(Delivered as the keynote for the Granite State Story Swap, the flagship event of the New Hampshire Storytelling Alliance, on May, 4, 2024,, at the Benz Center in Center Sandwich, New Hampshire.)

I’m so inexpressibly delighted that you’ve given me your attention this morning, that the danger exists that my enthusiasm could run over in a reckless way, and it could be as if I was showing you around that big candy shop in Littleton, the one with the Guinness record-holding 112 foot candy counter, holding out a glass jar of root beer barrels, and then showing you one full of of licorice whips, and then pulling out the gummy sour pumpkins and the fireballs, just throwing all these disconnected sweet things at you without any sort of unifying thread. My goal is to avoid that.

There were a few false starts as I tried to write this. Ordinarily, I would start writing something like this at least a month in advance, but I was traveling in Spain for a month with Andrea, visiting our daughter Fiona. As we went from Madrid to Barcelona to Granada to Galicia, every step of the way, every idle moment, all my thoughts of what I would say today were rattling about in my head, sometimes even in my dreams. When I finally got home and sat down to write, ten days ago, it seemed like all the pieces were lined up, and the stitching together would be easy. Not so. I’m pretty sure you can relate. Andrea came home to find me typing “All work and no play makes Andy a dull boy, All work and no play makes Andy a dull boy, All work and no play makes Andy a dull boy” over and over and over again, but she gave me the write kind of gentle shaking, and I was able to begin to get myself under control.

Then I remembered a “This I Believe” essay I had written for a church service about ten years ago. I dredged it up, and found that it expressed the golden kernel of what I’d like to get across, in just five hundred words. So that seems like  good place to begin. All I’ve changed is one number to make it as if I wrote it this week. Here it is:

I believe that all we can be sure of is a short span of time between darknesses. We come into the world out of an unfathomable oneness, and we return to it when we’re done. In the meantime, we have each other, and our challenge is to rediscover that oneness amid all this earthly confusion, and be true to it, by fully accompanying one another.

There’s an image that’s always stuck with me from War and Peace: Prince Andrei had a dream one night. When he awoke, he remembered that he had been looking at a golden ball. As he had looked more closely, he had seen that it was made up of countless drops of gold that were fading in and out of one another… and he intuitively knew that those drops of gold were all of us, somehow all one but at the same time unique expressions of that unity.

So, how do we remember such a dream in the light of day? There’s an expression the Irish use that I love: to “shorten the road.” The idea is that we shorten the road by passing the time with story or song, bringing a smile to the lips and lifting the heart. I believe that the best way to occupy our short time between darknesses is to lighten the loads of those traveling through with us, and shorten the road.

I’m still living into lessons I learned 30 years ago while working in Guatemala during the civil war there. I was with an organization called Witness for Peace, and a big part of our work was “accompaniment,” living with communities that had suffered organized violence to make it less likely that death squads and military would come at them again.

At times we managed to offer something concrete: we educated groups of US people and sent them home to help make a better US policy towards Latin America, we turned ordinary citizens into activists, we wrote reports and analysis, we built lasting relationships between communities.

But living shoulder to shoulder was the main thing. There was a certain discomfort at being the privileged US white people helping the less fortunate brown people, but when Guatemalan friends thanked me, I told them that we never know what the future may bring, who knows what may come in our own country, and we might need their solidarity in the future. The connection we had was one of mutual aid, of equal humans taking responsibility for each other.

Some of my favorite memories of that time are of evenings sitting around some family’s stick shack in a refugee camp, crowded against the walls, perched on the plank beds and crouching on the floor, faces of women, children and men lit only by the flame of burning ocote, the air filled with the wood’s resinous piney scent, telling tales of our lives, filling the night air with an occasional song, or rattling the walls with laughter after a joke. Each of us drops of gold, blending in and out of one another in the light of a wood fire.

Shortening the road. Accompanying one another between darknesses.
******

Sometimes, all roads lead the same place. Lately I’ve been doing a workshop on the telling of shaggy dog stories, “The Care and Feeding of your Shaggy Dog,” and I didn’t think it had any connection to what I would want to say today, but then I realized that in a weird way it points in the same direction as that “This I Believe” essay.

Let me tell you what I mean. First, even with storytellers, I’ve found that it’s helpful to start by defining “shaggy dog.” My back pocket one-liner is that it’s “a sauntering, meandering, digressive mode of storytelling that winds up in a disappointing, anti-climactic groaner of a conclusion.” Now, when I was developing my shaggy workshop, I realized two things. The first was that, since I’ve been attracted to this art form for a very long time, since I was a much younger man, there was a time when I indulged in it with impure motives. Yes, I gloried in the trickery of it, in leading innocent people down a long, winding primrose path that led almost exactly nowhere. Some of my victims are undoubtedly in this room, so please try to find it in your hearts to forgive me.

