THE WILD BRIDE

The Handless Maiden is a controversial fairytale.   It was collected and reconstructed by the Brothers Grimm, and left out of their later collections. It has a disturbing violence and tragic sense of loss that makes it a hard story to tell politely for those who want a fairytale to be an easy tale about unreal events. It does however continue to be a story of choice for many of my female storytelling students.   If taken literally (which I consider a disempowering approach for a tale of great symbolic or inner power) it is hard to tell. But, if understood at a more profound level, engagement in the story provides insight and healing.  It confronts  the pervasive suffering caused by misogyny and abuse against the feminine in our world today.

The production performed by the Knee High Theater Company was daring and riveting. No one shied away from the depth of potential in the story.   The writer, director, choreographer, and artists made choices that illumined the inner secrets of the story’s transformational power.  It was a visceral experience of the power of the “wild” feminine, and a genuine expression of the magic of a fairytale. It touched on the actual presence of evil in the world, and provided a template through which to look at our lives in an essential and raw way with grace, fearlessness, and humor.

The director (Emma Rice) explained that she first directed a Hungarian theater piece based on the story in 2002.  She found it flowery, at first.  She realized later that she had not paid attention.    “I began thinking of the story again.  I had a dawning awareness that I had indeed missed the heart, soul and very point of this extraordinary tale.  Older, more bruised, and more myself, I decided to make this piece again. Only now was I beginning to understand what it is to do a deal with the devil and what it is to endure.”

The title:  THE WILD BRIDE.  For many of us our association with wild is something out of control and dangerous. However, the playwright understood that what is wild is natural.  That to live in direct relationship to the world of spirits, and nature puts us in contact with  events of the world realistically.   In so many tales the inner union with what is natural is the goal.   The story unhinges us from conventions that render women as domestic animals to be owned and used.  It also moves us from how we think we should behave to how in essence we respond.  And how we need to leave our comfortable world in order to re-balance what has gone out of balance in our lives or society.  The transformation that takes place is not only the girl’s survival, but it is a liberation through knowing pain,  the reality of consequence of a  devil’s deal, and the promise of redemption.  This is about  disenchantment with abuse and war, and  reconnecting with the heart. Throughout we face the girl’s ongoing relationship to inherent goodness and love; and equally ongoing (but not as powerful) presence of shadow or devil’s intention.

The set was a dark leafless tree, winding upwards with ladders for trunk, and a huge mirror at the top.  The flower of this tree was insight.  On the grey floor, the territory on which the story would unfold, were scattered dried leaves.  There was a small stage for a small orchestra upstage right and on either side two small round stages with leafless single branches.  When the lights dimmed and brightened we saw what we had not seen before:  a rocking chair with the devil draped over its’ arms. His  head was tossed to one side. He was the ultimate sleezy conman.  He started  introduced the story.  He spoke directly to us. He signaled the music to begin and conjured forth three women who would be the girl in the story in her phases of innocence, loss of innocence and motherhood.

Knowing the story, I was curious about and dreaded the moment when the girl’s hands would be chopped off.  Even though I realized it couldn’t be real the anticipation of fear  greater than the moment of fear. A fairytale is the most profound species of  transformative story.  It rests on suspense, imbalance, fear, loss, and the possibility of love and repair.

There are choices to be made by a storyteller telling a tale to a living audience as a solo performer. And choices that a theater director has to make when bringing to life a fairytale in a theatrical presentation. Making it either too magical (which leaves it too special and smarmy – disconnected from our direct experience) or too literal  (which limits the impact of image that has the ability to drive us out of personal assumption into imaginative revelation).  The fairytale is personal and universal all at once.  It is an inner journey and it refers us to our world’s most root level disturbances.  The writing was exquisite.  The acting was incredibly good.

The fairytale was regarded for its specific genre of effect, and the actors’ relationship to listener was honored.  Not only were we participants often spoken to directly, the director understood the way in which a puppet, or a dance, an archetypal image or a sound could bring us closer to a sense of mystical participation than an explanation.  Brilliant choices were made.

