Sometime last summer, I can’t remember exactly when, my sister Patti called to tell me what I had to do now that I had retired. “You have to take this trip with me, it’s a small group of women, we travel to Morocco, the price is great, the trip has been highly recommended!” I asked if I could think about it. “What’s there to think about? It’s going to be great, you’ll travel all over Morocco, you’ll learn new things, do it.” I told her I had just registered for classes at South Mountain Community College and was looking forward to earning a degree in Storytelling. “You’ll get stories! You won’t miss out! You’ll love it!”
This conversation went on for a few weeks, until finally I realized the path of least resistance was to say yes to whatever Patti suggested. Even though she is in the younger set of our family of ten, she has earned her status as the Bossiest, because she is always Right. So not only did I say yes to Morocco, but also a week in Spain, and a almost a week in New York City. We were gone for thirty whole days. I ran out of toothpaste, eye gel, contact lens, vitamins, and clean clothes. But thanks to Patti, I found a new and exotic culture, new friends, and an even deeper appreciation for Patti. But most of all, I discovered a whole new way of finding stories.
“Create a picture in the listener’s head,” says master storyteller Donald Davis. But what if you have nothing but pictures in your head? I have often wondered how to bring these disparate images to life. What did they mean? What was the point?
As I traveled around Morocco and Spain with my beautifully organized sister, with delightful new friends and fellow travelers, taking in sights and sounds and tastes and experiencing the exhilaration and discomfort that comes with the new, I would wonder: where are the stories? I can’t make heads or tails of this, let alone beginning, middle or end. 
Returning to class after this five week foray, our teacher Liz Warren had us playing around with the short “wisdom” tales of Nasreddin Hodja. Equally absurd and profound, reading these short and breezy stories put me back at the medinas of Fez and the raucous public square of Marrakesh; brought back the dizzying array of vendors and shops crowding the marketplaces; plunked me back down in the stillness of the Sahara surrounded by looming sand dunes and not far from Nomad tents.
Those images don’t just inform a story from that locale though. Those images remind me that when we keep our senses open, we absorb all kinds of wonderful memories, memories that can be pulled up and woven through a story, memories that can serve as an unspoken feeling that underlies a story, memories that can enrich the landscape of our telling. Did I find new stories to tell from my travels? Of course I did—but I am not sure yet what they are. I can just feel them deep beneath the surface. I can feel them someday bursting forth and surprising me. That’s the joy of storytelling. And why I’ll keep “yes” to new experiences as long as I can.
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