Tell Me a Story Podcast

The Invention

We wish, all of us, to exceed our own inventionsto create and then to go beyond that creation,to enter into it and make it live,breathing life into the lifeless,stirring the immovable.

We fail, but we continue.

We invent machine after machine,each exceeding the next,becoming more refined,more capable,more effective.

And still we build,  paint     dance        sing           writeagain and again,ever aiming to excel.

The direction is obvious:We wish to build the perfect machine.

We are aiming for ourselves.

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One Simple Prayer

All it takes to release negativityis one simple prayer.

Say that prayer.

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On Seeing the Sentient Flying Flowers of Pegasus II for the First Time

A yel-low flower fellinto my handandwhen I touched itI crushed it

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I know how it feels to grow old.The time and the temperature never relate.It's always too cold.And it's always too late.

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Laurie Weiss and her husband went to dinner with old friends after a day at a professional conference in Montreal. Their friends picked a Mexican restaurant which was supposed to be quiet and pleasant.

Now, Laurie is a highly sensitive person whose body rejects highly spiced food and loud noises, so the evening did not go well. Waiters kept promising food Laurie could eat but delivering food that made her mouth burn and induced violent coughing. As they sat there, several very loud families arrived and the mariachis began to play trumpets! Can you imagine how stressed Laurie felt?

Laurie excused herself while her husband paid the bill. She went outside into a beautiful quiet evening to calm herself down. She did some breathing exercises and tapping so she thought she was fine. Then the friend came out and asked her if she was okay. She told him, truthfully, that she was. He asked her to describe what happened, and she did her best to explain how her body had become extremely tense.

He asked if she would try something new and had her repeat some words she barely understood. Suddenly she experienced a whole new level of deep relaxation of the remaining tension that she had not even been aware of before. She was stunned! She asked what he had done, and he told her he had used a new European technique called Logosynthesis.

Since that encounter in 2010, Laurie’s life-long stress reaction to noise simply disappeared. Another change is that after her first training weekend, which she had been reluctant to schedule because of her stress reaction to the intense overstimulation of airplane travel, she flew home and simply forgot to be stressed. She has been able to travel on airplanes without any particular reaction ever since. Sadly, she still can’t manage spicy food.

After several years of study and supervision Laurie and her husband have become the first and (as of 2016) only certified practitioners and basic trainers of Logosynthesis in the United States.

Excerpted from Letting It Go: Relieve Anxiety and Toxic Stress in Just a Few Minutes Using Only Words (Rapid Relief with Logosynthesis®) by Laurie Weiss

Amazon: http://www.BooksbyLaurie.com/go

Website: http://www.LaurieWeiss.com

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The following podcast is excerpted from an article written by Steven Schlozman of Storytellers of New Mexico:

Stories matter.

That’s not just an opinion. That’s not an axiom or a homily or a saying or even a pithy bumper sticker slogan. That’s a genuine biological imperative. There’s a reason we’ve been trading stories with each other since the time when we could trade anything at all. Our stories—those we share over dinner, the narratives we put down on paper, the arcs in movies and plays we scrutinize—these stories literally keep us whole.

Stories are our brains’ opposable thumbs. Without stories, we could not grasp the importance of an idea. We could not empathize with a friend. We’d even have trouble making plans for our future. If we ignore the importance of stories, then we ignore ourselves.

Storytelling is at the very core of our identities. As is often the case with fictional narratives, the truth of what we say comes not from the facts of the stories themselves, but from the feelings that these facts engender. …

If all we had were what the historians dryly tell us, can you imagine ever venturing anywhere new? Would we have ever gone to the moon if all we knew were the barest of facts?

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Here is a short story that originally appeared in Rhoda Yee’s 1975 cookbook, Chinese Village Cookbook.

Dinner was eaten early in the village, usually around four-thirty or five, and bedtime was around seven or a little later in summer.

