What did they do for entertainment, I wondered, knowing that most waking hours were spent in basic survival. Apparently, they told each other accounts of their dreams.
I think that this is so insightful about the strength of our need to tell stories. Somehow it is part of our human-ness. It is a small leap, I realized, from sharing dreams with the only half-dozen other people one knows to exist to sharing dreams with an anonymous millions of people on a blog. It is mind boggling.
Suddenly, blogs and facebook and dare-I-say-it twitters and tweets fit into an ancient tradition of story telling, and I GET IT.
I am working on a book right now that is a Korean folktale, and what I find fun is that because it IS an folk story, I can retell it in my own words. This is important because I am writing the text in calligraphy, and I would like it to be as short as possible, and because I have a specific message that I want to convey. There were so many versions of this tale, and they all seemed to emphasize a slightly different point. I wanted to make this be the third book I am making in my "Elements of Peace" series, so I focused on what the story could do further that concept.
As it turns out, "The Tiger's Whisker" covers several elemental components of being a peacemaker. Facing fear, determination, patience, acceptance...I leave it to the viewer to glean what is the element that speaks to them.
The book will be in a scroll style, and I have just completed the illustration that will be revealed as the story is unrolled. I spent a lot of time looking at old scroll images on the internet, and then decided that since I didn't have time to learn the ancient art of sumi wash painting, I just needed to plunge in. So the result is my nod to the many wonderful painters from Asia who with a few brushstrokes could show you an entire landscape, mist included.
I will tell the plan behind the calligraphy another time.
This is my blog. This is my story. It doesn't even matter if someone is listening.
