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Archive Number 2463 | ||
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Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2003 01:29:49 +0200
Hi Mel, You wrote: I suspect that storytellers who are able to share those type tales do so in guarded measure, since the personal emotional toll might be hard to bear. It is not necessarily the difficult material. It is the feeling of truth and the teller standing behind it. Last summer in Wales I heard Didi tell a story in her lovely hectic way about a mother's hectic life while still being deeply concerned about them. Everything was there and it was hysterically funny. I sat just in front of her on the first row, and I was crying my head off. The telling was so powerful. Funny and piercing at the same time. The crowd was on the floor and I could see she loved it. But at a certain point she saw me. And she started crying herself while telling. It was still funny in the details, but the audience wasn't laughing that much anymore. The telling transformed. She got a little slower and softer. She was as marvelous, but in a different way. Eventually everybody relaxed, because she is a true professional, and she maneuvered the whole thing to the point she could stop crying. Everything went back into place but it was a wee different. Amazing. This feeling of the teller standing with the truth is very important to me. If I can't find my personal connection to what I'm telling' I will not tell it. Tomorrow evening, I'm going to tell a difficult program. One of the stories is about a young woman, who arrived to the land of Israel with her husband (120 years ago) and with their new born baby. Although life here was tuff, she was happy. She could see the past but was looking mainly at the future of her small family, at the baby's future. To live as free people. Her joy and love to her husband and child build up along the story, and at the peek of happiness, the baby dies from Malaria. A few days ago I felt I was not content with me telling that story. Although the idea never crossed my mind, I was afraid I might be using someone's else's grief to move my audience. The rest of the stories on the program are difficult too, so why was this one buggering me? Two days ago, I went to visit the cemetery here in Zichron-Yaakov, where I live. It is one of the first settlement built at that period. Lovely place. I walked in and could recognize all the famous names on the tombstones. The first settlers of modern Zionism. So many stories. Suddenly I understood something: In the family I come from, no body died from unnatural cause. Nobody died young. This is quite unusual in Israel. So I never personally met that kind of grief very close to me. Only through other people. I understood why the story didn't click as right. Then I walked deeper in. In the heart of that beautiful and sad place, there is a special part where the children of the first settlers are berried. Dozens of small graves, with no names on them, no dates. I was walking around those graves looking at them. Then I stopped. I could feel the stillness of the dead, the final stop, the end. Looking down to the ground, I noticed the grave next to me. It was tiny, no more than 50cm long. And then I remembered giving birth. I have three daughters. I was again and again and again amazed by how tiny they were born, and about how a week later they looked bigger already. I realized the babies under those tiny tombstones died less than a week old. All their parents hopes vanished, leaving pain and sorrow and a doubtful heart. That was enough for me as a reason to tell the story. That tinyness was the connection. I could feel what it meant. I noticed the children's graves carried a lot of pebbles. It is a Jewish custom to place a pebble over a grave. Obviously those pebbles were not there because members of those children's families. Other people placed them there. Why? because they were so small? because they had no name? maybe because the combination of the two allows anyone to create their own story about who they could be and feel sorry for them not being? many questions... After coming back home, I could feel it was the right thing to do. I could tell the story with my personal truth behind it. It became part of me, and it was solved. Love, Limor, Israel. Limor Shiponi, Israel www.interpersonalarts.net | ||