Just a Story?

Once upon a time, there was a poor farmer who had a cow..... Once upon a time, in a country far away lived a princess.... Many of us remember bedtime stories that began like this.

But stories are for children aren`t they? Us grown-ups are not interested in stories. We want the `facts`, the hard truth. But if you think about it, our whole world is built on stories.

Has anybody read `A Short History of Progress` by Ronald Wright? His `story` of the history of Easter Island brought home to me just how important, for good or ill, stories can be.

According to Wright the ancient people of Easter Island, came under the spell of a powerful story. The story compelled them to fashion all those magnificent stone heads that still attract tourists in our time. But Easter Island is empty, pretty much. Only the weathered, broken heads remain.

The Easter Islanders believed that these great heads (moai) were necessary to honour their ancestors. Each ``clan`` competed to honour their ancestry with larger and larger images. Of course they needed timber logs to roll the images into place and the images themselves took up arable land. So, in the end, there were no trees left on the island, nothing to hold the soil in place and much of the arable land covered with stone heads.

`By the end there were more than a thousand moai, one for every ten islanders in their heyday. But the god days were gone -- gone with the good earth, which had been carried away on the endless wind and washed by flash floods into the sea. The people had been seduced by a kind of progress that becomes a mania, an ìdeological pathology,`as some anthropologists call it..`

The Easter Islanders had a fatal story. At first it seemed to work for them. And then it became destructive. Did no one question the story? Did no one look out across the island and seeing the devastation say ``Wait a minute!`` these moai in which we have invested the meaning of our culture are killing us! Is this what our ancestor`s wanted?

A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright, 2004.

Our civilization has its own `meaning stories.` How well are they working for us? I ask myself, what personal stories give my life meaning? Are these creative or destructive for me?

Today`s Story

The Selkie Wife