Creating the Webbd Wheel: The Stories Within the Story
In which we share stories ...
Where do stories come from?
The experience of life. Old ballads and nursery rhymes. Children’s books. Fairy tales. Cultural anthologies. They’re passed on from elder to younger. Myths, legends, lore, and spiritual traditions from around the world give us stories. We create symbolic creatures and tell stories about them. Stories are half-remembered fragments of dreams or overheard conversations. They’re urban legends with a seed of truth. They’re attempts to understand an inexplicable universe. We hear them, read them, sing them, tell them, make them up. Sometimes we can point to a source. Sometimes we can’t.
Stories are alive. Reading them on your screen is like trying to understand a butterfly from a specimen pinned in a museum. Stories, like music, like dance, belong to everyone. They’re part of our human inheritance.
Stories are blueprints, maps, manuals for life. Whatever our reality, whatever our challenges, shame, wounds, griefs, rages or joys, we can find stories of others who have stood where we stand. Stories are wisdom and medicine, handed down through the ages. They speak to our imagination, our intuition. We see them from the corner of our eye, and they come to us when we most need them.
The more stories we carry, the more they mingle, until we no longer remember the separate seeds. As I wrote the Webbd Wheel, I researched, read, made notes, collected stories, searched my memory for material I grew up with, immersed myself in my library, and wove it all together until I no longer remember exactly where and how and when many of the seeds came to me.
The source of the story in post #6 , was originally titled “The Black Prince.” I read it in an anthology titled Ready-To-Tell Tales and told it orally for years. It was contributed by storyteller and writer Laura Simms. It’s a story about love, and about authenticity. The version you read here is not the version I told, and neither is exactly the version I first read from Simms, because that’s the nature of stories. They change us, and we change them.
Some of the stories and characters in the Webbd Wheel are entirely my own. Others, like Persephone and Hades, are a cultural inheritance and familiar to every school child. I simply chose characters I was familiar with and wrote more of their story.
Or maybe they chose me. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
My Dark Prince is a primary character in the Webbd Wheel. I always wondered what happened at the end of the oral tale I told. Where did he go? What did he do? How did he recover from his doomed love? Did he ever find love again, and this time was he wiser?
Now I know.
(This was published with post #6 of The Hanged Man.)