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O, to write like this! Every now and again I read this piece of exquisite writing by Clarissa Pinkola Estes which I found as part of an advertisement for her storytelling training courses on her facebook page with a link to the website mavenproductions.com
I read it for the pure joy it brings me. But also to keep a dream alive.
"Dear Brave Souls:
ORIGINAL VOICE™ STORYTELLING TRAINING: Rowing Songs for the NightSea Journey
Do you want to tell the stories that flower from your lives, and from the lives of your blood and bones? Do you hope to move people for good reasons? Do you hope to learn about yourself and what I coined a term for "your farback people"? Do you have a calling to tell stories or even just one story?
Do you want to speak to the souls of others? Do you hope to delve and know and speak and create story in your own one of a kind voice so that you sound only as yourself and no other?
Do you have nonotmei'mnotgettingupinfrontofother-itis? Yet, do you feel called to learn nonetheless for the sake of others who will be helped or mended by what you have to say?
For these hopes and fears, and more, I say to you: you are on the right track. You are a storyteller. A lionhearted alternating with mousie-hearted, wonderous fraidycat/heroic soul, filled with golden light held sometimes under a bushel basket...but a storyteller nonetheless... and no doubt KNOWING that NOW is the time to begin stepping forward into fuller light.
Some hold out storytelling as some great masterful inborn gift. It is not. It is an apprenticeship with one's own heart and mind, one's own soul and spirit, one's own body and one's own ancestry. This means you can do this. We all can.
In the world of storytelling and storytellers, though the overculture too often sees storytelling as a cleaned-up version of 'knowing a few stories and practicing to tell them in various forms...' and somehow voila! we are suddenly born on the half-shell... it isnt that way for most of us. It is learning and meditative practice and a beautiful set of endeavors to capture certain skills.
When I peer between the worlds, I see storytelling and storytellers as not just 'knowing' some stories... but rather to me a storyteller is one who is 'living the stories, walking the rough road, being chased and kissed and kicked by angels, diving into the oldest wrecks to retrieve the injured stories, mending the broken stories and being the pride of one's ancestors by carrying the stories they suffered for, and sometimes died for. All these held in the triumph not of a cemetery of 'deadebook' renditions, but in the fullness of one's own life... in a cared-for field of wild and bodacious flowers that you found the treasure seed for, perennials, replanted by you... the flowerings that will now come up generation after generation because you did the learning, you gave the time and you are the ground, as in "the seed when tended grows slowly: the ground is patient."
So, this autumn in the beautiful Rocky Mountain redlands of Sunrise ranch, I'll be teaching the second training in the series I created to teach what I know from my lifetime in stories, having grown up in an authentic oral tradition amongst ravaged and gifted people who could not read or write or did so haltingly.
I will teach you story, as I learned its facets firsthand amongst my own ethnic storytelling family, that, like myself, can hardly tell you they walked across the kitchen without there also being a sudden story pouring out about the Giant's Cauldron that was once left untended on Ox Bone Mountain [I hope you are smiling with me.]
The training I'll teach in September 2013 at Sunrise Ranch is called: Original Voice™ Storytelling: Rowing Songs for the NightSea Journey.
To find out more, visit mavenproductions.com
You are not alone in knock-knees. I have remedios for that. You are not alone in thinking you're a know-nothing or that all stories of your farback people have been lost. I have rememios for all these. Promise."
Clarissa Pinkola Estes first swept me of my feet in her book, Women who run with the wolves. Quite by chance (and what a chance!) I bought a double cd set where she talks about the book and tells some of the stories she has written about. Her voice is the most beautiful I have ever heard. I know there's something there that is very important for me to grasp and to learn. For being the truest me I can possibly be. It has to do with voice and story and writing. In September 2014 she will again be teaching others about storytelling. With our dream of a quiet and beautiful place to live and work materializing into Barrowfield, maybe it is not a too big a dream to find myself in Colorado in September this year, being trained by Clarissa herself to tell the stories I must.
Matilda
Do you want to tell the stories that flower from your lives, and from the lives of your blood and bones? Do you hope to move people for good reasons? Do you hope to learn about yourself and what I coined a term for "your farback people"? Do you have a calling to tell stories or even just one story?
Do you want to speak to the souls of others? Do you hope to delve and know and speak and create story in your own one of a kind voice so that you sound only as yourself and no other?
Do you have nonotmei'mnotgettingupinfrontofother-itis? Yet, do you feel called to learn nonetheless for the sake of others who will be helped or mended by what you have to say?
For these hopes and fears, and more, I say to you: you are on the right track. You are a storyteller. A lionhearted alternating with mousie-hearted, wonderous fraidycat/heroic soul, filled with golden light held sometimes under a bushel basket...but a storyteller nonetheless... and no doubt KNOWING that NOW is the time to begin stepping forward into fuller light.
Some hold out storytelling as some great masterful inborn gift. It is not. It is an apprenticeship with one's own heart and mind, one's own soul and spirit, one's own body and one's own ancestry. This means you can do this. We all can.
In the world of storytelling and storytellers, though the overculture too often sees storytelling as a cleaned-up version of 'knowing a few stories and practicing to tell them in various forms...' and somehow voila! we are suddenly born on the half-shell... it isnt that way for most of us. It is learning and meditative practice and a beautiful set of endeavors to capture certain skills.
When I peer between the worlds, I see storytelling and storytellers as not just 'knowing' some stories... but rather to me a storyteller is one who is 'living the stories, walking the rough road, being chased and kissed and kicked by angels, diving into the oldest wrecks to retrieve the injured stories, mending the broken stories and being the pride of one's ancestors by carrying the stories they suffered for, and sometimes died for. All these held in the triumph not of a cemetery of 'deadebook' renditions, but in the fullness of one's own life... in a cared-for field of wild and bodacious flowers that you found the treasure seed for, perennials, replanted by you... the flowerings that will now come up generation after generation because you did the learning, you gave the time and you are the ground, as in "the seed when tended grows slowly: the ground is patient."
So, this autumn in the beautiful Rocky Mountain redlands of Sunrise ranch, I'll be teaching the second training in the series I created to teach what I know from my lifetime in stories, having grown up in an authentic oral tradition amongst ravaged and gifted people who could not read or write or did so haltingly.
I will teach you story, as I learned its facets firsthand amongst my own ethnic storytelling family, that, like myself, can hardly tell you they walked across the kitchen without there also being a sudden story pouring out about the Giant's Cauldron that was once left untended on Ox Bone Mountain [I hope you are smiling with me.]
The training I'll teach in September 2013 at Sunrise Ranch is called: Original Voice™ Storytelling: Rowing Songs for the NightSea Journey.
To find out more, visit mavenproductions.com
You are not alone in knock-knees. I have remedios for that. You are not alone in thinking you're a know-nothing or that all stories of your farback people have been lost. I have rememios for all these. Promise."
Clarissa Pinkola Estes first swept me of my feet in her book, Women who run with the wolves. Quite by chance (and what a chance!) I bought a double cd set where she talks about the book and tells some of the stories she has written about. Her voice is the most beautiful I have ever heard. I know there's something there that is very important for me to grasp and to learn. For being the truest me I can possibly be. It has to do with voice and story and writing. In September 2014 she will again be teaching others about storytelling. With our dream of a quiet and beautiful place to live and work materializing into Barrowfield, maybe it is not a too big a dream to find myself in Colorado in September this year, being trained by Clarissa herself to tell the stories I must.
Matilda
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