our stories
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us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine.
Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be
there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It
is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller,
the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best,
and at our most creative.
~Doris Lessing
The above quote is an excerpt from Doris Lessing’s acceptance speech for winning the Nobel Prize for Literature last month. At 88, she is the oldest recipient of the prize for literature, and in recently reading her acceptance speech in full it was evident to me that she is a woman of passion at an age when many would simply allow their fire to dwindle down. I find this most encouraging and hopeful.
So much sadness a human life has to endure the longer one lives. Loss and disappointment, pain and isolation. So many things don’t turn out at all the way we’d hoped and expected. Countless unanswered questions, and so many senseless acts of violence. How do we bear it?
“It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed”, Ms. Lessing advises, and I wholeheartedly agree. We are all of us the storytellers of our lives, and in this lies our salvation. We may not use words or pictures to tell our stories. We may not be artists at all in the traditional sense. Still the story-maker exists within every one of us, and this story-maker can create anything. Our job is to look deep inside, find where she dwells, and let her speak.
~Cynthia
