SLOW STORY

Photo by Deborah Littlebird

It was after a winter evening mealtime around the long sturdy wooden table where I was gathered with my Pueblo family.  My grandparents had already passed on and even though we missed them very much, all the many aunties, uncles, and cousins, still had the joy of being together, unhurried, sharing stories with one another.  It was my elder cousin who said, “Stories are something we hunger for today as much as we always have. Yet we’re unable to go that many thousand year journey, 'cause in this day, the stories aren’t being lived.”  

Everyone became quiet.  “Hmmm”, someone responded at last, as we politely waited for the older people to gently speak.  I listened intently and tried to sit still as one of my younger aunties, eagerly spoke forth. “You know why?  It’s all the TV and movies that are being made so fast and the stories aren’t even real anymore.  In the movies anyone can look like they can ride a horse!”  We all laughed, ‘cause it was true.  This was already my reality as another cousin and I were busily attending film school in Santa Fe during the early 70’s. 

Cell phones, laptops and iPads hadn’t even arrived yet.  Today’s “smart phones” have everyone excited and somehow we are being sold that the world is a smaller, smarter place.  What’s still true is that media is push button fast and almost all stories are only dimly experienced.

So much has changed in such a short period of time.  For me, the transition from “Paleolithic movie making” into the “digital age” has happened faster than one could say, “Mark!”  Yet from that day until this one, what I remember best about that evening warmly embraced by hearth and kin, was a story welling up inside of me.  I wanted to say something but I didn’t, instead I waited.  And sure enough in those long moments of silence, words formed and came, but not through me. It was a revered elder uncle who spoke up, “Excitement can’t be exchanged for the reality of an old person’s life.  For God’s sake, when a person has really learned to listen, it’s because they’ve lived through a thousand legends!”  Eyes averted, so I could pay attention to the sound of voices, I heard what I was waiting for, and understood why I’d hesitated to speak.  It was what I’ve now come to recognize as the continuation of the “slow story.”   

My uncle finished speaking, “When legends are told through the media they’re merely looked at.   They become substitutes for the usefulness of what we don’t get from grandmas and grandpas, and the mother earth anymore.”  His words were clear because they echoed my own thoughts.  Clarity came and was mine through my own waiting.

Now I’m an older man living as close to the earth as I can.  My friends and colleagues call me an elder now.  I still hear my grandmas and grandpas, and elders all around me. They are my tribal core.  They are the lineage that connects me to place and makes me indigenous.  All this helps me as I work to learn to remember that I’m hunting for a “listener.” A listener is a person who will share the waiting, in the “slow story.”  The story is ancient. It’s about humans of course.  Humans aren’t central to creation, it’s just that Humans are always provided for and this is why they’re always in every story, and we wait with our listening to discover what will be. 

In this sense old people are a sum of the stories they have heard and the stories they have lived in their lives.  The storyteller and the living of the story have an unbroken tie of reality between them.  The older a person becomes, the more myth their life becomes.  An elder is one who is able to carry the wealth of their people in ceremonies, rituals and actions of good and bad, the experiences of their lives.  When at last close to their own death, maybe they are ready?  For they have been on the great journey to the mountain and back to the people with what they have seen, done, listened to and learned.  Are they prepared?  Will they listen for the story one more time?