Storytelling Starters ~ Compassion
On Thursday morning this week, I went into my study to fetch my copy of Anam Cara. This is a book by the Irish poet and scholar, John O’Donohue, and it’s all about love and compassion. Anam Cara means soul friend in Gaelic. The book talks about how we need to discover this soul friend in ourselves as well as in the friends that we make.
The Celtic Christianity in which Anam Cara is steeped is something I find deeply attractive. Its approach and ideas are very important to me even though I am no longer a practising Christian, more a kind of Christian atheist. On Thursday, feeling especially aware of life’s difficulties and with four close people in our lives having died within the last three weeks, I felt very much in need of the gentle calm and compassion that Anam Cara offers.
Afterwards, starting to think about my Blog for this week, it occurred to me strongly that it’s for the very same reason that I believe that storytelling is utterly vital, especially for children. It gives that same sense of calm, that same sense of compassionate understanding.
This week, I also started reading a quite extraordinary novel. A Man Was Going Down the Road was written by the Georgian writer, Otar Chiladze. It is now available from Garnett Press in a translation by Donald Rayfield. I happened upon it completely by chance in the New Books shelves in The London Library of which I have been a long-standing member.
When I sat down in the library to get a sense of the book, I was immediately attracted by its combination of a strongly mythic tone with an equally strong psychological realism about the characters in the story. As the story begins, an unconscious boy is being washed ashore clinging to a golden ram. Only later does it become apparent that important characters in the book are Jason and Medea.
Otar Chiladze lived from 1933 to 2009. So far, I’ve not been able to find out much about him except that, in the post-Stalinist era, his writings brought new life to Georgian prose. According to Wikipedia, his novels ‘characteristically fuse Sumerian and Hellenic mythology with the predicaments of a modern Georgian intellectual.’
In honour of Otar Chiladze and that intriguing title, A Man Was Going Down the Road, one of my two photos this week is of a favourite road of mine near my Welsh home. Whenever I walk along it, I get a sense of excitement and pleasure at the feeling of being a part of nature.
My other photo is of one of our collection of stones from Iona, the island off the West coast of Scotland which is strongly linked in my mind with Celtic Christianity and the nightingale we once heard singing there. Our Iona stone collection was begun with the stone that was given to us by a very close and compassionate friend, mother of two of our now adult godchildren. She died many years ago now but has never ceased to be important to me.
Tags: Anam Cara, Iona stone, John O'Donohue, Otar Chiladze, soul friend