be real?
This is not to deny the very real and very good things in my life. I am living in a beautiful home, in a city I love. I am loved and love in return. I am earning my own way, by my own work, doing things I am passionate about and making a difference in the world.
It is a repeated shock when every day I recognize these things and am grateful for them, yet Kevin is not a physical part of my everyday. I can tell him about these amazing things, many of which would never have happened had he not died, but his responses are subtle at best; he's not here cheering me on. I simultaneously feel so lucky that this is my life and so bereft that life with Kevin is no longer my life. It is tremendously conflicting.
And you may ask yourself What is that beautiful house? And you may ask yourself Where does that highway go to? And you may ask yourself Am I right?...Am I wrong? And you may say to yourself My God!...What have I done?!
What I have done is I have chosen to live. I have chosen to honor what has been and to still embrace what is before me. It's really, really hard. It is the work of life, what we all must do every day; in my case it's maybe a little more obvious but it is no less than what you do every day as well.
It's a constant choice, letting myself be present in this world, in this life, in this moment. It's a constant choice accepting the gifts that are offered to me and the things that are happening because of my own hard work. Part of me wants to remain frozen. The rest of me is usually willing to let the world wrap itself around me but it is an ongoing struggle to balance life and immobility.
I may not recognize this life I'm living all of the time.
I may ask is all of this real and ask how this can be my life.
I may sometimes still wail for the life I had.
Life will happen whether or not we want it to. I can look at it with awe, with wonder, with regret and sorrow, but mostly I am looking at it with gratitude.
Thank you, Kevin, for loving me so well that I am in this moment. I could not be here without you, even though I am without you.
Thank you world, for welcoming me back and letting me occasionally run away.
Thank you.
Letting the days go by Let the water hold me down Letting the days go by Water flowing underground Into the blue again
Essay (c)2015 Laura S. Packer
Lyrics and video, Once in a lifetime (c) Warner/Chappell Music Inc.
At this moment I find myself in a coffeehouse in Topeka, Kansas, waiting for a friend prior to her open mic.
Topeka.
Kansas.
At this moment I find myself not crying over the loss of Kevin, but I feel like a walking absence.
Kevin.
Gone.
In another moment I will cry and try to pretend I'm just wiping my eyes, blowing my nose. An everyday thing in a coffeehouse in Topeka, KS.
At this moment I am drinking tea. I am listening to REM playing over the cafe stereo. I am watching the man across from me talking to himself.
At this moment no one in the world knows where I am. If I close my eyes I feel like I am floating. I am, in many ways, adrift. Not all.
One of my favorite bands is The Talking Heads. For years I loved the song And she was because it felt like it described my life so well. Now? Once in a lifetime feels more apt.
And you may ask yourself-Well...How did I get here?
Here. Listen.
2. I grieve.
When I was in college I experienced my first bout of major depression. I got through, though it was a near thing. Friends helped. A good crisis intervention hotline helped. And some music helped. The Peter Gabriel/Robert Fripp song Here comes the flood helped immensely; I am still here in part because of that song. I listened to it over and over in my dorm room, imagining what it would be like to let go and drown, what it would be like to choose to survive.
When the flood calls You have no home, you have no walls
Since Kevin died I barely listen to music. Too much of it is too painful still, carrying memories and secret moments. As you know, music connects to emotion and right now I have more emotion than I can easily handle.
But...
A friend reminded me of this song. While it doesn't represent all of my experience of grief it captures some of it.
the news that truly shocks is the empty empty page while the final rattle rocks its empty empty cage and i can't handle this
Once again, Peter Gabriel speaks for me. Thank you. And if anyone knows how I could get a letter to him, thanking him via paper and pen, please let me know.
I just saw the best customer service prank ever. You can complain about the expense, what the money should have been used for instead and all kinds of things, but really, this just made a whole bunch of people happy. Take a look.
What it drove home to me was this: Ask for what you really want. You never know who might be listening. There is rarely any harm in asking and I think the world could use a little more honesty, including honesty about our own hopes and dreams. If we don't dream big, ask big, hope big, what can we expect to find, have, accomplish? If we're too afraid to tell anyone what we want, will we even tell ourselves?