No one was a star, so everyone shone.  Each performer was a musician, a singer, a dancer, and actors or a storyteller.  The father whose lack of attention allowed for the devil’s deal to be made later played the prince who was duped by the devil, still after the girl he felt was his.  Subtle meanings of the story were protected.  All three women played the girl.  A young girl, a wild girl, and a fearless mother each had their dance, their role and were supported by the others. It was seamless in exchange.   The play didn’t let us have the comfortable luxury of getting completely lost in the story as if it was real.  Hence, we were moved over and over again with surprise and intensity.  There were jokes and visual metaphors.   We were constantly reminded that it was a story and it was a revelation of truth. The music, blues music played live, was a background of energy and resonant emotion.  It made the unfolding play more forcefully engaging.  The use of lights, and props, supported the emotional world and changing landscape.

Astonishing moments come to mind. A war. The prince was in a near foolish ballet dancing kilt costume.  But when he went to war, leaving his wild bride behind, he became the poster soldier from Scottish World War I posters: wearing helmet and pointing rifle.  He was urgent, serious and perched on one of the small stages in the act of watchful battle.  Lights flashed on and off. The music was intensified.   There was no violence enacted. But, we felt the true horror of war.  On the field of leaves were the three women bent backwards. Their pelvises rising up and down — open, facing us — a sad reminder of motherhood, rape, and the violation of the feminine that is war.    This was the other kind of wild. The deranged dance of death where we lose our minds and hearts.  The territory of violence is where wilderness is obliterated in service of genocide.

The Cut:  The father with his ax and a tree stump were center stage. Horrified at what he had to do in order to save his daughter from being thrust into a hell of brimstone and fire and pain, he slammed the ax on to the wood two times. The devil watched as we watched the young girl throw one arm behind her back, then another.   What we did not literally see we felt.  We were victim, witness, and perpetrator.

After the girl’s hands were cut, the younger actress was replaced by an older more sexual and physical second woman.   She moved like a wounded deer falling and standing, trying to use her bandaged stumps to regain balance in the forest.

It was the center of the story that was revealed in this exchange and this beautiful and agonizing dance.

Stunned by the power of the dance, we came to stillness as she entered a garden.

Strings holding green containers with painted light bulbs began to descend from the ceiling becoming the pear trees she hungered for.  It was surprising and hilarious.

The audience in the midst of empathy and recovering from the shock of what happened began to laugh. This was ritual theater at its best.  We were never allowed to drown in the mire of pity or opinion. We were brought up so we could reenter the story again with fresh mind, capable of feeling into the next phase of the tale.

Just as the young woman had avoided being taken by the devil because of her intrinsic inner purity, the second woman crippled and torn from her home, was the cause of the trees leaning toward her to feed her.   The prince arrived.  He would be her husband,  but the redemption occurred because of her essential goodness and bravery — her inner untarnished self that had already deflected the devil’s plan.   The wild girl  was the embodiment of connection to the sacred. She and the natural world were related. The silver hands of the fairytale were replaced by metal sword and hoe on her arms. She was goddess of plants and animals, farmer of the heart and earth.  An amazing choice again.  Throughout there was the lurking presence of the devil on stage somewhere.  We never were able to forget his persistence and confidence.

The Queen mother was a huge Victorian painting with holes for real hands and a voice.  Again, laughter and appreciation for the make-believe quality of the story that allowed us a bigger experience than our own interpretation  or personal outrage.  It was all managed with  elegance and understanding.  A deer, that the mother caused to be killed, was a transparent puppet.  The letters intercepted between prince/soldier, devil and mother were pieces of paper pretending to be flung across stage and caught.  Music carried the invisible papers with  the magic of Kabuki theater. The   second woman was sent away to save her life, again into the forest.   This time she held a baby on her back.  Until, the third woman, older and more sober, took the child, becoming handless, and roamed the forest  in a different way.   She was devastated and courageous.   She was  the caretaker of a child. Her movements were painful to watch. They embodied tragedy and dignity.  Her voice was harrowingly beautiful and we, the audience/witnesses were somber while in awe.

