So as we break for Thanksgiving, I find myself thrilled to see that you are discovering the power of stories, and that you go home thinking about them. Rose and Chloe's posts gave me chills. We love movies because they can tell beautiful stories with image and sound, but the stories we discover in the pages of a book or that are meant for us to pull up a bench in the mead hall to listen call to us in a different way. A great story is the one that invites you to hear and to see with your mind. You are immersed, and you can see it so clearly--the glorious, bejeweled mead hall with the warmth of the fire and the brotherhood of noble men. The shaper invites you to be one of them and to imagine the evil that lurks, the monster, the one that preys on them all, night after night when the stories are done. Is he a real monster or is he any evil that can undermine this brotherhood? How strong is the brotherhood? If the questions are too clearly answered, the mystery disappears and the story becomes something else. As it is, you are invited to give it shape once it leaves the shaper's mouth and enters into your world, to have it speak to your own sense of community and what monsters can make things fall apart...These stories are universal, as you can see, so they are wonderful to read together. At the same time, they are so distinctive, each and every one. I find the sad beauty of this one particularly compelling--the ring-giver on his whorl-prowed ship sailing out for the last time onto the whale-road, this place of great mystery, loneliness and unknown. A community both so strong, so beloved and so fragile...and a story that almost did not make it into our hands.
Hwaet! We heed the call!
Have a great Thanksgiving!
yours,
knowledge-sharer
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