The Healing Power of Stories

by Daniel Taylor, Ph.D.

We live in stories the way fish live in water, breathing them in and out, bouyed up by them, taking from them our sustenance, but rarely concious of this element in which we exist. We are born into stories; they nurture and guide us through life; they help us know how to die. Stories make it possible for us to be human.

When the King Comes Home

by Caroline Stevermer

Life is short, as the wisdom of the ages has it, but fortunately art is long. I don't expect to understand much more of either than I already do. I was born with what wisdom I have, and the many years that I have lived served only to make the scantiness of that wisdom more evident. Though I do seem to do better than most people.

Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

No, I don't have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don't know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.

The Dance Boots

by Linda Legarde Grover

When she got home, she helped her mother and wrote letters. She read every day, silently in the morning and aloud before bed, from the only book in the house, the Bible. When the Indian agent's wife paid Mother for some ironing with a length of yellow calico, Henen cut and sewed a new blouse for Maggie on the new kitchen table--heavy and solid as a sow--that Baba had built right in the house. Sitting there one night, sewing with her delicate and even stitches, listening to Baba and Mother talk while they drank raspberry tea, listening to Nokom sucking on her pipe as she lit it with coal from the stove, Henen felt a tapping from within her belly, a lurch to the side. She hummed a song of gratitude.

The baby never moved again; instead, it shrank within Henen's belly, imperceptibly from day to day but nevertheless steadily from week to week. She began to reach for her belly when alone in the house, or in the outhouse, or when she forgot to keep her hands from idleness, searching in sickening composure for a small body, cupping her belly and using her fingers to prod a circle around the lump that every time she searched was harder, more dense, as the little body of her baby calcified and shrank to the shape and consistency of a robin's egg, until any appearance of a small saucepan shape that was a baby simply disappeared. And then, after that, every day, the spirit of her baby receded from her own and the others that continued to live, growing more and more distant, until when the children came back from school in June it had joined those other baby spirits who, because they were too small to walk, traveled to the other world on the east wind, which carried them gently in the sky, borne by visions of the Great Ojibwe Migration of long ago. Out of sight, they were mourned by bereft earth-bound mothers like Henen.

The Enchanted Castle

by E. Nesbit

And then it is as though a spring were touched, a fountain of light released. Everything changes. Or, rather, everything is revealed. There are no more secrets. The plan of the world seems plain, like an easy sum that one writes in big figures on a child's slate. One wonders how one can ever have wondered about anything. Space is not; every place that one has seen or dreamed of is here. Time is not; into this instant is crowded all that one has ever done or dreamed of doing. It is a moment and it is eternity. It is the centre of the universe and it is the universe itself. The eternal light rests on and illuminates the eternal heart of things.

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Natural Prozac

by Dr. Joel Robertson, with Tom Monte

As every adult knows, goodness and weakness exist in everyone; similarly, every situation--no matter how good or bad--contains difficulties and opportunities, Moreover, each of us helps to create--by our own efforts, behaviors, and attitudes--the outcome and the quality of every situation we find ourselves in.