I could re-conjure images again and again.   The constant use of music and the combination of literal and symbolic events and set, kept us enraptured in the story.  The actors sometimes turned to speak to audience.  They asked questions dropping out of character, to be present.  We were not forgotten.  We were not witnesses alone.  In the end, when the girl’s hands grew back and the prince, after his own long wandering in the wilderness, was reunited with her,  we were sighing from the intimacy of their dance.  The devil was brought to his knees literally.  For a moment  he was vanquished, disappeared.  Then the audience was invited on stage to dance. It was a wildly joyous celebration.  We clapped and cheered. We thought we had come to the conclusion of the story.  The lights dimmed  and they quickly came on  again.     There on the same rocking chair was the devil. Back.    He had been defeated by the girl – by  her love and capacity for faith -  but he was  waiting for a new story to begin.  It reminded me of great tellings where audience, young or old, ask “Was that true?” And I have answered, “Yes. It was true until the story starts again.”  It was visceral: the audience left satisfied and changed.

Outside the theater, the actors waited for us.  They were selling CDs of music.  I couldn’t help but take home the songs.    But they were also there speaking with us.  I found myself embracing each artist;  thanking them for the experience of a genuine event. At a restaurant later, I sat near one of the actors.    I asked what he loved most. He said, It was a joy to work with others who loved collaboration and it was an honor to be so involved in a great story.

Laura Simms

While waiting for the New Jersey Transit Train to arrive at Penn Station in Manhattan, I sat  on a bench to think about the sudden death of a friend, to take in how mysterious life is, and how to accept the unexpected with grace. I thought about how I too could have an unexpected heart attack at any time, or be a random victim of violence.   My thoughts, however,  were distracted by a well dressed man carrying a transparent Smoothie drink.  The color  was a near violent red. It seemed undrinkable.  As I stared at the cup it began shaking.   I watched it fall;  spilling onto the  floor. Then the  man grabbed his coat by  his heart  and  tumbled toward the ground.  A young soldier in army fatigues passing by dropped his large carry bag and caught the man as if they were in a well rehearsed slow motion ballet. As he  helped him to the floor, another  man in a hoodie rushed over, unwound a thick scarf from his neck and set it under the man’s head for comfort within moments. It was so beautifully occuring like a natural choreographic event.  A woman stepped over the man’s shaking body and said out loud, “I am a nurse.” An elderly man shouted,  “I am calling 911.”   I stood for a while watching, both frightened for the man and in a state of awe.   What I saw was both tragedy and living prayer.  I caught my train just in time.

I thought—when I had a moment to catch my breath—that if I had an emergency, I would wish for such compassionate strangers. such immediate care in an unexpected place. I have no idea what happened to the man or his guardian angels in the subway.  But the episode was a reminder of our basic kindness and connection.

It made me think of ancient Indian stories where an event in the present is related and the events leading up to that moment from previous lifetimes are revealed.  The beggar on the street who was a King who in a fit of jealousy killed his blind and beautiful wife, who was reborn as an insect and then a lion, an elephant, a saint, and  then the beggar who would become a King again . . . and all the related events, seemingly random, that  led up to it. What appeared unrelted in these tales had an entire  history – a compassionate back story – that storytellers told.

If we are able to see our lives as a story, makes the difference between opening into a sense of awe and appreciation of  sudden change, impermanence and miracles with intelligence; rather than  closing us down in anger,  revenge or despair. But even if we do not know the story, there is a sense of invisible mystery that seems to be at work in the unfolding.

I worked in Austria. My job was   to help uncover stories from immigrant women who were living in a “transitional” house outside of Vienna.  The “house” was supposed to be temporary, not longer than three months residence. However, there were people who had lived there for more than thirty-five years. Each woman had a remarkable tale of  their culture, their escape or displacement and the challenges of their new life.  Each evening for a week I met with Afghan, Iranian, and Iraqi women.  One evening, they introduced  a
woman  from Chechnya.  The other women were beautifully dressed, coifed and adorned.  They were learning English and skills to have jobs to support their families.  Their stories were difficult, victorious, and complex.  The Chechen woman  sat in silence for a long time. She was dressed in baggy dissheveled clothes.  Her hair was pulled back  too tightly under a black scarf.  She wore no make up or jewelry.