The second epiphany was that, as I lived with it over time, the spiritual meaning of this genre has begun to work its way into me and win me over. Yes, you heard me right, “the spiritual meaning.” You see, I’ve come to see that the joy of pure narrative that shaggy dogs offer, combined with the disappointing conclusion, is directly analogous to life. It’s a reflection on mortality, for god’s sake! It urges us to glory in the process, and not to worry so much about the end of the journey. We remember Don Quijote for the windmills, and all the adventures and turns in the road, not for the deathbed at the end of the story.

So, what does the inevitable let-down we’re all heading towards mean for how we live the story, or how we tell the story? I keep coming back to our companions on the road.

On this recent trip, our last chapter outside Madrid was in Galicia, in the northwest, north of the border with Portugal. The plaza in front of the Cathedral in the small city of Santiago de Compostela is where a number of medieval pilgrimage routes converge (speaking of roads leading to the same place), like spokes on a bicycle wheel. Tradition has it that Santiago, or St. James the Apostle, the patron saint of Spain, is interred in the crypt there. Legend has it that he had traveled to Hispania in the western Mediterranean to spread the good news about Jesus, so he traveled about and preached here and there and performed some convincing miracles. He then went back to Palestine, where he became the first of the apostles to be martyred when he was beheaded by Herod Agrippa in the 44^th year of the Common Era. Two of his followers undertook the epic journey to bring his remains, head and body together, in a stone boat back to Galicia  to be buried. (I can’t help but imagine Frodo and Sam Gamgee, but that wasn’t who it was) In the ninth century, a hermit saw a miraculous shower of stars over the same hill for several nights running, and discovered the bones, which eventually ended up in a silver casket beneath the church which was built over it, which was over time upgraded to a Cathedral towering 250 feet in the air, which was consecrated in 1211. This is all true. With my own eyes I saw the stone where Santiago’s followers moored their boat when they made landfall in Spain when they brought him back, and I saw his silver sarcophagus. Andrea can back me up on this.

Ever since the early Middle Ages, pilgrims have crossed the Pyrenees and forded rivers and hiked over rocky plains in all kinds of weather to  reach St. James’s final resting place. Today, hundreds of thousands do it each year, their backpacks festooned with scallop shells and their toes decked out with moleskin. We had been hearing the siren call for a few years, and so we decided to squeeze in the final hundred kilometers of the route that comes up from Lisbon, which is called the Camino Portugues. We caught a ride share to the busy port town of Vigo, found a bed for the night, and the next morning, after coffee and croissants in a café, we set out, first down the busy streets of the town, following the scallop shell route indicators, which were at first elusive. But eventually we found ourselves in a steady stream of humans bearing rucksacks.

Each day along the way we had the opportunity to walk together for a time with Spaniards, Colombians, Brazilians, French people, English folks, Australians, Mexicans, other US people, trading stories and shortening the road. And, of course, between interludes with this changing cast of characters, I got to compare notes and impressions with my favorite traveling companions, Andrea and (for the first two days) Fiona.

I can’t say enough about what a rich experience it was sharing the trail with all these different people, even just for a few days. There are certain tourist situations in which the experience becomes too much about this or that pile of stones or collection of painted canvas, and it takes a lot of ingenuity to make it about the people you encounter along the way, to even figure out how to meet people and have meaningful conversations.

But on the Camino, there’s nothing but time, on top of which many hikers are suffering from muscle aches, or blisters, and are very happy for the opportunity to talk about anything else, about their job back in Brussels, or, (heaven forbid) the upcoming presidential election in the States, their frustrating doctoral dissertation that’s waiting for them back in Paris, or their work with the poor in Bogota, or how the relationship with his father in Nottingham England has changed since the old man developed Alzheimer’s and needed full-time care. And mixed up with all of these mundane topics were their motivations for undertaking something as archaic as a “pilgrimage.”, Nowadays, a minority of these trekkers would actually define themselves as religious pilgrims, but probably a majority are doing it for some kind of broadly defined spiritual motive. And we end up talking about our deepest motivations, what moves us, and why we live our lives as we do, and whether we were with them for hours or just passing each other on the trail, we would part ways by wishing each other “Buen Camino,” basically “Good travels” but in the sense of “I recognize you as a fellow pilgrim, and may your pilgrimage go well.” And the experience of walking with them, and then saying goodbye, and possibly reencountering and falling in together again further down the road, hours or days later, kept bringing to mind the most essential words from the countercultural holy man Ram Dass “We’re all just walking each other home.”

