WARNING

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eware of Storytellers. They are the most dangerous of all beings. For it is they who brought the tales and ideas of which this world is made. It is storytellers that have given us the religions that men follow. It is storytellers that turn us towards both God and Devil. It is storytellers that have pulled the sword from the stone, put horns on a hare, made the virgin pregnant, planted the seeds of happily ever after and given us heaven and hell. From ideas born of stories have come war and discord and all the terrible things that men must face. From stories come the lovers and yearners of the heart that kiss the moon. It is stories that provide the mortar by which the walls of prejudice are built and it is stories that tell of the far romantic mountains from which the rivers of desire and love flow. Beware of storytellers, they are not all bad, but, they are not all good. Beware of storytellers I tell you. It is because of storytellers that we all are yearning for what we don’t have.

and

eware of those who interpret, praise, criticize and tell the lessons of stories that they have heard, for they also are storytellers. They tell a story from what seems an unmoving, still and fixed point, but, in truth, they are adrift on a sea of wonder without end, like all and everything. How can we get our bearings when drowned in dilemma and faced with paradox? It is not obvious or easy to learn the lesson of experience, to know what has transpired, to choose the proper goal, to understand both cause and reason for it. It is difficult to select the pointed moral, to make the right judgement. It is subtle and deep like what is beyond the boundary at the far end of space.

and

eware of storytellers who have conviction. They have caused more suffering than can be counted. Struck by the lightning of contradiction, blown by the gales of competing metaphor, they have not the humility of the shipwrecked, but, clinging to their rafts of word and hope, they claim recogniton of God and Truth, a Being that they do not know, an idea that lies only in the little pool of their thought and feelings. One may yet believe in God, but we must recognize our belief as only a hopeful story that brings small comfort as we cling to what is only floating on the choppy surge of wave and sea without solid ground on which to stand. What we believe in is only a story-unknowable, uncomprehendable, unverifiable, infinitely mysterious. Beware of those who are full of conviction, for they are full of themselves.

and

eware of what storytellers do not tell you. For they must of necessity leave something out- if not from time alone then from purpose good or bad or from ignorance of the story, or from carelessness or naïvete. In the untold story lies mystery and deceit, hidden things and revelation, great meaning and silence and as we trace our way back along the roots of silent implications we will feel what is left unsaid and in that dark earth of imagination find ourself back before that solid storied stone that stands within the very heart of the temple of our hearing- upon which our mind is tethered and find we cannot escape- It is of stories we are made and it is in stories we live and with stories we see our lives, tell our tales and with which we will always tell and live them. At the very end of the fruited branch and in the germ below the earth, story is the seed of our life.

and

eware of who you are, for it is unknown to you and yet on this unknown ground you lay foundation for your life. We believe we know the story, who it is for and how it all turns out at last, but, we see only from the crest of a wave, holding to a temporary and failing raft, rising and falling in the midst of an infinite and ever moving sea.

eware of storytellers. Beware of all those who teach, instruct and yarn and rap and riff. Beware of those who criticize and those who praise. Beware of those who claim to love and those who hold intentions that would be the destruction of the world. Beware of all things and ideas, for they are made of story, into which we are tossed and flung, all of us, all together in a place we only understand with a story.

Beware

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