Fairytales

Telling Tales

“’No, no,’ the djinn said, ‘I remember the story now.’ And so he told his tale and a marvelous one it was, too. When the djinn was through, the fisherman smiled. ‘That was a good story,’ he said, ‘but not as good as this one…’ And so the two spent the afternoon telling stories, until the fisherman noted the late hour. ‘I must leave soon, my friend,’ he told the djinn.”

Arabic Fairytale “The Fisherman and the Djinn,” In the Ever After, p.117)

          The Fairytale group, led by Jungian Analyst, Melissa Werner, met again last night—on Zoom, of course. We discussed this tale of a fisherman and a djinn, who has been imprisoned in a bottle for a thousand years by King Solomon. The fisherman is old and not having a lot of luck catching fish. The bottle is only one of the seemingly useless items he pulls out of the sea on this unlucky day. As it turns out, it contains a magic djinn, who isn’t interested in granting wishes, but wants only to kill the old man and escape. The fisherman manages to charm the djinn with a story, and in the course of telling it, entices him back into the bottle. The djinn may be magical, but perhaps he’s not the smartest djinn in the sea. At any rate, he and the old man exchange stories over the course of an afternoon and become friends. Eventually, the fisherman takes pity and grants the djinn his freedom. The story goes on, as fairytales often do, to a Sultan with a magic castle under a spell by an evil sorceress, but truly, the story is about the relationship between the old fisherman and the djinn. Bound together by their love of tales, they produce magic that restores wholeness to the kingdom.

          Telling stories is like that. When is the last time you sat on a dock for an afternoon and told stories? In the second half of life, or more like the forth quarter of life, when most of our years are in the past, we have many stories to tell—our true stories about people we knew and things we did way back when. We tell true stories, or mostly true anyway, we tell made-up stories, or stories we believe to be true, and ones we wish were true. We humans are all about stories—especially Southern humans. We write them into country music songs, tell them on summer nights when the fireflies are rising out of the grass, and around dinner tables while people linger over their coffee.

          I’m just finishing Wendell Berry’s book Jayber Crow, in which the protagonist is a barber in a small hamlet in the mountains of Kentucky in the early years of the 20^th century. It is replete with old men’s stories, told at random while Jayber is cutting their hair, or shaving them. Tales of life and love and women and farming—their tales, their lives. That’s what we do—we relive and embellish and remember our stories in order to rediscover, or perhaps discover for the first time, who we are and what our lives are about. The same thing happens in therapy offices and in 12-step groups all over the world. We are stories waiting to be told, and in the telling, we bring wholeness to the kingdom of us.

          While we are in isolation for the coronavirus, we have time to consider our stories—to write them down, to tell them to someone else. Why not do it and feel how restorative it is to tell the stories that best capture who you are. Your own fairytale is the best story of all.

                                                  In the Spirit,
                                                  Jan