The women encouraged her to tell me her story.  I offered to listen without asking any questions.  She nodded in agreement.  Her story  was translated by an Afghan woman who spoke five languages.  “The roof of my house tore off when we were bombed. I was nine months pregnant. My husband pushed me down the steps into the cellar for shelter  as my contractions began.  I lay on the floor as bullets riddled the ceiling above me and gave birth.”   She lifted her shawl and showed us scars  where shrapnel was embedded under her skin. She was  tense as she spoke; angry.    Over and over she repeated that she remains  unhappy.   Just then the door of the room opened.  A young girl, wearing a scarf lightly tied with her cascading brown hair  around her face, walked in. She was  followed by a group of other young girls, chatting.    She wore a short skirt with a red jacket. She was smiling.

I asked the Afghan woman who it was.She said,  “It is the daughter of the woman telling the story.” “Is that the baby she gave birth to in the cellar?” I inquired.  “Yes,” said my friend.

Our time came to an end. I asked the women to bring their friend  the next night. I longed to see if we could retell or reframe her story  – not as a tale of a suffering victim alone, but as a victory  as well;  giving birth in extreme danger to the most beautiful child.  The courage and nature of a woman overcoming the horrors of war and death.

The woman did not return. The others went to her apartment to invite her again,  and each time they came back and said she was ill.

How we tell our stories  is how we shape our lives. How will the man if he survived tell the story of his emergency?   Whether we  find the medicine, the transformation, the secret message or liberation in our tale,  can renew us and provide courage. The retelling of the story, rendering narrative from memory,  accesses a  life giving source of energy within beyond survival  – a path to live  without ignoring the pain or sorrow, but not surrendering to that as the only conclusion.

Our imaginations give us an option to try out other endings and to imagine other ways of seeing. I longed  to tell her back her story.  To ask a few questions.   To see if we could open into the anger and disappointment into her fierceness and mother love.  Perhaps she could have seen herself as heroine. It is possible to uncover within ourselves a resource of unlimited  goodness. We can transform our stories,  (not the facts),  but the perception of a memory so it feeds us mercifully into the rest of our lives.

The first time I fell in love was at a summer camp in 1965. My mother was increasingly unhappy  ten months after a crippling stroke. She was only 39 years old. Each time I thought of her that summer  I felt her mouth twisted to one side as my own sorrow and her curling brown hair that fell around her face now tangled and prematurely grey as despair.  I was haunted by czárdás music she played with one hand while she wept at the grand piano in our living room.  I spent  time alone by the lake reading books and staring at the water.   I didn’t know how to speak about what had happened.    A boy who was dark haired and tall and also quiet, was fishing by himself. We shared our silence.   One afternoon he caught a frog instead of a fish. I watched him try to save it. His eyes filled with tears.    I carefully walked towards him and unhooked the frog’s one leg that was slightly injured and placed it back in the water. We sat side by side watching the frog gain momentum and swim away,  making patterns on the surface of the lake.   I was unable to heal my mother, but I helped to save the frog.  My broken heart was useful. He and I became closest friends, never telling each other why we needed to be alone. Telling stories I have repaired thousands of damaged imaginations, or I hope that I have, putting them back in the water of their own confidence and joy. I never thought about this story as a tale of my first true love until today.

*  *  *

it snowed for only a few minutes this evening in Manhattan.  I missed the major snow last weekend, and have been longing to walk through city streets rendered quiet and white.   I haven’t been in deep snow since walking in Northern Romania for a mile when my friend Ciprian and I abandoned his car, unable to drive further alongside a road with many other cars miles from Iasi.    We plodded in snow as high as my head, laughing, to a peasant house owned by his grandfather. We sipped Polenka (corn vodka) while sucking on orange slices drenched in sugar. The house was a mosaic of memory and blazing heat.    Ciprian’s grandfather had been saved by a Jewish merchant before the war. He had lived in this house through the Holocaust when the merchant was taken away. He stayed there to protect the house although he pretended to take it over! Later, when the old man returned, broken and sick, Ciprian’s grandfather slept on the floor by his bed so he would not die alone.

