Big Questions

                          In the little garden next to the bewitched house, there were twelve lilies . . .

Larry Ferlazzo invites on his blog : “Do you know a story/quote that can be used to show the importance of asking good questions?  Thanks for marking this distinction of good stories and storytelling.  Here are a few of my favorites:

When the princess (emergent feminine) discovers she has twelve brothers (full masculine) who fled due to threat of their father, she travels immediately to the center of the forest.  There she is asked the fundamental questions expressed in almost every quest: Where are you going? (destiny) Where do you come from? (source, ancestry, inheritance) and Who are you? (identity).

From Grimms’ “Twelve Brothers”.  William Stafford’s haunting poem also deals with this question: Who are you really, wanderer?  “A Story That Could Be True,” in The Darkness Around Us is Deep

When the one in search of the beloved reaches the place of prophecy, the question at the threshold of life and death asks: Are you here because you want to be or because you have to be?

From “The Maiden Tsar” in Afanasev’s Russian Fairy Tales. Also developed in Robert Bly & Marion Woodman’s The Maiden King.

Where’s my home? When the creatures beg the creative source for a place to build their nests, to raise their young, to share beauty, they’re told that the time has come for them to participate in the act of creation.

From “Dawn of the World” in Jamake Highwater’s Anpao.

When the chief’s most-loved daughter has been taken to the world above the world and the chief asks, “Who will venture to the other world to bring back love?," only the strangers offer.  Only the ones who’ve been rejected by the way things are have the courage, the heart, and the wild knowing to enter the mission.

From “Kanu Above and Kanu Below” in Margaret MacDonald’s Storyteller’s Start-Up Book.  MacDonald adapted the story from Ruth Finnegan’s Limba Stories and Storytelling.