Often families would sit out in front of their houses and visit with neighbors. My grandmother was a marvelous storyteller, and we kids used to sit by the hour listening to some of her hair-raising ghost stories.

Her stories were made even more scary when the night was dark, the only other sounds were cricket songs and frog mating calls, and the only lights were faint glimmers from dancing fireflies.

The women liked to get together and cook, sew, quilt, or embroider. But, best of all, they love to play mah jong, a form of gin rummy using carved ivory tiles instead of cards. The men, too, enjoyed mah jong, but they preferred fan tan, a game similar to dominoes. They’d often get together at the one and only general store in the village for their bull sessions.

We kids didn’t have any ready-made toys to play with. They all were hand made. For instance, the girls would use two ends of burned incense sticks to make a cross. We’d pretend it was a doll, and we’d cut out scraps from leftover fabrics to make tops and trousers for our dolls.

Another popular homemade toy was the swallow, made with three chicken wing feathers tied together. We’d stick the feathers through the centers of small stacks of tissue paper cut into 1-inch round circles. The bottom was weighted with a coin. The idea of the game was to kick the swallow with the inside of one’s foot as many times as possible without having it land on the ground. Some kids were so accomplished, they could keep it going 100 times or more! When we became more advanced, we’d try different kinds of kicks or switching kicks between the left and right feet.

Many of the games we played were similar to the ones kids play in the U.S. We’d often go into the hills to hunt tigers and pick wild berries, or we’d go to the rice paddies and catch field mice and water snakes. Like kids everywhere, we were mischievous little devils.

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Here’s a lesson on gratitude, relationships, and love as told by George Strait in his #1 song, I Hate Everything (Keith Stegall and Gary Harrison, composers and lyricists):

He was sitting there beside me throwing doubles down.When he ordered up his third one, he looked around.Then he looked at me.Said I do believeI'll have one more.He said I hate this bar and I hate to drink,But on second thought tonight I thinkI hate everything.

Then he opened up his billfold and threw a $20 down,And a faded photograph fell out and hit the ground.And I picked it up.He said thank you, bud.I put it in his hand.He said I probably ought to throw this one away'Cause she's the reason I feel this way.I hate everything.

I hate my job. And I hate my life.And if it weren't for my two kids, I'd hate my ex-wife.I know I should move on and try to start again,But I just can't get over her leaving me for him.Then he shook his head and looked down at his ringSaid I hate everything.

He said that one bedroom apartment where I get my mail,Is really not a home. It's more like a jail.With a swimming poolAnd a parking lot view,Man, that's just great.I hate summer, winter, fall and springRed and yellow, purple, blue and green.I hate everything.

I hate my job. And I hate my life.And if it weren't for my two kids, I'd hate my ex-wife.I know I should move on and try to start again,But I just can't get over her leaving me for him.Then he shook his head and looked down at his ringSaid I hate everything.

So I pulled out my phoneand I called my house.I said, Babe, I'm comin' home.We're gonna work this out.I paid for his drinks,And I told him thanks.Thanks for everything.

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Let us pray.

Today we pray for all the people who have died and who will die from the violence and terror now taking place in Afghanistan.

We pray for the women who have been beaten, raped, disfigured, or killed in Afghanistan.

We pray for the American soldiers who have given their lives or limbs in the service of a greater good.

We pray for the Afghans who are being killed or terrorized by the Taliban rule.

We pray for all the people at the Kabul airport. We pray that they get home safely.

We pray for all the stranded Americans who may end up dead or as hostages to a cruel regime.

We pray for the American leaders who have made so many mistakes during this time.

We pray for the souls and lives of the victims of Taliban terror, killings, and misrule.

God bless all of them.

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Let us pray.

Today we pray for the Taliban in Afghanistan. They think they’ve won a great victory, but that victory is only of this world.

They have not won the true victory of life.

We pray the Taliban discover the true victory.

We pray they discover the true life.

We pray that the world is stronger, more beautiful, more true, more peaceful when they do.

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