Stories shared for hours every morning with strong coffee and vodka, and at night with an endless meal are my most precious memory of the time.   Words transformed the cold. Memories-turned-into-stories gave me the connection to my ancestors that I could not find in my grandmother’s birthplace of Dorohoi. When we left, ten days later, the old man’s  wife gave me the rug that she wove for their wedding fifty years before. It hangs in my kitchen. The colors are vivid.

It is stories that connect us  to places lost, and histories vanished.   if the place itself or the events are unknown it is the imagined places that sustain.   There we re-make meaning; melt sorrow into inspiration and fall laughing into snowbanks of meaning. For years I told stories about all kinds of love, love of romance, love of place, love of mystery, friendship, spiritual love, and family, passions for peace or war, love enduring and sudden surprises and meetings. Winter is that time when we need to stoke the fires of love and imagination in order to renew ourselves with connection and invisible images that come alive again. We prepare our inner world for the return of spring and light and melting snow; the endless possibility of new beginnings is practiced with imagination. Two weeks ago I heard the story of a friend’s sudden death. Diane Wolkstein a keeper of great tales and a friendship hard won over forty years of knowing each other.  Our becoming good friends was a special love. A love based on forgiveness and liberation from fixation.  Her leaving was startling. A bird taking flight. Beauty vanishing into sky.

This activity, co-opted by sound bite and media disguised as storytelling, is like none other. It is the  depth of sharing and presence brought forth because of engagement that melts rigid borders between Them and Us;   gives us back a sense of what we have lost in the outer-world but never need to lose within our own hearts.  The  sharing of words shaped into narrative and widened into reciprocity is  infused with immediacy and intimacy, becomes  an act of passion and restoration.

This entry was inspired by a conversation on the storytell listserv about childhood shopping memories.

A man went in search of beauty. He could not find it anywhere until he was told to visit a woman in a cave on a remote mountain. She was very old and very ugly, but she understood the nature of beauty and offered to teach the man all she knew. He remained for years until he had accomplished what he could. But before he left, he asked his teacher, “How should I describe you?” She said, “Tell them I am young and beautiful.
—from a Sufi tale

I grew up in the 1950’s, in Borough Park in Brooklyn, New York. Our street was a refuge for Jews who had escaped Europe and Eastern Europe before and after World War II. Every kind of Jew lived on our street: conservative, orthodox, Chassidic, and communist. I knew from my mother that there were Gypsies in Coney Island who had also come to Brooklyn at the same time but that is another tale. On several occasions my mother would tell me, while brushing my dark hair, that I was not really her child, “Your grandmother found you in a garbage pail in Coney Island. The gypsies threw you away because of your green eyes and black hair.” I was horrified that I was an orphan, but thrilled at the idea that I might be unrelated to my family who lived in the midst of too many languages and untold stories. I think I was also delighted to possibly be part of a coven of witches or a community that had colorful clothing and loved to dance (this is what I assumed about the Roma). The strange absence of related histories, and stranger family storytelling, may be what inspired me to seek stories from everywhere else for a very long time.

My family lived in an old farmhouse that had been renovated into a private home. It stood in the middle of 47th street between 13th and 14th Avenues. There was another large house on our street, a ranch house with a well-kept lawn and a fence. It was owned by a famous baseball player, who was unrelated to the secretive Yiddish world we lived in. Our street was filled with foreign languages, hanging laundry, makeshift basement shuls, and small dark shops. At our corner was the smallest shop. It was a grocery owned by the Gottesman Family. It was dark inside and smelled of candy and meat. The window held a wild assortment of food in boxes and large bottles of penny candies. Mr. and Mrs. Gottesman were exotic. They looked almost exactly the same to me; the same size and shape. I knew them apart because she wore a scarf over her hair and he wore a black hat. They hardly spoke English, seemed to rarely smile and wore long sleeves and black jackets through the intense heat of the summer. I believed they slept in the store. My brother and I often commented that we never saw them on the street; not even on Saturdays—the Sabbath—when the shop was closed, and everyone in the neighborhood was out walking. In our childish lack of knowledge (no one spoke about what had occurred only years before in the old country) we remained ignorant, making jokes about them. Until I was nine years old.

