Story Telling

I’ve been thinking a lot about the farm in Missouri lately. On my way home from work I remembered that collection of arrowheads he’d found out there.

arrowheads tell a storyEven though I haven’t been to the farm in awhile I started imagining them hunting in the woods there. I’m sure it looked similar to how it still looks, roll ridges and creeks in a deciduous forest, but who knows how long the arrowheads had been there? I’m sure an archaeologist could guess better than me, but anywhere from 200-15,000 when people made it to North America.

I can only imagine the hunt, but the amount of skill they must have had to actually kill something with sharpened rocks and simple wooden bows is amazing. They must have had some amazing stories. There’s so much we’ve lost with oral history.

On Democracy Now! the other day they had a guy talking about StoryCorps. I’d never even heard about it, but it’s a fantastic idea. They have booths and mobile trailers going all over the country and people set up times and come into a recording booth to tell life stories. A lot of the time someone goes along and interviews another person like their friends and parents. Afterwards the people are given a CD with the interview and a copy of the CD goes to the Library of Congress.

I think they’ve collected 15,000+ stories and they played several of them on Democracy Now! and they were really powerful. I’m sure they picked some of the more powerful but I’m sure they were only scratching the surface. What made them so powerful was the real emotion. I got choked up a couple of times. It made me realize that we don’t talk to each other enough.

Before everyone was so busy “making a living” we must have had a lot more time for each other. Without all of our electronic distractions, there was nothing else but each other. Nothing I can buy will ever replace what is lost by that, and it makes me sad that my own culture is such a lonely one. There are so many more of us now and we’re more isolated than ever before.

It’s never too late to start again though. Tell me a story.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Society, Culture. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Story Telling”

  1. sue Says:
    December 4th, 2007 at 8:10 pm

    One amazing example of a similar project was during the Great Depression. Unemployed writers and researchers interviewed more than 2,000 former slaves (remember this was in the early 1930s and slavery officially ended in 1865 so there were still people alive who’d been held in slavery). The narratives are incredible and would have been lost forever if not for FDR and the New Deal.

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