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Good Stories and Wise People have much in Common



Good stories and wise people foster a state of wonder



Wislawa Szymborska, the Pulitzer prize winning poet from Poland, said in her acceptance speech, "Poets, if they are genuine, must keep repeating, I don't know.....each poem marks an effort to answer this statement." (and I would say the same can be said of children's stories and children's authors)  Each story, in some way, is an attempt to wrestle with what we do not know, with what we wonder about.  As Katherine Paterson, Newberry medalist, says, "Story is the way we make sense of life."


Of course, WONDER is rather counter-cultural in our age of Google and Wikipedia.  But good stories and wise people encourage us to bask in mystery, to see, in the words of Browning, that "all of earth is crammed with Heaven," and to know that the best things in life are meant not to be measured, but treasured.


Nor is it the kind of wonder that marvels at the extraordinary or unusual, but rather the kind of wonder that Dr. Dorian refers to in Charlotte's Web....

When Mrs. Arable asks him if he understands how there can be writing in the spider's web, he answers,

" Oh no, I don't understand it.  But for that matter I don't understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place.  When the words appeared everyone said they were a miracle.  But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle."

Some of my favorite words of wisdom to ponder this week

"Literature is prismatic. Light shines through the excellent books or dances off and the rainbow it gives shine on and on in a child's life in a thousand different ways."  Jane Yolen


"To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart." Unknown







"Show me a day when the world wasn't new"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 







 

 

 



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So, what does all this talk about Wisdom have to do with stories?

Well, I like to think that good stories and wise people have much in common.

Good stories and wise people help us to love more

A wise African proverb tells us, "what you help a child to LOVE is more important than what you help them to learn."  And E.B. White, that marvelous author of Charlotte's Web maintained that, "All I want to say in books, all I ever wanted to say, is - I love the world!"  Now of course, the love we are referring to here is not the sappy, soppy Hollywood version.  No!  The love we mean is the nitty, gritty, sacrificial kind that makes a spider called, Charlotte, use her last reserves of strength to save the life of her best friend, a pig called, Wilbur!


Good stories and wise people give us courage

The word courage comes from the French word, La Coeur, meaning, HEART.  Wise people and good stories FEED OUR HEARTS with beauty, truth and goodness.  So they strengthen our hearts, and help us in the words of Blake's beautiful poem, to "burn bright in the forests of the night."  We know our job as parents and teachers is not to eradicate all the trials and troubles for our children, but rather, it is to give them what they need to face their dark days and troubled times - COURAGE, that will help them feel bold and brave and unafraid!



Good stories and wise people impart an "all wellness"

Madeleine L'Engle maintained that this "all wellness" should be at the core of ALL children's stories.  It does not mean that there cannot be sad stories, but simply that there must be some glimmer of hope, some pinprick of light simmering there beneath the sadness.  She was referring to the words of Julian of Norwich, the medieval mystic, who maintained, "all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."  This is not a Pollyanna, naïve disregard for the sadnesses in our lives, but rather a stalwart belief in what all good stories tell us- GOOD will triumph - LOVE will conquer! (more on this topic in April)


Some of my favorite words of wisdom to ponder this week

"Be the change you want to see in the world."  Gandhi

"Beneath the muck and scum of things, there something always always sings." Emerson

"See our children as they are - unique persons with a song to sing, a dream to live.  Children are endowed with an inner power that can guide us to a more luminous future."  Maria Montessori.

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As a parent and a teacher, I have often tried to give some piece of wisdom to the children in my care, and when they ignored it, or just seemed incapable of incorporating it into their lives, I found myself frustrated and bewildered, until....

