Their story, yours and mine — is what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them. - William Carlos Williams
Steve Seliy from the Consortium for Public Education just read this to me over the phone, and I’m returned to the ultimate goal of this project, which is human understanding. It seems like an almost contrived thing, we hear this phrase so often, but the only thing contrived is when “human understanding” lives like an intellectual concept rather than an event of the heart - there is nothing contrived about being touched and inspired.
Last night I took my own children to the Beechview library’s Halloween party. Leo was a bank robber and Eli was some kind of dollar-store, polyester ghoul (black and purple - yikes). I met up with Jeff Baron of Saturday Light Brigade, who whipped up a recording studio in a corner. We smiled as kids came out of the woodwork to record scary stories. Jeff chatted with some teenagers, inviting them to tell their stories. I observed, fascinated and inspired by the spaces in between the storytelling, these gems of human understanding: a focused mother and son, quietly listening together; a group of teens high fiving each other after one shared about their new rock band; a headsetted tween quietly claiming, “Hey, that was a great story” after listening to how another child overcame a bully.
While it will be a LOT of great fun, and perhaps even impressive, to record 25,000 stories, my take-away is the exchange - what happens in between, around, and because of these stories – the wonderfully human moments where we encourage and learn from one another, just by listening.
- Jen Saffron