Planting Roots in the Story

I suppose I’ve always had a love affair with The Story.  Although I didn’t always realize that’s just what it was.  At least that’s not what I called it.  I knew I loved to write.  I knew I loved all the things that stories are made of:  the characters and character development, the details of the moments, the plot, the tapestry of images and words and art.   I knew I liked to collect memories.  They lived in shoe boxes of stuff and in my photo albums and in my journals.

But it wasn’t until I started to document the characters and the details and the events in my own life, through photographs and through scrapbooking and through journaling, that I realized what I was really doing was: storytelling.  Not in a fictional sense of the word, and not in a “sit right back and you’ll hear a tale” kind of way, or even in a “when I was a young gal, we had to walk uphill (both ways!) in the snow with no shoes” kind of way.  This storytelling isn’t about tall tales or embellishments, it’s not about capturing, keeping or entertaining an audience.

It’s about documenting, about recording, about saying “I was here”, it’s about taking stock in life, it’s about celebrating the every day, it’s about finding your voice and getting to know yourself better, it’s about writing love letters to those I care about, it’s about keeping a family history, writing biographies and an autobiography, and it’s about building a legacy.  It’s about things that matter.  Not to the world.  Not to Tom, Dick or Harry or Lady Gaga.  Not to anyone else but those who matter to me.  The ones I love, the ones I hope to teach and to learn from, the ones I share myself and my life with.  I am recording our stories.  And in the process, I am *writing* my own.

Anyway…all that is to say, I have a spark for telling my story and I feel there is a value in documenting our days that pours out beyond the page and into our lives.  And I hope that this site will emerge as a source of inspiration and encouragement for anyone who finds themselves wanting to tell their own stories, whether they have a “pull” like I do, or if they feel like they don’t know where to start.  I hope that, together, we can tell record our memories and document our days in a more meaningful way by planting our roots in the story.