STORY AS MEDICINE

Without story, there can be no cure, no healing; either for individuals or for humanity. It is the stream that transmits oxygen to the soul.

This is especially true for those who have become refugees, forced from their homeland. It is the very reason for making the interviews on this website available for you to hear and see.

—17Yearsandcounting

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— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, from her book Women Who Run With The Wolves—

''To my mind, story, in every way possible, thrives only on hard work–intellectual, spiritual, familial, physical, and integral. It never comes easy. It is never 'just picked up,' or studied in one's 'off times.' Its essence cannot be born nor maintained in air conditioned comfort, it cannot grow to any depth in an enthusiastic but non-committed mind, neither can it live in gregarious but shallow environs. Story cannot be 'studied.' It is learned though assimilation, through living in its proximity with those who know it, live it, and teach it—more so through all the day-to-day mundane tasks of life, much more than the clearly ceremonial times.

The healing medicine of story does not exist in a vacuum. It cannot exist divorced from its spiritual source. It cannot be taken on as a mix-and-match project. There is an integrity to story that comes from a real life lived in it. A story is clearly illumined from being raised up in it—stories are considered to be written like 'un tatuaje del destino,' a light tatto on the skin of the one who has lived them.''

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