Radial storytelling for the recipient of generational wounds
What's your story? "Oh, I seeee..." . Reorienting, reweaving, restorying
The Primordial Weaver, the Great Weaver, is the creator of the universe, weaving on the loom of life the fate of all.
in J.C.Coopers’s ‘An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols’
My mother is in her 80s now, and during our weekly hangouts, I’ve been encouraging her to share more stories about herself and her life. There’s no urgency to gather and collect stories. She is remarkably well, even though she complains a lot about her aging body and expresses surprise at the natural deterioration. We joke that she’ll live well into her 90’s.
But I’m conscious that during these last Passages, time is more twilight, and through the reality of lightness of bone and body, there's a sense of self becoming “more spirit and less matter”1.
She’s always told her childhood stories, but from my earliest recollections, these tend to circle a theme of hardship, struggle and devastation (my father was the sentimental one). As an observant and empathic girl, this was tough for me to experience. It was difficult to not carry that storyline as a burden.
She tells her story as growing up in extreme poverty, during and post WW2, and in a part of former Jugoslavia that has always been a pressure point for tension, a juncture for tribal and political conflict. A between place that seems to never quite crumble (but seems to be forever crumbling) and never quite rebuilds.
This was evident on a recent quest to Croatia, where place and people seemed to be in perpetual flux, or stuck - I’m not quite sure. While achingly beautiful in many ways, it was/is rough living, so I understand that she labours her grievance stories.
— What are your grievance stories? Can you give them a name?
— How might they be inherited stories, that you hold as burden?
Sorting, spinning, weaving
Recently, while sorting through clothes (keep? pass down? donate?), we revisited a familiar story of how her mother, my baka - had glory boxes full of cloth and clothing, including handworked garments, traditional dress, bedsheets, and rugs that were destroyed during these conflicts. Usually, the story stops at the devastating loss of possessions when having anything tangible was a privilege. But also grief for the loss of beauty, history and culture - many of these items were passed down from the women coming before her.
But on this day, she remarked in an off-hand way how time-consuming it was to make these fabrics. Like, MAKE the cloth. “What do you mean, make? Like the fabric for the dresses? Did you make your own sheets!?”
I don’t know how I missed the detail, or didn’t make the connection earlier. I knew that hand embroidery was a thing. And, she’s told me before (often) how she and the other village girls and women would soak hemp grown creekside in said-same creek to soften the fibres.
I assumed that somehow the fabric was purchased. I’d just never thought to question, “ …soak for what?” (Remember: from the Grail Myth - it can be enough just to ask the question!).
Us-two2 had always focused on the hardship perspective, oriented to the wound, and perpetuated the grievance story.
‘Re-storying’ pauses the narrative so we can pull back, review, deconstruct, and reconstruct a new story with more context than the old one.
More context is perspective widening - for new storytelling
It’s hard to explain the significance of this moment, except to say it felt like a door I didn't know existed, suddenly became apparent (“Oh, I see…”), and with that, more room, and a feeling of expansion and widening. Of possibility. New information enters.
Establishing more context is essential to re-storying and transforming personal life myths.
So began a dynamic exchange where she’d describe the process of soaking, then beating the hemp fibres, spinning the thread and weaving the thread to make the cloth. And then decorating with handwork for beauty and her individual mark.
She’d mimic actions and attempt to describe the rudimentary tools they used - archaic versions of the swindle, distaff, spindle, spinning wheel, and loom. I googled images of them for her to confirm, as her recall of names was in the regional dialect, not the common Serbo-Croatian language.
I began envisioning my mother as her 14-year-old self, labouring and making, and felt big love for us-two. Things began to reorganise within and between us. Again, the palpable felt sense of new and revisioned information coming through, and that there is more to the story than trauma and devastation - an updated story is emerging.3 A lighter one imbued with more … something … sweetness? joy? Maybe just more reality … I’m not sure yet.
Piecing together lost narratives
Since then, I’ve been meandering down a rabbit hole to discover more tangible facts, but found little by way of cultural specifics. I’m grateful to this old website dedicated to Hungarian history and ethnography research by Ivan Balassa and Gyula Ortutay. It’s a common frustration for me that there’s very little recorded specifically for my ancestral ‘tribe’ and more broadly about village life, and women’s lives in rural Southern Slav regions. I’m limited by a combo of the language barrier, the destruction of written records, and the likelihood that much of this knowledge was oral anyway.
