Robert Gale Ongley

Month: July 2021

  • THE ART OF STORYTELLING

    I was born into a family of storytellers. My father was a quiet man, but when he opened up and launched into a story involving something in his life, he could talk for a half-hour uninterrupted. My older brothers have shown the same talent for recounting an incident at length. I have a tendency to do the same, but I prefer my medium to be the written word and I like most to make stuff up. My grandmother Gertrude wrote a book of poetry titled Her Book of Memories. I would love to have heard the yarns of my line of grandparents back to England. Perhaps something in my DNA is wired into my penchant for storytelling.

    Show and Tell

    I respect the raw telling of a story by voice and memory. That’s how it was done in the beginning. Eventually, stories were written down and then printed on a press. Obviously, many classic stories have been told in writing, but I’m thinking here of storytelling in the verbal tradition. I can imagine human beings were telling about the events of the day as soon as speech was developed enough to do so. “You should have seen that sabre-tooth tiger, woman! I had him on my spear, but he bit it off and ran away.”

    By the Middle Ages, storytelling was a major form of entertainment. There were professional storytellers, many of whom were in great demand. They worked for anyone who could afford their services, whether it was an individual such as a nobleman or a village that pitched in the money. It wasn’t only entertainment. Often, there was educational or historical value in the stories that were related, passing down information that was like something you might find at a local historical society today.

    Here’s an example of a summarized tale that was told in numerous countries, handed down from generation to generation. I’ve pulled an excerpt from a website called The History Press, an article written by David Tonge called Medieval Tales from Many Lands. “Stories like the one about a foolish man who goes to a doctor in the hope of getting a medicine that will help him find his lost donkey. The doctor duly prescribes the fool a potion that makes him fart so loudly and so long that it sounds like a donkey braying and so attracts his own beast! It is a story that made many a medieval person laugh long, loud and lustily long ago and it still has the power to amuse today, especially children who love fart jokes when many a grown up does not.”

    Storytelling Today

    There has been a resurgence in the popularity of storytelling in recent years. I’ve done a little at an open mic I attend sometimes. Primarily, it’s a music night, but various art forms are encouraged and storytelling is among those.

    Maybe I’ll tell one like this at the open mic in the not too distant future. There’s not enough room to tell the whole story here, but I’ll give you a taste. In 2004, a good friend of mine and I took a road trip into Colorado. We went deep into the San Juan Range of the Rockies, then started back toward home by going along the western slope. We visited Ouray, a picturesque little town at an elevation of about 7800 feet. We headed south and found the road was full of hairpin turns. The worst part, though, was the fact that the outer lanes of the road had a shoulder no wider than a foot with no guard rails for long stretches. There was a precipitous drop of about a 1000 feet throughout. No trees or anything else to break a fall. My friend pointed out how easy it would be to go over the edge. I was driving and that sent me into a state of near-panic. I became hyper-aware of the potential for a horrible, violent death. I began shaking, even to the point of having one arm rise and fall radically. I envisioned myself succumbing to an urge to turn the wheel intentionally to the right and send us off the road and into the view. I really didn’t know if I was going to make it through this stretch of road.”

    The story goes on, but I’ll leave it there. Good drama, right? This art can touch the entire spectrum of human emotion. The campfire horror story can make it hard to fall asleep. A stand-up comic is often an excellent storyteller. Louis CK is an outstanding example who can make us laugh and cringe simultaneously. Spalding Gray was an actor who helped revive storytelling with a one-man show back in the 1980s who explored darker emotions through his tales.

    Getting Involved

    There are plenty of opportunities out there to do some storytelling or listen to others. Meetup alone has 552 storytelling groups with over 318,000 members across many countries. The rise of Zoom and other teleconferencing apps has made it clear we can organize our own storytelling groups at no cost if we can just find a few people who would have an interest.

    So, storytelling holds excellent promise for enjoyable entertainment, deep reflection and an art form to cultivate. Connect with some storytellers! Keep up the tradition.