There was a morning, when on an emergency run for milk, I saw Mrs. Gottesman leaning over the meat shelf. Her sleeve fallen backwards, revealed numbers printed in black ink on her arm. I rushed home with the strange news. I was laughing about how “weird” they were, when my mother, with a raw rage I had not seen until that moment, stopped me, grabbing my arm. She said sternly, “They were in a camp.” I had no idea what that really meant. The only camp I knew was the one I was forced to attend for four weeks in the Adirondacks every July. How did I escape this knowledge of holocaust and suffering? She sat me down and told me about the camps: the horror, the brutality, the hatred, the murders, and the escapes. These were part of the forbidden lurking stories that drenched our street with tears. I was afraid to go shopping at “Gottesmans’” for days. I would only walk on that side of the street if I had my dog with me on a leash for safety.

My mother sent me with a list to Adelman’s Delicatessen instead. It was well lit and spacious with amazing smells of what we called “Jewish Food”. It was across the main road (13th avenue) from the Gottesman’s store. A different universe. The Adelman’s were a well to do family that owned the Deli and several other shops on 13th Avenue. They dressed normally, “like Americans.’ They spoke English without an accent. They wore colorful clothing (but not as colorful as gypsies), laughed a lot, and chatted. There was often music playing in the store. Their parents and grandparents had come to Brooklyn in the 1880’s and did not have numbers on their arms, wear long coats and skirts, nor cover their heads every day. From them we purchased bagels, fresh rye bread, pastrami, derma, sour pickles, pistachios, kosher salami, lox, and creamed cheese. They had a machine that sliced bread and deli meat either thin or thick. I walked out daily with a shopping bag of items, separately packaged in white paper, and four black and white cookies always given to us as gifts, for each person in the family.

But every day I thought about the Gottesmans. So I returned. It became a special event. I would go inside for a penny candy that was in a bottle in the window. I entered with the same sort of respect I had for my grandparents who knew English but mostly spoke Yiddish; who were not as strange, but also seemed to live in another time zone. Although we never spoke about what they had experienced, nor did I tell them that I knew, my now tempered requests for groceries and candies finally won me tender smiles in response. Perhaps they felt sorry for me since I seemed to need to enter their store more than they needed to sell me occasional foods. It was a place of history, and a pilgrimage to the mysterious realm of Eastern Europe where people were killed because they were Jews. I was buying groceries, but I was also buying history. My visits put me in contact with a revelation of unspeakable occurrences that happened elsewhere. “How could that have happened?” I often asked my mother who just shook her head. I grappled with evil and weighed what I had heard against the acts of giants and demons in fairytales that I read nightly to keep in contact with the inner sanctums of reality that were becoming known to me through the grocery store.

It was that elsewhere that my grandparents also came from. They did not speak about that place either, though they did not have numbers on their arms, or own restaurants. Later, I learned the Gottesmans were from Poland, like my father’s family. I realized that must have been why my grandma Ida often walked in to their shop reverting to her other language. She reserved Yiddish for the Deli. I never knew their first names. The Gottesmans had lost everyone and were saved by a distant relative living on our street. This unnamed family member, I overheard, rarely visited them but had “set up” the shop so they could continue their life as they had lived it in their shtetl in Poland. I did have “big ears” as my father repeatedly said. When I was seventeen and my father and mother still lived on that street, I walked to 13th Avenue. When I came home from college. I was in search of the story that I had never heard about the Gottesmans. I wanted to see them again and know more about them. Perhaps they had children, or had learned English. But the shop was gone. A hair salon replaced the dark entrance to Poland. End of story.

