Story as the Heart of Language
So, here I am, not an anthropologist but an English major with twenty books on brain theory and linguistics piled under my desk, trying to distill a vast body of scientific inquiry and relate it to my interest in story. The point that fascinates me from my foraging is that human beings are biologically wired for verbal activity: we have to tell stories! And it seems obvious that any skill embedded this thoroughly into the biological structure of our brains deserves attention; more than attention, it deserves preservation, study, and tending.

In terms of preservation, language teaches us without our having to directly experience. Every other living thing must learn through direct experience, which is much riskier. Baby bunnies and baby humans should not play in the road. The bunnies who survive are the ones who figure out how to hop out of the way at the sound or vibration of wheels. The children who survive are the ones whose mothers effectively communicate danger and watch over them until reasoning capacity sets in (which can vary from age four to thirty). When my niece was still in preschool, I remember squatting with her over the pancaked carcass of a dead rabbit, driving home my point about why she should never run into the street.

In terms of study, language emotionally moves us to love and hate, and can motivate us to change the whole course of our lives based on secondhand information, hearsay, and example. This aspect of language has been a blessing and a curse throughout history, and probably the source of a lot of history itself! Language soothes or riles the heart, even if we are not directly affected by the events or experiences recounted. Simply hearing stories about other people can cause us to either embrace or expel those people from our hearts and consideration. I was born an American because the stories of the New World that filtered back to Britain and Norway inspired my people to leave everything they knew, their families, their countries, their languages, and their an-cestral homes to seek new lives in a new land.

And in terms of tending, language can lift us beyond the borders of our individual lives to imagine realities of other people, other times and places; to empathize with other beings; to extend our supposing far into the universe; to even imagine God. Through the power of words, language expands the borders of our self-concept and places us in a context and continuum of human experience. In just five to seven million years our use of language has evolved from a survival technique to remind us to get out of the road, to encompass and communicate our capacities for contemplation, imagination, and the ecstasy of insight!

The split that occurred in the course of our evolution from ape to human is mirrored in the brain: we have two lobes, two ways of thinking, two ways of processing language. And while the language center is located in the left hemisphere, the capacity to generate poetry, art, and story seems to be located in the right. We are cognitive/left-brained and metaphoric/right-brained. Scientists, being cognitive, have focused most of their study about language on brain theory and I, being creative, have focused most of my study about story on experiential observation and participation in its power to heal and motivate.

To my way of thinking, the ultimate aim is to be whole-brained: to take in information and anchor it in narrative so that language fulfills its amazing functions. Whole-brained responses create language patterns that are associative. We take information and embed it in story and we take story and embed it with information so that skills and information can be passed from generation to generation, or from group to group. This is automatic. It's how we teach children. It's how we socialize the individual to the group. It's how we create culture.

And for most of human history, whole-brained learning has been how we preserved and taught all the wisdom we accrued. Story and information were chanted and drummed and danced around the fire. Decisions were made within a spiritual context, and elaborate prayers and rituals accompanied the counsel offered by elders and leaders. Only recently, in the rise of the Euro-American culture, has this holistic modality split severely in two, with intellect and science given more credence than story and wisdom. We need both: the cognitive and the creative, the statement and the story.

The Four Gifts
In serving as the heart of language, story imparts four distinct gifts. Each of the descriptions of these gifts below is followed by a corresponding chapter in the story of my Scottish sojourn.

1. Story creates context. Context is the comprehension of what the story means. Context is the lived experience of understanding that resides underneath the spoken experience. Context sets events in time and place. "Once upon a time..." or "It was a dark and stormy night..." or "Last Tuesday after the ballgame..." are all examples of context setting. Context verbally places us in the world of the story. It opens the portal of imagination and identification.
    
   Rain finally caught us in the Scottish valley. We hustled into the museum café for tea, shaking off wet jackets. The sounds of passing cars on the highway outside changed to that slick whine of tires on wet pavement. Cupping cold hands around hot milky tea, we sipped, ate scones, and read our educational brochures. We settled into the shelter of the Kilmartin House to write in our journals while dusk gathered around us. We would look up from time to time and stare out into the valley, drawing the reality of the place into our words. This is what we would take with us: the story we made of this moment; the emotional sense of connection to the land, to the people who walked here thousands of years ago depositing stones, and to the people who left here hundreds of years ago depositing themselves in America.
    
