Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags, and crazy people.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the rich legacy and diverse backgrounds of modern storytellers, connecting them to a long tradition of oral and artistic expression.
In this quote, Clarissa Pinkola Estes highlights the idea that modern storytellers are not merely individuals sharing tales; they are part of a vast lineage that encompasses a variety of voices and experiences throughout history. By referencing ancient figures such as troubadours and griots, she suggests that storytelling is sacred and deeply rooted in community and cultural traditions, creating a bridge between the past and present.
In practice
In a workshop on creative writing, this quote can be used to inspire participants to draw from their cultural backgrounds.
Asking the proper question is the central action of transformation- in fairy tales, in analysis, and in individuation. The key question causes germination of consciousness. The properly shaped question always emanates from an essential curiosity about what stands behind. Questions are the keys that cause the secret doors of the psyche to swing open.
Tears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.
Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don't waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success.
Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.
There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.
To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.
My favorite flamenco singers, they're not trying to look pretty. They're trying to put truth in what they do, in the way they express themselves. Sometimes that's not beauty, but it's beautiful.
If you really understand the meaning of be-bop, you understand the meaning of freedom.
A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.
The fact that we're at a point today where anybody, anywhere can put a comic book together and get it in front of the entire planet without spending a dime on printing and distribution - that's the good thing, and I think that's what's going to save [the comics industry]. These young people who have nothing to do with the industry we're in, just going out there and doing their own work and putting it out there, letting people respond to it.
For me personally, Elliott Carter was and remains one of the most meaningful composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries because he represents substance. He was the living proof of uncompromising, complex music, which at first seems inaccessible. But it becomes accessible if one digs in and sees the development through.
Sometimes I sound like gravel, and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.
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