One year, I heard a wise homilist explain the meaning of the Parable of the Ten Foolish Virgins - a parable that likens Heaven to the story of the ten virgins/bridesmaids who carry a lamp as they await the coming of the bridegroom which they expect at some time during the night.  Five of the virgins are wise and have brought extra oil for their lamps in case they have to wait longer than anticipated.  Five are foolish and have only brought their lamps.  At midnight, all the virgins hear the call to come out to meet the bridegroom.  Realizing that their lamps have gone out, the foolish virgins ask the wise ones for oil, but they refuse, saying that there will certainly not be enough for them to share.  While the foolish virgins are away trying to get more oil, the bridegroom arrives.  The wise virgins then accompany him to the celebration.  The others arrive too late and are excluded.

I had always found this parable to be somewhat mean-spirited and could never understand why those wise virgins couldn't be kinder and share their oil!  But the homilist explained that the reason the wise virgins did not share the oil, was not that they were selfish or judgmental, but rather, that it was simply impossible for them to do so.  The "oil" represents their spirituality, and spirituality, like wisdom, is something unique and particular to each individual - it is not a commodity that can be bought or bartered or just instantly handed over to another.  Again, a counter-cultural notion in our world of instant gratification and ubiquitous consumerism.



Some of my favorite words of wisdom to ponder this week


"The color of your thought dyes your soul."  Marcus Aurelius

"Beware of the barrenness of a busy life."  Socrates

"Be kind to one another for we do not know the burdens another may carry"  (a friend of mine)

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"What we teach a child to love is more important than what we teach a child to learn.” - African Proverb


This month’s story from my video readalouds is a tale that honors—WISDOM.

The Name of the Tree is a Bantu folktale, retold by Celia Barker Lottridge and illustrated by Ian Wallace.

What is Wisdom?


According to the Collins English dictionary – “the ability to think and act utilizing knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight.”
But I prefer another definition that I stumbled upon many years ago (source unknown)

“Wisdom is experience reflected upon.”

I like this version because it highlights the connection between experience and reflection. While it is true that most of us do relegate wisdom to the domain of the elderly, we can all probably point to notable exceptions: the eight year old child who grows up with a single mother afflicted with diabetes, possesses a wisdom far beyond her years, or the eighty year old cantankerous great aunt in the nursing home, who for whatever reason has never matured beyond the mental age of 14.

So, wisdom is not just something that we acquire simply by living a long life, but rather something we earn through experience and deep reflection.

It’s interesting that in the Old Testament, Book of Wisdom, we see Wisdom personified as a Woman. In many of the Celtic stories that I read to children at school, the “wise” character is almost always a WOMAN.

In  Catkin a young couple seek advice from the Wise Woman in the village.

In The Witches and the Singing Mice, the townsfolk go to Granny Pine, who comes to their aid with he basket of potions and herbs.

And in  Fair, Brown and Trembling (an Irish version of Cinderella), the "fairy godmother” is portrayed as a “Hen Wife."

 

And of course, all the nine Muses from Greek mythology are female.

How to explain such thinking?

Perhaps it is not so much that all women are wise, and all men are foolish (although, I have to admit, there are times when I am tempted to succumb to such a conclusion), but rather, the qualities we associate with women (or used to) - gentleness, kindness, submissiveness, maternal affection and nurturing, are the very qualities needed to acquire wisdom. And so, when males do tap into such qualities, we say that they are tapping into their “feminine” side – counter cultural in our present society that seems to reward and honor the more masculine traits of dominance, power, control and force.


Some of my favorite words of wisdom to ponder this week -

"As a compass needle points north, so a man's accusing finger always finds a woman." (or as I like to tease my husband, one could substitute wife for woman!)
Khaled Hosseini - A Thousand Splendid Suns

"The unexamined life is not worth living."  Socrates

"There is nothing so strong as gentleness and nothing so gentle as real strength."  Francis de Sales (patron saint of writers)

"What we teach a child to love is more important than what we teach a child to learn." (so true, especially in the realm of children's literature, for when we teach children to love goodness, truth, beauty, and wisdom (the stuff of all good stories), then they will naturally be drawn into learning how to read and write!