I love stories, have always loved them.
They have the ability to widen the aperture of our world, to take us places we dare not even dream. They comfort us, they restore us, they make us feel seen and heard.
They heal what nothing else can and help us find peace with what cannot be forgiven.
“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity….When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”
~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ~
Transient by their nature, storytelling began as most things do, as an oral tradition. Its form and shape altering as the story moved through the bones, the body merely a conduit for what sought to be known.
Stories can never be claimed, they are universal and eternal, born from cosmic dust.
But we chain those stories in words, in sentences, in the very body itself. Cover them with culture, rules, shame, guilt and falsehoods.
But what if stories could breathe again, what if the story you’d been sold could be retrieved from the psyche, reclaimed by the body, and reimagined by the very soul itself.