  • SUFFERING SUBDUED

    Buddha left us with The First Noble Truth. He acknowledged there is suffering in life. It’s evident that some form of suffering is present throughout much of the lives of us mortals. From quiet longing for better conditions for ourselves or others to dealing with intense physical pain, suffering has a way of finding us.

    Knowing how to handle suffering is a necessity if we want to make it through a day, let alone a work week, a season or a lifetime. There have been volumes written on the subject in one form or another. I’ll pull out a few references that will impart some wisdom, but I’ll share my own experience and views here because it’s what is most real to me. The main point of all this is to shine some light on how to relieve suffering, mainly the kind generated by the mind.

    The Problem With Suffering

    We tend to hate suffering. We try to avoid it, spend years setting up our lives to prevent it, investing considerable suffering along the way as a hedge against experiencing it in the future. “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” John Lennon said. Some of us immerse ourselves in it, giving up and acknowledging it. This wouldn’t be the worst thing if a person was embracing it in a healthy way. Unfortunately, the immersion method of dealing with suffering means agony.

    The problem, as I see it, is we stick ourselves to suffering. Working in a job you dread doing because you’re working toward a big payday or retirement at the end of your life is a way of attaching yourself to the suffering in exchange for a later reward. Living in an unhappy relationship, suffering through without working on it and creating it in a positive way, is sacrificing your life for something you may not even envision. Sinking into an apathetic acceptance of our ongoing failures will bring us a lifestyle of suffering.

    Well, we don’t have to suffer. At least, we don’t have to suffer endlessly. Life does bring us challenges, setbacks and tragedy. However, we suffer from these only if we take them on in a suffering frame of mind. We can moan our way to the end of time if we choose. Or not.

    To Rise Above

    In my recent yoga studies, I came across a prayer/affirmation I have found helpful in dealing with mental suffering. I state it repeatedly as written by Yogananda. “When fear or anger or any kind of suffering comes to me, I will view it as a spectator. I will separate myself from my experiences. At all costs, I will endeavor to retain my peace and happiness.” This is similar to a recommendation given by a counselor/minister friend of mine who suggested confronting this kind of suffering by looking at it objectively and thinking of it as interesting. These both can release a person from the grip of the obsessed mind.

    In the book titled The Art of Happiness, written by the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, an approach to human suffering is given. “The biggest problems in our lives are the ones that we inevitably have to face, like old age, illness, and death. Trying to avoid our problems or simply not thinking about them may provide temporary relief, but I think that there is a better approach. If you directly confront your suffering, you will be in a better position to appreciate the depth and nature of the problem. If you are in a battle, as long as you remain ignorant of the status and combat capability of your enemy, you will be totally unprepared and paralyzed by fear. However, if you know the fighting capability of your opponents, what sort of weapons they have and so on, then you’re in a much better position when you engage in the war. In the same way, if you confront your problems rather than avoid them, you will be in a better position to deal with them.”

    I now quote the book Buddhist Reflections on Everyday Life by Paramananda. “According to Buddhism, when we suffer, a possibility opens up, a crack appears in the habitual pattern of our lives. As with all opportunities, we then have a choice–we either enter our experience or do what we can to avoid it.

    “Meditation is a means by which we can enter more fully into our experience and, by doing so, deepen our understanding of it, and eventually move through it. When meditation is used just as a relaxation, to reduce suffering by avoiding it, it becomes a kind of spiritual aspirin taken to relieve the symptoms, rather than facing up to the deep-rooted patterns that lead to stress and unhappiness.”

    I want to make one clarification to remove any idea there’s a contradiction in what I’m presenting. Separating ourselves from our experiences can be done while entering “more fully into our experience.” In both cases, we can be calmly and objectively looking upon our suffering and the cause of it, not being all wrapped up in it and by it.

    Singin’ in the Rain

    By using these techniques, we can virtually smooth out those rough patches in the road. We know the bumps are there, but we ride over them without bouncing around in pain and misery.