I am once again on the east coast ...this time in Canada and in the Maritimes... at ( yet) another conference. I had the great fortune to attend a story - telling workshop yesterday, a place where a story is not prefaced with an apology... an authentic space.
I am taken by the sensibility that I feel in myself and my fellow participants: there is a strong commitment to listening... I/we have spent a number of years learning to listen like a cow **... what this means is that I turn my eyes toward you when you speak and give you my soft and rapt attention and I twitch my ears so that they are attuned to you as well... this is how I practice listening people--and their stories-- into existence... this is how storytelling works... the give and receive of being in a moment and aware of a moment, simultaneously: the deep call of mindfulness.
even now, hours later, I feel that I am still in that liminal space in between thought and word, feeling and expression and I am easy with being here until I am somewhere else...
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* thanks to JP Sartre for this lovely phrase offered to describe what is required for a story
ReplyDelete** thanks to Mary O'Reilly, a marvelous author and teacher,for this phrase and advice
Do you practice mindfulness (the practice for training the mind)?or is just that I misunderstood?If you do it sounds that the best poetry ever done must emerge from the practice of mindfulness in its creation.
ReplyDeleteI can imagine that the experience must be wonderful and long lasting.
By the way do you know that storytelling it is supposed to be the oldest form of art and that it is suppose to have an important evolutionary role?
Narratives (either historical, or partly historical, or purely fictional) help us survive. Stories give our brains an opportunity to work out contingencies of response to possible future events. (If a kitten jumps at everything that moves, it is better able to pounce on a real mouse when one shows up.) If we come upon a situation similar to one we once heard about in a story, we are much more likely to deal successfully with that situation and survive to pass on the "storytelling genes." Stories also provide examples of many kinds of people and how their minds work, and hence help us deal with others in social situations. Imaginative storytelling is one of the survival instincts that is packaged into human intelligence.
listening...into mindful existence
ReplyDeletemayhbe
mindful listening into existence
maybe
existence into mindful listening
Humbling.
I will have to listen to my mind, full, review, during a few hours of existance this day.
Punch-- thank you for your elaborations on the theme of mindfulness...it surely is a state that calls out for reflection
ReplyDeleteMariana--I do practice mindfulness; I got hooked years ago after reading Kabat Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living and his follow up Wherever you go there you are... I like the ongoing lived attentiveness and wonder that it nurtures in me...
appreciated your comments on story-telling, a lifelong love of mine...