We’re all just walking each other home, just accompanying one another between darknesses.

Once you start paying attention, the reminders are everywhere. One morning in late March, Holy Thursday, actually,  Andrea and Fiona and I set out from Fiona’s home in Madrid on a day trip to visit Cervantes’s birthplace in Alcalá de Henares. Most of Fiona’s non-walking travel in the city is on the subway, in tunnels below the streets, so when our train on this particular day emerged from beneath the earth, and we were splattered with mottled sunlight as we made our way through greening fields, Fiona tossed her head cheerfully and exclaimed, “I’m so happy to be above ground.”

Since I was already in the thick stew of reflection leading towards this talk, I couldn’t help but here that as an existential statement. I heard it as, “I’m so happy to be between darknesses.”

I was raised in a culture that at best compartmentalized death. Death had turned our family’s life upside down when I was small but we didn’t talk about it, and like many families, we seemed to keep busy and live our lives looking in every other possible direction. When I grew up and began to read James Baldwin, I found him saying so many things that helped me make sense of the world, but the one quote that has accompanied me all the way is this one, from The Fire Next Time:

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”

The trouble for me, is that death-denying culture part of living in a that we don’t just deny the fact of our own deaths, we ignore the fact of the deaths of others. One of the roles storytelling has played in traditional cultures has been to remind us of this reality we all face, to put us in spiritual solidarity with one another. Some of you no doubt know the folktale “The House that Has Not Known Death.”

In a well-known Indian Buddhist version of the story, a young woman from a poor family, Kisa Gotami- marries the only son of a wealthy family. She bears a son, which leads to her acceptance, at last, among her husband’s people. But then, tragedy strikes. Her son, grows to be a joyful, running toddler and then suddenly dies.

Mad with grief, Kisa takes her boy’s body and searches for a doctor with the right medicine to restore him to life. She is mocked by those she encounters for her hopeless wish until, finally, one compassionate man suggests that she climb into the mountains to consult the Buddha. She undertakes this quest. When at last she finds him she is overjoyed when he tells her, “yes, I can help you.”

What he requires her to do is to go door to door in the nearby village and bring back a mustard seed. In India, mustard seed is a common spice, so she thinks that this task will be the easiest imaginable. But as she turns to go, the Buddha calls out, “There’s just one thing: the mustard seed must come from a house that has not known death.” So that was the catch, right? She soon realized that everyone was bound to her by grief, and this realization propels her on her way to enlightenment.

When post-punk Australian rock star Nick Cave’s 15 year old son died from a fall at their home in England, he found comfort in this story, and he included it in the haunting last track of his 2019 album “Ghosteen”:
“Everybody’s losing someone
Everybody’s losing someone”

In The Way of the Storyteller, Ruth Sawyer’s essential work, which was first published, astonishingly, in 1942, she tells us, “To be a good storyteller one must be gloriously alive. It is not possible to kindle fresh fires from burned-out embers. I have noticed that the best of the traditional storytellers whom I have heard have been those who live close to the heart of things—to the earth, the sea, wind and weather.” I would add that one of the elements that contributes to the a glorious aliveness of the best traditional storytellers was the unavoidability of death. Among their preparations for their craft was having gone door to door asking for mustard seeds.

Now, it’s one thing to accompany one another when we’re walking down the trail elbow to elbow, but it seems to me an interesting question how we go about accompanying each other when one of us is on a stage. How do we practice accompaniment when telling stories in a performance setting?

I guess my goal is to remember what Brother Blue taught us, that storytelling is “God speaking to God about God.” To do all we can to make myself a fit vehicle for the story to come through. On Simon Brooks’s podcast “Conversations with Storytellers,” Megan Wells talks about how to best serve the story. “I try to get Megan out of the way,” she says, “but Megan is my instrument.”

Paradoxically, the stories we choose to tell should also be vehicles for the best of who we are, the bottles into which we decant what is most essential in ourselves. What stories would we tell if we knew we were going to die? Remember Scheherezade, under a death sentence that lasted 1001 days who told her stories to save her sisters.

Now, I have another little Spain story I want to tell you. I think this is where it fits, and we’re winding down, so this is where it’s gonna go:

That day when Andrea, Fiona and I went to Alcalá de Henares, despite its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the first glimpse of the gritty edge of the city from the train station was a bit underwhelming, but once we found our way into the maze of narrow medieval streets in the old center, we were charmed. It was mid-morning, and the pedestrian-only areas were beginning to fill up with people of all ages, families out for some Holy Week conviviality, dipping in and out of shops, calling their children and their dogs, stopping at outdoor tables for coffee and pastries. Alcalá is a town of ordinary enough beauty, with just an ordinary late Gothic cathedral and run of the mill Roman ruins that in a country as rich in these things as Spain, there are not noticeable numbers of foreign tourists.

