True Stories About Facing the Unknown

True Stories About Facing the Unknown edited by Catherine Burns

   

 Imagine sitting on the porch on a quiet evening with a few people and in the quiet of the evening you tell a story.  Your story makes someone else think of something to share and they tell their story, and someone else then does the same.  Like moths attracted to a lit porch light, we tell our stories from our hearts and open ourselves to the light, fluttering our wings at the light we see.

    This is the Moth.  Stories told on stages around the country, people like you and me standing up in front of people like you and me and telling our story.  No notes, no prompts, nothing but our heart and soul and the one experience that somehow stuck with us, changed us and become us.

    All These Wonders is a compilation of forty five of these stories and they are truly wonders.  These stories make us take note of each other simply through the story of ourselves.  Reading these or listening to them on the radio, we don’t know anything about the person speaking but for what they are telling us.  We don’t know what they look like on the outside but by listening to them, we see they are simply us on the inside.

    I can’t think of anything more amazing.

My Last Lament

My Last Lament by James William Brown

   

    We need to be remembered, we need to have our song sung and Aliki is one of the last to do this for people, she is a lamenter, she tells our story, sings our song when we’ve died.   Because she is one of the last, she is asked by a young researcher to record some of her laments for posterity, for history, for the stories.

    Aliki’s approach to this request is to tell her own story, her last lament.  Aliki lives in northern Greece and she begins with the German occupation during World War II when she witnesses a German soldier kill her father for stealing a squash.  People are hungry and they will do whatever they can even if it’s the last thing they do.   Aliki is taken in by her friend Takis’s mother, who in turn hides a Jewish woman and her son, Stelios. Takis is devoted to Aliki and becomes jealous of the attention Aliki shows to Stelios and this jealousy uncovers deeper problems within Takis. 

    When finally, the Germans burn down their village, the three, Aliki, Takis and Stelios make their way through the countryside, trying to stay alive and becoming more and more entwined in each other’s lives.  There is love and betrayal, there is hope and death, there is renewal and loss. 

    This isn’t a happy story but it unfolds another layer of the lives that people endured during the most unendurable of times.  And isn’t this what we all want? To be heard?

Weekend fun

Back from spring retreat weekend, I'm still basking in the glow of being with like minded friends and watching such talented fingers create so much beauty.  It's something special to take a piece of fabric, a needle and some thread and turn those humble little things into such as these.

Without a lot of commentary, here's a small sampling of the weekend. Not everyone is represented but the thought is there.

 Scraps turn into spider webs

  Last fall Joyce won 30 batik fat quarters as the jackpot from our Saturday after dinner game.  Joyce IS batiks and no one would have appreciated this bundle like she did.  If you win the bundle of the night you are charged with coming back the following year with something made from the booty.

 Joyce is paper piecing this picture to go along with a tuffet she made.  Pics of the tuffet someday.

 There was applique

 ornament making

 Show and tell

Joyce travels a LOT so knitting is a good take along for her.  She is a beautiful knitter.  Beautiful.

So, all of this plus big, soft, comfy beds, chef prepared meals, a bit of wine, 130 acres of beautiful countryside for walking, coddling from the inn keepers makes this a weekend we look forward to twice a year.  It never gets old.