Its quiet here this afternoon. The light has just changed again and even the birds who are so insistently ebullient this time of year have let down the chatter. For me right now when it is quiet, I think about what stories I want to hear, what stories I want to tell, and how the shape of stories is the shape of our lives.
We tell the story of the arrival of the light each day. We tell the story of the speed we move, the quality of how air feels on our skin, how we remember how it felt to be small, or young, or different than we are now. We describe ceaselessly in our minds the quality of our lives as we brush our teeth, in our morning meal as we eat, as we barge out into the day.
I’ve been thinking about this because L in her five year old insistence wants to hear stories. She wants good ones. Real ones. The ones that let her see me in new ways, and of course let her see herself. She wants the story of why I only liked hot dogs after I was pregnant with her. The story of the big storm in Greece, but not the short version, the long one with all the parts. She wants stories about each song that hear on the radio like she is unpacking clues to some whole picture.
And I get it, I want stories too. I want stories of a life inhabited. The lushness of the fuschia of the peonies. The rush of being the last car on the ferry boat and the damp must of sweaty relief at making it on.
I want the stories because the world feels and is alive like that. It’s because I want the stories that make us more human and more fallible. They often are beautiful but just as often they have a much more ordinary quality to them that I can’t live without.
Here are a few that I love for the beginning of summer:
A story about love, nature, and rhythm following Sophia and her grandmother on an island in the summer.
The Last Cuentista-Donna Barba Higuera
Young adult speculative fiction, new planets, ancestors, and how much you can actually love your brother.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois-Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
Spanning hundreds of years this amazing novel reaches back into afroindigenous history and unfurls along family lines all the way to the complexity of now.
Poems to bring you home to your body, the world, and each other.
Get some Full Moon Tea! I have some really exquisite tea, also very delicious iced whenever the sun decides to shine again. It is a great point of return in this moment of the world to heat up water and add plants to it to presence yourself!
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I want to tell myself better stories!