war stories

Last night I had dinner with the couple I married and our friend who had caught on fire during the ceremony. His bandages were off, and he looked like my imagining of what a chemical peel would look like; tender, raw and reddened. Most importantly, he was not on fire. Our memories of him can now move forward, being replaced with images of him laughing, of him washing dishes. Over the evening, which included my housemates and two others who had been there, the conversation would regularly return to the retrieval of moments on that hill. All of us held different facets of what happened; all of us had focused on different things. All the bad jokes, the gallows humor, were shared. Over and over again, we returned to laughter, to the camaraderie of sharing an intense experience from different vantage points, of viewing it all now with humor.

As the evening progressed, I recognized the similarity to conversations with those I’ve done political action with. War stories, we’ve called them, these stories of facing down gauntlets of police, of holding on to each other as one by one we are picked away and arrested. The recounting always entails stories of each other at our both our best and at our worst. The moments of courage, the acts of stupidity, the losing of tempers, patience or minds. The long night of labor which resulted in the birth of my son was full of these stories, as I was surrounded by and attended to by those who I’d also been to jail with. I remember Starhawk laughing that night at how being there was like being in jail. We had a long wait, it was sometimes tense, and we had no idea of when we would be released.

I’m savoring the power of stories tonight, of how the retelling of hard times helps us, how somehow in the telling we draw closer together, how even a traumatic event can get instilled with human warmth, human laughter, by the retelling of it in community. It’s clear to me that it’s not just the experience of going thru things with others that makes bonds, it is the retelling of the experience, the co-creation of the story that bonds us, and also that heals us. More was wed this past weekend than Mojgone and Jim. Learning the importance of marrying the event to the retelling is something to rejoice. Huzzah!