All that being said, what do you really want for Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza/Solstice/etc? I'd love to know.
It's been almost seven months now, which seems amazing. Almost seven months since Kevin and I packed up our life in Boston and began reconstituting here in Kansas City, Missouri. It was the right choice. It was the hard choice. Every day is a new adventure.
It puts me in mind of the millions of people who left their homes for new lands, knowing they never would go home again, that the most they could hope for was a long-delayed letter. How lucky we are to live in this age of electrons and airplanes.
I'm working on a piece about what all of this feels like, but I'm finding it challenging writing, so it will go up another time.
For now, I wanted to share some of the small wonders I've found here. I am a fan of small wonders. Kansas City is a pretty amazing place and I thought you might like to see some of the details. In the next few weeks I'll post some broader views.
Let's start with where we are, in case there are any doubts. I found this on the step of an old warehouse. KC is rich in old warehouses.
I'm not the only one who enjoys looking around Kansas City.
Who would have thought this would be here?
And if you need a rest, there are secret gardens. This is my favorite.
I have found wonders within and without.
And, barring bad weather, I can always go to my own back yard for succor.
Life visualized in jelly beans. Maybe that's why President Reagan kept them on his desk. Maybe we all need to keep some kind of reminder on our desks. In our cars. Beside the mirror.
As a storyteller, part of my job is figuring out where my audience will feel emotional resonance with my subject. How can I thrill them, make them ache or laugh or yearn? I am in the business of creating empathy and connection. Some might call this manipulation, but I think it's more complex than that. There is an implied contract in any art experience; the audience goes into it knowing they may experience emotional manipulation and, by agreeing to be in the audience, to some degree they are complicit with the manipulation.
As storytellers, we are ethically bound to not abuse this trust. There have certainly been those who have; Hitler, Pol Pot and McCarthy are a few I can think of offhand. But as artists and creators, we need to recognize that our audiences have given us permission to move them, within a certain set of boundaries. They want to be moved by the story, perhaps moved to reflect on their own lives and actions, maybe even moved to create change. But it isn't our job or right to deceive them with our stories into believing things they might otherwise find reprehensible.
We aren't the only ones who use manipulation in our daily work. Almost everyone does. Doctors, lawyers, graphic designer, marketers, architects, salespeople, landscapers, anyone who is passionate about what they do will use some form of emotional manipulation to persuade their audience or clients that what they offer is the best choice.
This is where it gets hazy. To what degree is it ethical to manipulate someone who hasn't agreed to the implied contract we have with our audiences as storytellers? What happens when this manipulation is the basis of the job? What are the societal implications?
I was spurred into this line of thought by a video released by Dove. This company does a great job of manipulating me. Their Real Beauty campaign argues that presenting artificial images of beauty is harmful and that they support a wider range of what can be beautiful, be it size or skin or ability. All of this, of course, is in the hope that you’ll buy their products. While I don’t use Dove products, I do love the message, that when we alter images artificially it creates impossible expectations of beauty that are harmful.
The video they released is below, give it a look. I like its subversive nature and, obviously, it got me thinking on the boundaries of acceptable manipulation. Modern advertising, pop culture, couture and more are built in these manipulated images, so it’s not going to change any time soon, but what would happen if it changed a little? And what are the boundaries of acceptable manipulation? In advertising, in art, and in our own lives.
When I was a kid, I didn't fit in. I know, as you read this, you're thinking neither did I or so what, who did? None of us did. Even the kings and queens, I'm sure, had their moments when they felt like they didn't belong and really, we don't know what goes on behind closed doors, what happens in homes or behind someone's eyes.
When I was a kid I was teased for being weird. For reading too much. Or for not reading the right stuff. Or for not reading enough. For being fat. For being too quiet. Or too loud. For having green eyes, because that meant I was a witch. I remember, one year at summer camp, I spent as much time as I could in the library, because there I would be left alone. This was after the morning we all lined up and saw the flag at half-mast. When we were told Elvis Presley had died and I asked who he was, my fate was sealed. I was the weird one, the one who knew Vivaldi but not Elvis, the one who didn't fit in.
