Tell me a story

A few weeks ago, my daughter shared with me a story she had read online in The Smithsonian about a family in Russia who had fled to the wilderness to escape persecution, and were "discovered" years and years later. The parents by then were elderly and they had acquired four children in their life of living away from anything and everyone; they knew nothing of the events in the world around them. It was fascinating and sad at the same time.
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.