Part of unpacking the backpack I’ve carried now for more than six decades is recognizing that there are so many stories. Yours. Theirs. Ours. Everyone’s. We all do have a story and much of my life has been about sharing stories. One of my favorite jobs revolved around being assigned to interview a wide variety of people whose stories I was then tasked with telling.
(So many of my favorite books, by the way, have been short story compilations or books about stories. As I unpack this backpack, the books I’ve held onto, often referred to and found worth rereading will be topics of entries. Below is one of my long time favorites. Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., shares wonderful stories and I have quoted her more than a few times in sermons.)
As you can see, this copy has been well-used.
I love stories.
Stories about trying to grow disease-free strands of chestnut trees, trees that have their own stories, by the way! (They used to grow in the south to be massive but now can only manage to sprout bushes. Grow, little trees, grow!)
Stories about small town festivals and cowbirds and killdeer who protect their young by pretending to be injured to draw predators away from nests.
Stories about how you refused to let anyone else tell you how to live your life, stories about first loves, stories about sitting with dying.
As, I unpack my backpack here, I’ll tell those and others, stories about travel to Japanese temples in caves or about stumbling over statues intentionally left lying in the middle of bridges in Rome.
Stories about Lazarus stumbling out of the tomb and how that image helped us find ways to help our friends and neighbors who have stumbled as they tried to come back from combat and wars.
Songwriters and poets are some my favorite storytellers, often as much for what they leave out and let us fill in ourselves. The embroidery below I did years ago and, if you’re a John Prine fan, you know that is a line from one of his songs, “Everybody,” where he sings that: “Everybody needs somebody that they can talk to, someone to open up their ears and let that trouble through….”
Some stories are more compelling but none is more important than another, only more important to me or you and only in a certain time and place. All of our stories need to and deserve to be told. Even the ones we regret. To be sure, some are more fun to tell than other and some are the kind of story that, while you’re in the midst of the story itself, you know this is gonna be epic…if we survive.
One benefit of hearing and then telling your stories is how your stories spur me to remember and tell my own, whether they were stories about nearly drowning or stories about all the mythology around pregnancies (and the tendency people have to warn you or tell you about the worse-case scenario when they see you sporting a swelling belly) or some of my earliest stories, which were about running away from home or trying to make sense of chaos using a child’s vocabulary and point of view.
Stories. We all have them, we all need to hear them and we all need to tell them. I’ve got lots so this is just the beginning. Might want to sit down. This could take a while. You go first.
Emptying The Backpack 