How I met the world of stories...

At yesterday's storytelling evening, my friend and storytelling ally Nazli asked me point blank why I became a storyteller.  I was a little startled, and didn't have much time to think, so I just blurbed something about how lots of stories were told in the commune I grew up in.
Then later (now) thinking about it, I thought that there might be something here.
How does one decide that telling stories is so important that they are going to make this innocuous pastime the center of their lives?

A good friend of mine, who is an amazing guitar player, told me that he first learned to play in high school, to get this guitar playing cute girl to notice him....She never did, but it worked later... on others.

I guess that's why I started, to be noticed, by some really good storytellers.  A few years before I came to this world, my parents as part of "the return to the land" movement, sold all they had and moved to an big old house in Burgundy, there many people came to weave, die wool with plants, learn how to spin wool...etc.

Why would anyone want to spin by hand in a industrial world??  You know what my answer will be...stories!

When your hands are busy, and the looms pedals mark a nice wooden rhythmic tune...the only thing missing is a story.  A room full of people working with their hands, starts with something wonderful: calm silence.
Not the kind of silence where everyone is making to-do-list in their heads (metro silence) not the kind of silence where people are highly concentrated trying to solve a problem (exam room silence) no calm, non-busy, open silence, the kind in which we can stay.

This is the ideal soil for the story seed to grow.

There is a reason why they call it "to spin a story".

"pong, frrrup, shik shik...pong, frrrup, shik shik....pong, frrrup, shik shik" (loom pedals and comb sounds...)
The sounds, the quality of the silence, and then the words, the story, a great listening quality, and the weavers taking this newly spun story and adding it to their own fabric of images, sensations and experiences.

In this house I knew very early on that silence was beautiful and if I wanted to earn the right to break the silence, I needed to spin a good tale.
To this crowd of utopians, topic was important, message essential.  A mistake in timing or a twist lacking in originality and you would have to surrender the group's attention to someone else, or to the rhythmic silence.
It is with this audience that I first learned how to weave my experiences into stories.  They had all the qualities of an ideal story listening audience:

They liked stories, but they also enjoyed silence.
They were good listeners and they had nowhere to go.
They were picky, but when a story was good they would let you know.
They told lots of stories.

A story is a yarn, and a storyteller either spins it or weaves it, or both.
As a child of course I learned to weave like everyone else in the commune, I made my school bags, and my blankets, still today many of my bags are hand-woven, but today I realize that sitting on the loom all those years, I really learned to weave a different kind of yarn.