Beware Of Storytellers

 BEWARE OF STORYTELLERS

'Once Upon a Time'  - James Christensen   

Beware of Storytellers

They are the most dangerous of all beings. 

For it is they who brought the tales and ideas 

of which this world is made. 

It is storytellers that have given us the religions that men follow.

It is storytellers that turn us towards both God and Devil. 

It is storytellers that have pulled the sword from the stone,

put horns on a hare,

made the virgin pregnant, 

planted the seeds of happily ever after

and given us heaven and hell. 

From ideas born of stories have come war and discord

and all the terrible things that men must face.

From stories come the lovers and yearners of the heart that kiss the moon.

It is stories that provide the mortar by which the walls of prejudice are built

and it is stories that tell of the far romantic mountains

from which the rivers of desire and love flow.

Beware of storytellers,

they are not all bad,

but they are not all good.

Beware of storytellers, I tell you.

It is because of storytellers,

that we all are yearning for what we don’t have.

A Tale from the Decameron, by John William Waterhouse

Beware of those who interpret, praise, criticize,

and tell the lessons of stories that they have heard,

for they also are storytellers.

They seem to tell a story from what seems an unmoving, still, and fixed point,

but in truth, they are adrift on a sea of wonder without end,

like all and everything.

How can we get our bearings when drowned in dilemma and faced with paradox?

It is not obvious or easy to learn the proper lesson from experience,

to know what has transpired,

to choose the proper goal,

to understand both cause and reason for it.

It is difficult to select a proper moral,

to make the right judgment.

It is subtle and deep, like what is beyond the boundary

at the far end of space.

Beware of storytellers who have conviction.

They have caused more suffering than can be counted.

Struck by the lightning of contradiction,

blown by the gales of competing metaphor,

they have not the humility of the shipwrecked,

but clinging to their rafts of word and hope

they claim recognition of God and Truth,

a Being they do not know,

an idea that lies only in the little pool of their thought and feelings.

One may yet believe in God,

but we must recognize our belief as only a hopeful story

that brings small comfort as we cling to what is only floating

on the choppy surge of wave and sea

without solid ground on which to stand.

What we believe in is only a story . . . unknowable, uncomprehendable,

unverifiable, infinitely mysterious.

Beware of those who are full of conviction,

for they are full of themselves.

Beware of what storytellers do not tell you.

For they must, of necessity, leave something out . . .

if not from time alone, then from purpose, good or bad,

or from ignorance of the story, or from carelessness or naïvete;

and in the untold story lies mystery and deceit, hidden things and revelation,

great meaning and silence;

and as we trace our way back along the roots of silent implications,

we will feel what is left unsaid

and in that dark earth of imagination

find ourselves back before the solid, storied stone

that stands within the very heart of the temple of our hearing . . .

upon which our mind is tethered and find we cannot escape . . .

It is of stories we are made, and it is in stories we live,

and with stories, we see our lives, tell our tales,

and with which we will always tell and live them.

At the very end of the fruited branch and in the germ below the earth,

story is the seed of our life.

Beware of who you are, for it is unknown to you,

and yet, on this unknown ground,

you lay foundation for your life.

We believe we know the story, who it is for,

and how it all turns out at last,

but we see only from the crest of a wave,

holding to a temporary and failing raft,

rising and falling

in the midst of an infinite and ever-moving sea.

Beware of storytellers.

Beware of all those who teach, instruct, and yarn, and rap, and riff.

Beware of those who criticize and those who praise.

Beware of those who claim to love

and those who hold intentions

that would be the destruction of the world.

Beware of all things and ideas,

for they are made of story,

into which we are tossed and flung,

all of us, all together,

in a place we only understand with a story . . .

Beware . . .