2. Context highlights relationship. When context is set, the story starts happening to real people, and the events in the story activate relationships. With or without names, people in a story are identified by relationship: "I had this friend...," "I knew this woman at work...," "My great aunt Ellen...," "This little boy in Costa Rica..." are all examples of identification by relationship to the speaker. Even if the characters in the story are far removed, we begin to see them and to imagine a relationship to them as well.
    
   Only when we got back to the B&B did we hear about the accident. An American schoolteacher had been killed when a lorry going around a curve had tipped over and crushed the man inside his rental car. My traveling companion and I were busing around these backroads because we had not trusted ourselves to drive in a country where every instinct for left and right would have to be reversed. We were shaken at this news. How far to come to die in another country, body and metal twisted together. People came up to us in the pub and said how sorry they were. We wondered aloud, "Where did he come from? Was he traveling alone? Are there students who miss him tonight? How will they inform his family? Is the lorry driver all right?" We could not answer these questions and went to bed tenderly aware of life's precariousness.
    
3. Context and relationship change behavior and lead to holistic and connected action. When story starts happening in a real scene with real people involved we start putting ourselves into the story. This is vicariousness, the human ability to imagine ourselves into relationship with experiences that are not our own but are - through story - able to inform, inspire, and activate us as though they were direct experience. While we listen to such stories, we evaluate the actions and reactions of the characters in the tale. We identify with the person who behaves most like we would behave, or would want to behave. We are critical of people who behave differently, and learn from their experience: to anticipate and prepare ourselves to behave well in a similar situation.
    
   This part of Scotland is a series of small towns with a lot of rolling pastureland in between. The next day we headed back toward Oban on the local bus and listened as the local people got on and off and talked amongst themselves. One woman knew the lorry driver's cousin. Another woman was the neighbor of the ambulance driver. Something had happened that stirred them more than usual. When the accident occurred it had blocked both lanes of the highway and required crews from several communities to clear the scene. A story began to emerge: There was a woman who had been driving just behind the schoolteacher's car. She skidded to a halt and ran toward the vehicles. Without seeming to worry for her own safety, she checked on the lorry driver, who was conscious and hanging securely in his seat belt, then she eased her way into the squashed car and stayed with the man until authorities arrived.
    
   "The man's dead," she told the constable, "but the lorry driver doesn't seem too badly hurt." She gave the police the details of her witnessing and asked that her name be kept private, except she wanted to know how to contact the man's family. She wanted them to know he had not died alone.
    
   We were the last off the bus when the driver turned and stopped us for a moment. "You're Americans, aren't you?" he said. "I know you didn't know the man, but I know the woman. Her father died in a car wreck when he was vacationing in France ten years ago. She made a vow that if God ever gave her the chance to help a stranger, she would do what she wished had been done for him - she'd be the arms of an angel."
    
4. Connected action becomes a force for restoring/restorying the world. When we come upon a story like this one, or participate in a moment that has such rich potential to teach us how to be better human beings, we want to pass it along. We want the story to live, to outlive the participants. We are drawn to our heroic nature, particularly to the private unsung moments that are often our finest interactions. When these elements combine into real scenes, real people, real inspiration, the personal becomes universal - the characters lose their specificity and become everyman/everywoman. Whether this story takes place in Scotland, or France, or India doesn't really matter, because of course it has taken place everywhere and forever. Like the story of the Good Samaritan, it is an archetypal story that reminds us that the choice to be our best self is always with us, waiting for that skid in the road.
    
   So the bus driver respected her privacy, but told us in parting, "I dunna think she'd mind you tell the tale. It's what I'd wish myself, wouldn't you?" We stood in silence a minute, each of us imagining ourselves being the one who was held, being the one with the courage and heart to hold. And as we exited the bus we made a vow - if ever God gives us the chance to help a stranger, we will do what that moment calls for, attempting to be the arms of an angel, in honor of a lady in Scotland, in honor of her father, in honor of an unnamed schoolteacher, in honor of putting goodness back into the world.