I was also one of the lucky ones. I had enough resilience and enough resources that I made it out. I was feral enough that no one picked a fight with me more than once. I told people my green eyes meant I had the evil eye, so they wouldn't mess with me. I had an imagination that gave me friends and allies no one else could see. I was fortunate enough to see beauty even when around me was litter and anger and unmeetable expectations. I was tough enough that what happened at school or at home, at camp or any where else made me all the more determined to fuck them all and get out alive.
I was lucky. Even if to this day I still flinch at Elvis, still stand up a little too much for the under dog, still cringe when I hear a certain tone in a teenage girl's voice, still brace myself when someone comments on the color of my eyes.
Today I saw this stunning animation of the poem, To This Day by Shane Koyczan, reminding me that I was not the only one who didn't fit in. Reminding me that there are so many of us who are strong and scarred. That my flinches are nothing to be ashamed of. That the stories we tell have an impact we might never dream of, helping someone when they most need it. That I am still here. That I am one of the lucky ones.
No matter what your work is - storytelling, writing, glass blowing, carpentry, brick laying, cooking, anything - it takes time and practice to be as good externally as we know we can be internally. Ira Glass nails it.
So I've been having to look at quite a few of my fears lately. Moving, marriage, self-employment, leaping off into the unknown... Any one of these would be enough to derail me. All of them happening at once is so big that there isn't really any point in being afraid, all I can do is move forward, one tiny step at a time.
My friend Annette Simmons posted this video recently, wherein a six-year old boy talks about a lot of things, among them the things that scare us. It's the best thing I've seen in a long time. I hope you love it as much as I did.
In celebration of my upcoming birthday, I'm pretending I'm a hobbit and giving gifts to my friends. I'm sharing things I love with you. Go back a few days to hear a poem and consider time.
Today I'm going all out, revealing myself to the world as a lover of slow, methodical, overly dramatic horror movies from the 1950s and 60s. I love Hammer Horror films.
Hammer Horror was founded in the 1930s, but really hit their stride in the 50s and 60s when they produced dozens of gothic horror films with the likes of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. The women were always buxom, the villains evil with a touch of dark sexiness. As a child I would stay up late with my friend Carla, glued to the tv as we watched Dracula seduce beautiful women (I would hide my eyes when he bit, Carla would tell me to pretend it was a love story) or shuddered as plague overtook a village, turning everyone into monsters. It was wonderful, delicious, campy horror.
The pacing of these films could be called methodical. Rather than being driven by dialogue, the scripts relied on the actors' facial expressions and the melodramatic soundtracks. Some might call them ponderous. I love them. I love the way the story spools out to inexorable doom. I also love the costuming and set decoration. I don't know what life was really like in the Victorian era, but I'm certain it was full of red velvet and handlebar mustaches.
Hammer Horror now has a wonderful YouTube channel, where you can see full length movies., classics like Captain Chronos, Vampire Hunter and X the Unknown. I thought you might enjoy this trailer for The Devil's Bride. I especially like Christopher Lee's naughty little goatee.
You might remember the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. I was in my senior year of high school and I remember wondering what it all meant. I admit, I was largely oblivious; it's only in later years that I have come to understand the bravery of the protesters. In some ways it was a precursor to the Arab Spring uprisings.
Of the many images that came out of those rough days, Tank Man stands alone. I've seen the still images before. Today I saw this video for the first time, a stark 1:13 suggesting that one person can change the world, or at least try.
Ever have a conversation in a public place and think someone might be listening and taking notes? That's me, over there, pretending to look out the window. I’m hoping your story might end up in one of mine.
I tell stories, I listen to people, I help organizations understand and tell their own stories.
I believe storytelling is among the most basic of human activities and is what separates us from other animals. When we listen to each other we have a chance to understand another person and change the world.
This blog is a collection of stories, observations, and random thoughts. Send me an email, tell me your story. Who knows what might happen?
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