Wednesday wisdom: Storytelling

A weekly Wednesday Wisdom post with two or three profound or beautiful thoughts on a theme related to Paganism and childbearing. An invitation to meditate or just to pause a moment and consider.

Storytelling, remembering, recording, myth-making…

“Through years of listening to my mother’s stories of her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves, but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories – like her life – must be recorded.” -Alice Walker

“The erotic charge that […] lit up the performance of giving birth also seemed to light up the stories they told about it. Many of the stories I heard were not specifically sexual but, in the telling, were filled to overflowing with the kind of intimacy, excitement, pleasure, and passion that articulated itself in and through the birthing body they hailed—a body that, in being given, gave, that exceeded its limits in joy and strength, that managed, like Demeter retrieving Persephone from hell, ‘to go and get the baby on another planet / and bring the baby back.’”
–Della Pollack, Telling Bodies, Performing Birth (via First The Egg)

And a bonus link to Molly’s Talk Birth post about stories.

What story in you needs to be told?

PS. I’d love to publish more Pagan birth stories here. Please send yours to paganfamilieseditor@gmail.com if you’d like to share.