Tending Our Fire
Some of the people who left the hills and valleys of Great Britain ended up in the hills and valleys of Kentucky and Tennessee in the southeastern United States. They burrowed into the landscape to preserve a way of life that honored their origins. The Appalachian hill folk kept their Celtic dances and music and their southern drawl remained spiked with brogue and burr. They made a variety of homemade whiskey and proudly - sometimes violently - kept their clans.

At the onset of World War II, under an agency called the Tennessee Valley Authority, the U.S. government decided to provide electricity to southeastern rural America by constructing a huge hydroelectric dam on the Tennessee River. Riding on heightened patriotism and the need for defense, the agency pushed the project forward with apparent populist support. The folks most deeply affected, those whose valley would be logged and flooded and who would be required to relocate from lands where they had subsisted for generations, were enlisted to work on the project as a way of buying their cooperation. In her book The Wild East: A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains, Margaret Lynn Brown writes, "TVA relocation experts emphasized the importance of employment connections to speedy, cooperative removal. State and county government officials actually provided TVA with lists of families receiving public welfare..."

Brown later writes, "TVA targeted [the towns of] Bushnell, Judson, and Almond first, because soon after the gates of the dam closed, all three would be underwater. To achieve these removals, TVA exercised extraordinary power of eminent domain... By statute, TVA could decide which lands were needed, employ its own appraisers, and make a nonnegotiable offer to landowners. If an owner refused to accept this onetime offer, his property was condemned."

In its own way, the Fontana Dam is a version of a standing stone. In an inflammatory atmosphere of threat, pressure, and red tape, the poor, disrespected hill folk were worked hard and scattered. "As families left and removed their homes, communities were reduced to unsightly heaps of unwanted lumber and buildings and then burned by TVA clearance crews." Like the hills and valleys of Scotland, change was coming to the Tennessee River valley, and no one could stop it.

In one of these valleys where residents were required to move, everyone had taken the government's offer and relocated except one old woman. Whenever TVA officials or social welfare officers approached her cabin, she chased them off with a burning brand lifted out of the fire she kept in a pit in the dirt yard of her dilapidated cabin. To the officials, the property didn't look like much, certainly not worth saving, but they could not convince her to leave.

In a news report published in the Sylva Herald and Ruralite newspaper in October 1943, such a situation was described to reporters: "There is an old woman who lives back in the Proctor area, two miles up in the cove, where it is impossible to take a car. She's rather feeble. [Her son] said his mother had not been to Proctor in forty years and had never been to Bryson City, twenty-five miles away. She had never been in an automobile."

When officials expressed their dilemma to one of the woman's former neighbors, he promised to help. "I know what to do. I'll go get her." The man drove his tractor with a front loader onto the old woman's property, scooped up the fire, and carried it down the valley to a relocation site where he deposited the fire. Soon behind him came the woman pushing a wheelbarrow with her worldly goods.

"What did you do?" asked the officials.

"Well, this woman is a keeper of the flame. That's been her family duty in these hills for long as we remember. They kept the fire, made sure it never went out, so we always knew where to get a new coal if we needed it. She's the last. She'd never leave the fire."

In the misty hills of Scotland where this woman's family left the old fire for the unknown, I wonder if this is what I came for - not the stones but the spark. I came to get a coal from the hearth because I needed to rekindle my dedication to the story, to the long, long story that is older than anything we know. Once this understanding starts to live in me I am ready to come home, to find my relocated people; to take two stones, rub them together, make fire, and enter the story again.

What is the story you're tending, the one you'll never let be put out?

Let's start there.

Tell me that story.

© 2007, Christina Baldwin, All Rights Reserved

Excerpted from the book Storyccatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives Through the Power and Practice of Story © 2007 by Christina Baldwin. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. or 800-972-6657 ext. 52. Storycatcher is available for purchase now at your local bookseller, or by clicking on the cover image above.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christina Baldwin is the author of Storycatcher: Making Sense of our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story. She has devoted her life work to helping people honor the importance of story. www.storycatcher.net.