Storytelling. A narrative tale of the Now.

Elisabet Kedziora
Aug 22, 2017 · 8 min read

‘What is this thing that you do?’, they ask, and again I stand there fallen into the lost track of words and the now so well known inner conflict of defining myself and the creativity that flows through. I have tried most of those titels that could fit, where the word ‘Visionary’ held the first place for a long time. But again, I have honestly found myself in a foggy mess of uncertainty about myself and my aims and feeling lost in definitions was also followed by a feeling of being lost in a deep level of myself and my spirit. ‘So what is this thing that I do?’.
Abstract and uncertain. Beautifully free and untied.
But a fog is a fog and through it one does not see very clear. Nor far.

I was fourteen. And I carried a feeling within of wanting to talk. out. loud. Speak.
I loved the moments I created where I held hourlong tellings for my friends about anything. When they actually listened I felt upfilled and satisfied to the very root of my inner soil. And I realized that this is what I have to do. I have to talk. out. loud. But being born in a culture where one is told to take two steps back instead of one step forward, where it is more understood to talk oneself down than up and to generate low self-esteem as an anchor for social acceptation, I had to fight my way through a lot of self-reproduced ‘common sense’. To start with. I was a woman. My body carried a vagina. And my bodily attributes is not even only that of a woman, but also that of a beautiful one… an even more frightening threat. So I was burnt at the firing stake. Over and over and over and over again.

Wrath had been a tread throughout my path.
I have bent down to the memories coded into my DNA of victimizing the natural force of my inner being. Hiding it. Shading it. Being killed for it. In these times we no longer tie a body to a burning bonfire, we no longer talk out loud of demonized femininity and witch haunted accidents. No, we no longer lit up those fires and smells the burned flesh and boiling fat out of the now permanent destroyed bodies one belonged to personalities not fit for their time. No, we no longer hold trials where justice is anything but justice and the holding powers of a time wins over sanity and intelligence. No we don’t… but still we do… don’t we?

I was born into my time. Loaded with memories of all times. What I did not remember I have been reminded of.
I was told about my time. Learned about what has been in all times. And being told that what is is not what was but also seeing that what was is still what is.

Bonfires burns up till this very day. No flesh is longer melting under flames of idiocrazy, but words are, dreams are, aim points are, bravery are, and renaissance is.

I was.
I still sometimes am.

I was twenty-four. I sat on top of a massive sand dune in Sahara. The nomad that had guided me through the desert for over a week now, sat down below the dune. He had spread out a colorful blanket and built up his little kitchen. I suppose he was cooking tea for himself and me. The day was as hot as one imagines it would be in a desert and I had climbed up to this rocky sand dune that looked like an ancient pyramid that time had hidden under sand and small rocks though centuries of repeatedly recurrent sandstorms. He had pointed me up to it’s top and he had told me to climb up there, so I did, an option to his sayings sort of didn’t even exist since I hade left my trust and belongings and therefore also my life, into the hands of this nomadic man. Momo was his name.

Momo had been guiding me though the black desert, the red desert, the white desert. We had been sleeping on blankets for seven nights now and we had gas in his jeep for another one and a half week or so. I had left behind all of my control in the oasis of Farafia. I had jumped of the bus from Cairo after a days ride on it, and stepped into the cottage village that seemed most right. ‘You can’t go to the desert alone’, was what they’d met my request with. ‘But you could go with this man called Momo, he’s born and raised in this oasis and the desert of Sahara has been his playground for all of his life.’ The owner of the cottage village glared me into my eyes, like all of them do when they measure whatever they always feel like they have to measure within me. ‘Ahmed’, he yelled and a young boy appeared at his side as quick as he had finished shouting the name, as if he’d been waiting for an order to be given, maybe for something to do with the day. I don’t know, but the boy listened to whatever the older man wanted to say, gave me a quick look, a bit shy but still measuring, and then took of. After a served tea with seven sugars in, Momo stepped into the garden. And I shock his hand, looked into his eyes and said, ‘Yes, with this man I will definitely travel through the desert of Sahara.’

On top of the sand dune that I was convinced was once a proud pyramid, I felt a feeling of coming home so strong I had to shout out loud. ‘This is the time that I just came back’, I shouted down to Momo. He looked up as the silence had been cut by my voice and waved at me. He had not heard me properly cause of the distance, but even if he’s done so he probably would not have understood anyway. My conversation the last week had been sparsely cut down to ‘Good morning’, ‘Eat’, ‘Look’, and my stumbling arabic phrases I hade picked up along my travel in Egypt.
My heart cried out loud and remembered how I gracefully had walked the dunes of this desert for lives after lives. I remembered how I could tell the weather from how the sand moved in the wind. I remembered the vein of nomadic wandering that was within my personalized memory. I hade walked these plains before, and I had walked them a lot. A had left them for other karma to be lived through, and this very time, in this very body, was the time that I returned.

‘Welcome Queen, finally you have returned to the jungle, it’s been a long time since you were here’.
I was thirty.
A young lover had bought me a ticket to Peru as a birthday gift, and there I came, barefoot from the boat that had taken me from the old indian village Iquitos, located deep into the Amazonian jungle. The conservator of indian traditions walked up to meet me. He stopped walking a couple of meters from me and spoke that sentence out.
I felt it as well. This was the time that I had returned to that place of the gaian soil, i had not walked these grounds for a very long time, but this was the point in time when I returned. I stayed with the shaman for two weeks and he chanted me through thousands of frequencies outside and into the gaian mind. I was being guided so far out I had to struggle for two years to return back in. The information stored into my consciousness was of such a vast greatness that my physical mind could not handle it. I had a black out in the jungle. And then I got the jungle fever. And then I died at the foot of a mountain in the Andes. And then I was taken to a hospital in Cuzco. And then the doctor stared down at me where I was lying in my bed. And then he told me I was dying and that the fever had taken hold of all of my organs within my body. And he told me to call home to my mother.

I was thirty-two. I lived on an island outside the coast of Sweden. I was questioning my sanity.
Wondrous wonders of imaginary purple skies, I had flown so very high, had I really died?, to understand the blink within Gods’ eye? Or was all that I was a psychotic lunatic, practicing an abstract escapism to flee a life she never asked for to be given? Sanity’s insanity. I balanced myself on top of that knifes’ edge. I suppose I was the one who would have to choose, but my choice would divide och unite. I think I made up my mind.
And I decided to be a genius.

How does one tell of what is outside of words when words are the used tools to do just that?
How does one tell of knowings on a deeper level, coded into ones DNA?
Well, one has to tell the tales within stories.
One uses symbols. And archetypes.
And one has to stop throwing oneself at a bonfire, how common that memory even might exist within, and in stead pick up one of those burning lodges and stand there, as a lighthouse for those who sails on rough stormy oceans. One has to start telling stories. Bits and pieces of ones heart. Like islands of chapters, told together they portrait my part of creations melody. My act.

Rootless. Not aimless. But rootless. I have ran and ran through the vast corridors of my subconscious self. Turned long locked doorknobs, opened windows and hatches that has led to staircases, haunted attics and dark basements. Undefined but on a brave quest through it all, in to it all.
And then it happened that I opened the one door that would give the roots of my spine the anchor it had been missing.
Storyteller.
‘Well, this thing that I do is that I tell stories.’
Storytelling.
My narrative tellings of the then, there, here from now.

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