To Fall Under a Spell

Spellbinders is a Denver-based organization that brings elders into schools to tell stories.

The astonishing thing is how often we have to explain to people what storytelling IS.

"You mean you read to kids?"  "So, are you a teacher?"  "So, you're storytellers like (name a Ted Talk celebrity)?"

As a culture we're so far removed from the ancient, basic art of telling stories to each other that we have forgotten not only how to do it, but what the heck it even IS.  I think this is because we have forgotten how to listen.

If you brush up on your listening skills and tune your ears, you'll hear people telling stories all the time.  Most people, however, are not artful tellers; and even artful tellers, while not telling stories, will bore their partners with mental grocery lists and gripe sessions about how annoying that guy at the gas station was again.

Listening is three times harder than talking, because the brain listens faster than a person can speak.  Great storytellers know this and pace themselves with many techniques to make the story hearable.  People who are just yearning to be heard tend to pack ears with the force of a firehose.  People who are yearning to be heard but have chained themselves to the rock of social acceptability struggle in a completely different way.  Everyone needs to tell their story, and every human being is jammed with unheard stories.  Freud's "talking cure" was all about listening to someone's story.  To be heard is to be healed and made whole.

It's easy to reacquaint ourselves with storytelling.  It starts with listening, which is the most generous, caring thing you can do.  To set your own thoughts aside, to truly give over to what's being said, is to fall under the spell of the teller.

When you're truly listening, when you are spellbound, you are making space for magic.