But I’m piecing together a broader narrative from what does exist.
How to restory - reworking the old myth.
It begins with the act of stepping away momentarily from the typical exchange and usual roles to let fresh air in, and respond to what is actually happening before you.
Staying with the symbol of the weaving - you start to unpick and untangle some of the old story, and re-weave and thread new material back into the fabric as it becomes available. To portray a different and possibly more accurate narative.
Spinning and weaving in old stories
At the most mundane level, us-two are seeing my mother’s, and my mother’s mother’s story in a new way (I still can't get over that my mother, of just one generation back from me, made her sheets!).
Beyond that, it's a reminder of how essential women’s work and women’s craft were/is to culture and life, and how that exists, has changed, or no longer exists.
— How does culture value women’s labour and practical creativity?
And then symbolically and archetypally, there are so many examples of how spinning and weaving is reflected and conveys meaning in myths and old stories.
In folktales, the spinning wheel was a character in itself, often in possession of magical properties. Like in Sleeping Beauty, where the princess is sent into a 100-year sleep at the prick of a deaf crone’s spindle. This is despite the King banishing all spinning wheels from the kingdom. And in Rumpelstiltskin, the miller essentially throws his daughter under the bus by bragging to the King that she can spin straw into gold - alchemy. An impossible task. She ends up making a terrible bargain with a devilish imp to win favour or die.
In Greek Mythology, Arachne - a master weaver - was turned into a spider by goddess Athene, jealous that Arachne’s creations were more beautiful than her own. Meanwhile, for 20 years, Penelope weaves by day and unpicks at night a funeral shroud for her father-in-law. A way to suspend time and hold at bay the many suitors eager for her to forget her husband Odysseus, who is away fighting the Trojan wars. She promises that once the weaving is done (i.e. never), she will decide on her new husband.
In other myths and stories, goddesses of fate and time across many cultures are shown as spinners and weavers of destiny and of each individual’s story into the broader pattern of the world, and the greater fabric of life.
— What could it mean that women were (but no longer are?) seen as the spinners and weavers of the culture?
It was a dark and stormy night …
Why are we huddling about the campfire? Why do we tell tales, or tales about tales - why do we bear witness, true or false?
Ursula K. Le Guin
In this essay4 by Le Guin she speaks about radial storytelling. Where there is no beginning, middle, or end. To let a story be muddled or all middle.
This idea has stayed with me for a while, not in the least because I know my storytelling is circular and meandering. At times I see it as something to fix. At other times, I find it legitimising. I see such value in radial and spiral narratives as a way to weave in new stories that don’t require linear causality or immediate sense-making.
Unpicking and unravelling the thread and reworking them back into the design is the long game - how you tell and retell the story of your life. Each time bringing in a little more, or removing a little more and having new material to work with. Each time a little tweaked and more contextual. For a little more space, perspective, and healing.
Mendy xx
🗝️Work with me 1-1 (online)
🌀Explore the Rites of Passage for girls and women
Sources and references used:
Iván Balassa and Gyula Ortutay. Hungarian Ethnography And Folklore
Yunkaporta, Tyson. 2019. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Melbourne: Text Publishing.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1989. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, 157–171. New York: Harper & Row.
I’m not sure where exactly this phrase is from - it could be Carolyn Myss, it could be Clarissa Pinkola Estes-Reyes
“us-two” is borrowed from Tyson Yunkaporta and his book Sand Talk - a way to say “we” that better expresses the nature of ‘yarning’ that speaks to the nature of dialogue and communication and meaning making that happens individually
In this rather excellent interview of Dr Catherine Liu by Dr Chris Hoff (Lui has a new book I should really get and read) she speaks about how trauma creates a “rupture in your life narrative” and that a “trauma script” - aka grievance story - is the one worked on in modern therapy. There’s much here that criticises modern psychotherapy and how the process of healing has become an individual one (i.e for individuation) and neglects the culture, systems, economics, etc that the wounded individual exists within. But that’s another side quest to explore at another time.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1989. “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Or, Why Are We Huddling About the Campfire?” In Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, 157–171. New York: Harper & Row.