Driving past Central Park on a Sunday morning, where horse and carriages were clip-clopping visitors around the Park’s holiday festivities, I felt like I was on a movie set. New York in December is the most magical time of year. There is trilling and jingling and caroling and every kind of ritual that carries with it a sense of living in a wonderland, if only for a month before the slush of snow and wild weather takes over.
The previous day, Josh and I had slung through the cold, determined to go on our weekly bookshop pilgrimage where we spend hours hanging out in second hand bookshops that have the most eclectic and electric collections of books. At this time of year we walked through cathedrals of pine trees and Christmas lights winking in the streets. ‘So pretty’, I said to Josh. The previous week, Josh had taken me to an apartment owned by a bookseller who years ago turned it into a soiree for booklovers when he could no longer afford the rent for his bookshop space. So, on appointment, people make the hike to the apartment to look at the books and, in the evenings, have a glass of wine while they browse.
People are endlessly reinventing themselves, and their circumstances, in New York and, for a city that sometimes gets a reputation for being impersonal, I’ve felt more community here than I’ve felt in many other places. In part, I think it has to do with people walking so many places, and not having cars, which means we have more contact with each other. People’s circumstances are sometimes very rough with so many jobs being lost that there are so many examples of people banding together. At the Chelsea Antique Market last week a woman market seller’s car was towed away and the other sellers at the market banded together in six minutes to produce the $1,000 she needed to reclaim her car. Kindness shows its face in the most unexpected places.
That Sunday I was headed to a Narrative workshop to learn how to be a great storyteller. Twelve of us sat in a circle on a Sunday morning and, for the first few minutes, I felt like I was at a Quaker Meeting. Then the organizers told us their stories, and we were entranced. The co-founder told us he had created the organization after he introduced storytelling sessions for terminally ill patients so that they could share something of their life and identity with others whom they trusted. This work had in fact been informed by the late Michael White, the brilliant creator of Narrative Therapy in the 1970s, who came from Adelaide.
Sometime later, when we had still not been asked to introduce ourselves to each other, we were asked to do something very different instead. We were required to channel one of our grandparents and to introduce ourselves as that grandparent. We had three minutes to tell our grandparent’s story, or a story from their life. As William Sloane, I told my experience of being a stretcher bearer and of life in the trenches during the Great War before returning to life in Lyndoch with Elsie Olive, my wife, and my three children, Donald, Glen and Rosemary. What a powerful experience it was and how many more questions I’m now going to ask my parents, especially my mother, about the lives of my other grandparents. We were reminded that we were practicing the act of re-membering, keeping alive the spirit and memory of our loved ones.
Later we had to work on a story that we would tell to the whole group. We had to cull any emotions and keep bringing back the focus to ‘what happened?’ “Allow the listener the space to feel the emotion for themselves, to genuinely believe you are telling them the story for the first time so that they can sense the excitement, the challenges, the mystery, the joy,” we were told. So, I practiced hard and practiced some more and then finally it was my turn to tell a story. It was great to feel the aikido energy flowing as I made the connection with my audience and I sensed they were with me all the way as I took them on a journey, allowing them to connect with, and reflect, emotion that in turn fed the story. Then we repeated the pattern with everyone else’s story. The energy flow was itself a dance and it felt like such a gift to be in a space where stories entered the realm of the sacred.
I came out of that storytelling workshop feeling exhilarated, like I had discovered my voice or suddenly that I could be a ballerina or play the violin. I was on such a high. I could tell stories! ‘You look like a teenager’, said a friend working at the Chelsea Market as I skidded in there to share my new skill. ‘You look like the cat that swallowed the cream’, observed another friend wryly, before giving me a gorgeous saffron shirt she plucked from her seller’s shelf “Happy Christmas, sweetie.”
Just home and I received an email, ‘you are a powerful storyteller, come back and work with us some more.’ And so I will.
Happy Christmas, Happy Hanukkah. Happy Stories. Happy Memories.
Jane Sloane