So there we were out with our near and dear people-watching all the other people out with their near and dear. And after our first coffee and pastry stop we made our way over to the main objective of our visit, the Miguel de Cervantes Birthplace-Museum. After an efficient tour, we stopped at the bench out front and talked with the statues of Don Quijote and Sancho, and watched other people posing with the two of them, and then we wandered on.

We came to an open plaza, an expanse of cobblestones surrounded by an ancient hospital where Cervantes’s surgeon-father had bled people, and a convent, and other imposing stone edifices associated with the university. And then we looked up. Fiona pointed out an enormous nest made of twigs and sticks high above us on the edge of a roof, a broad bowl of tree debris at least three feet in diameter. And then Andrea said, “look, there’s another one,” and then we were seeing them everywhere, high on the ramparts, towers, belfries, peaks and all the other highest features of all the old stone buildings. My first thought was that they must belong to eagles or something, but then we saw another woman looking up, and saw a spreading, white, gangly bird with a long red beak landing in one of the nests. We asked her what it was: “Un cigüeña,” she said. A stork! The white stork, to be specific, or, for you biologists or Latin speakers, Cigonia Cigonia. Storks have been large in human folklore for thousands of years; Aesop helped give them a good rep, as did Has Christian Andersen, and then, of course, there’s all the thankful babies they’ve brought into our lives.

So, after that initial sighting, we kept glancing upward as we walked the streets waiting for a Holy Week procession to start, though we tried to stay aware enough of our earthly plane so as not to bump into anyone or trip and fall on our faces. We began to see storks and more storks, in the air with wings outspread, gingerly stepping about their roofs, or resting in their nests. They were a completely whimsical, unexpected treat, a population of curious creatures right out of a folktale, and they came to represent for me all that we miss when we get too focused on our normal plane of existence and all its distractions, when we forget to look above the brims of our baseball caps. Keep that channel open.

To be good narrative accompaniers where we live, we should strive to be local, farm-to-table storytellers. Elevate ordinary people, who look like your neighbors. New Hampshire storytellers should tell stories about New Hampshire people, at least some of the time. Nobody else will. Redirect attention from the multi-trillion dollar mega-culture that swallows everything.

And, in order to be good company on the road, surround yourself with love. Everyone you know, or everyone who sees you perform doesn’t need to know you’re surrounded by love, it can be your secret superpower.

Let me give you an idea of where I’m going with this: When I was in the thick of building my house, I listened to a lot of podcasts. And sometimes something just knocked my socks off, and I had to get down off the ladder, or stop whatever I was doing and pick up a black sharpie and write down what was said on the wall before I forgot. So, this one day, I was cross-training, listening to “The Working Songwriter” podcast, and Joe, the host, was interviewing folksinger-songwriter Iris Dement. The interview was winding down, and he still hadn’t asked her about John Prine, one of my favorite musicians and songwriters, who has accompanied me all my adult life, and been integral to my soundtrack. But then the interviewer says, “I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about your legendary association with John Prine.”

So she told about how a mutual friend had gotten John to write the liner notes for her first record, and how she had first met him when he showed up and stood in the back of the little tiny room at her record release party at the Bluebird in Nashville, and then Joe asked, “What would you say you took away from him creatively?” She hemmed and hawed. She paused. Then she said, “One thing that I always felt, when I’d sing with him, was that it was never just John and it was never just me. I felt like everybody that ever knew and loved us was on that stage with us. It was a very communal sense when I sang with John, because his presence in the world, and what he was doing, was so entrenched in the human community.”

I think that’s as deep as accompaniment gets, and that’s what we’re going for. When I tell stories, up on stage or out in the audience, Michael Parent is always there, and Uncle George, and Peter Brodeur is always somewhere on the edge, taking pictures. And if I’m lucky, and their schedules allow, Brother Blue and Ruth are sitting right there in the front row.

Now, Fiona didn’t just start blurting out accidental existential profundities last month. One September when she was on the cusp of ten, she and I spent part of an afternoon at the Remick Farm harvest festival. We carved pumpkins, drank cider, went on a hayride, did the little corn maze, and gloried in the company of friends, but the time came when we needed to head out to catch up with Andrea at another event. I gave Fiona the five minute warning, and she uttered these immortal words: “Papa! We didn’t come here to leave.” Maybe not, but leave we must, eventually, and as a tiny little dress rehearsal, right now it’s time for me to leave the podium.

Thank you for accompanying me this morning, and always. See you out on the road.

Buen Camino!