I'm a storyteller at heart. I may not have the best tales to spin, or the best voice for spinning them, but I love to tell stories and I love to hear them. There's something wonderful about being involved, as audience or storyteller, in a world invented specifically for the excitement, the wonder, and sometimes even the education of the people involved in it.
I reckon that it's this love of story-telling that first drew me to roleplaying, an activity that has at various times led me to associate with actors and with gamers, but that's peripheral to what's been on my mind today, and perhaps that's a topic I'll delve into at another time.
As a child, I can remember deriving no greater pleasure than to become completely engrossed in a story. I was an avid reader (I still adore books, but my rate of consumption has plummeted since I "discovered" the Internet!), even to the extent of tackling some of the modern "classics" (most notably "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Journey to the Center of the Earth") long before I was able to appreciate their impact, just because the stories that played out between the covers were so exciting to me. And when I first found out about audiobooks, I can remember spending an entire afternoon sitting in my bedroom with a tape recorder reading one of my favorite
Pee Wee Scouts books. I only had one cassette, and I remember how disappointed I was that I wasn't able to fit the entire book onto it...I had the entire book except for the last chapter on that tape! There's no stopping a devoted 7 year old, though; I'm pretty sure I remember reading the last few pages out loud to myself.
So my love of storytelling runs deep, and it runs early. By accounts I've been told, I was a pretty bright kid, as well, always questioning and wanting to learn more about the world around me. And I love my parents because when I would ask them questions, they'd always try to answer them for me, and as often as not that question would come in the form of a story, a fable, a tall tale...or even sometimes just an invention of pure fancy.
I remember especially a time when I was a youngster, probably also 7 years old, although I might have been 6, when I was in the garage with my dad, and I could see the trees blowing in the wind through the open garage door. I asked my dad what cause the wind, prepared to refute the oft-cited Sneezing Trees Hypothesis with a resounding "nuh-uh!" (even back then I was suspicious of this common explanation. You have to have a nose to sneeze, and I never in my life have seen a tree with a nose). But rather than the expected response, my dad must have noticed what had caught my attention and provoked my question - he gave me a simple "the wind is cause when trees move". Now how much sense does that make when you're 7 years old? You're old enough to know that trees make food from sunlight with their leaves, and the sun moves across the sky. And mom would always turn the houseplants sitting next to the windows because they would always lean toward the sun and she didn't want them to look lopsided. So of
course it made sense that trees would move their leaves to follow the sun, thus creating wind.
Voilà, the story of wind was created!
It wasn't until some years later I learned more of the details of photosynthesis, and that, although trees
do shift to follow the sun, the movements are too slow and too slight to cause any sort of atmospheric interferance, even in a large forested area.
But even after all these years, the impact of the story of photosynthesis and the wind has stayed with me. It's helped me come to appreciate all the stories we hear, we tell, and we come up with every day. A story doesn't have to have unicorns or flying turtles to be fantastic, and oftentimes a plausible story can be far more exciting than the actual facts.
And sometimes, all it takes is a little story to reveal just how mysterious and wonderful the Truth can be.