There were trees and gardens on 47th street, but no meadows or forests to walk through to get groceries. It was neither an urban world or a suburb like the kind my cousins moved to where houses were all the same. It was an in-between place. We had lived half in the 1950’s of America and a haunting other world of Eastern European memory and over sized furniture. The deli and its shopping bag and the grocery where food was wrapped in newspapers were my coming to terms with a complex history that slowly unfolded for me when I started reading about the Holocaust on my own. The smell of their grocery is the smell I often remember when listening to stories that are hard to tell and best shared in a cradle of gentle listening. That listening cradle is still made of old newspaper and wrapped in kindness. Perhaps it is from the Gottesmans that I learned how to ask questions without asking questions and to listen to all as if I am listening to my own family.

In the city of Malini in the northern part of Moldavia, Romania, a city known for its powerful refusal to give up its peasant philosophy even in the threat of the hated dictator, I took orphans (teenagers) to live in farms for three summers on a storytelling program. At first, I was told there were no Jews in the city. “They left after the war,” the mayor explained. However, I learned there was one family still living in the outskirts in a fenced compound. I went to see them. The father welcomed me into his well-kept large house and explained that he and his son worked in Italy and had built the house. I asked further about the war. He told me that his mother lived in the original house, still standing behind this new building. I went outside to a small wooden peasant house. Inside, the walls were papered with old newspapers and the only decoration was a wedding picture. The mother only spoke Romanian and Yiddish. I bumbled along with the help of a translator and learned that she grew up in Dorohoi where my mother’s mother was born at the same time. I began to make a desperate inquiry, but she kept saying she did not remember much. At one moment she began to tell me about the synagogue they attended, when her son interrupted and yelled at her to stop talking nonsense. Our conversation abruptly came to an unnatural end. He dragged us back to his house and served coffee and cakes on plastic covered furniture (reminiscent of our neighbors in Brooklyn in the fifties who were protecting their newly acquired middle class homes.) Finally, we left disappointed. But the mother came to the car, just as I was about to roll up the window. She whispered furtively, “My mother used to take me to the mikvah every Friday morning. She would wash me and then dress me for the Sabbath. I remember. She sang to me. I remember.” Her son arrived and we had to drive away. I knew I would not see her again. Again, end of story.

The next day I had two cakes delivered to the house for the Sabbath. But I had no idea if they were received or the mother was given one for herself. They were wrapped in newspaper and bought in a small dark shop that smelled of meat and candy.

I feel thankful for Giving. To give is ultimate mind protection: if we can give, we have something within of great value and worth that can be offered. The Giving is also the nurturer of joy. To be able to offer a wish, a gift, even a moment of empathy for someone else brings happiness. we are protected from self preoccupation and selfishness that makes us blind to our being a part of the world. Buddhist teachings say again and again that to care about others is to be personally happy. And, to care only for oneself produces misery.

When I worked with Ovidiu Rom in Northern Romania (an organization that brings life skills and education to roma mothers and children, respecting their culture), I was directing a Roma Children’s Art Camp in the small city of Buhusi. I ended each morning with a wishing circle. The kids ranged from six years old to eighteen and numbers changed from 24 to 86 children daily. We made a large circle and one child took a place in the middle of a circle and made a wish. The wish could be for another child, or all the children, for their families and community, for themselves, for their country or even the world. Those in the outer circle repeated the wish expanding its resonance further. We always made time for everyone to make a wish. There was always a lot of laughter, and sighs, and sometimes accompanying big gestures that were also mimed in unison, or something like unison. My translator stood next to me and I would attempt to repeat the wish in my own mispronounced Romanian which brought even more generous laughter to our circle.

The outer fun of the wishing was about being kind, and giving voice to natural generosity. Making sure everyone was cared for. It was not about results or solutions, it was about wishing itself. The secret practice was accessing and becoming confident that they each had a vast inner resource of wealth to call upon: the capacity to give was boundless; or to imagine something good for another. They wished for an end to poverty, an education, a puppy or a repaired roof. Each child that made a wish harvested their inherent goodness. Their capacity for kindness and care, in their usual lives, was often ignored, invalidated or even stifled in the poverty and harshness of their lives, and the pressure of a cultural role of being victim as well as perpetrator of thefts and antisocial behaviors. these kids who I spent two months with often raced up to me in the streets when we were not in the project, and I was warned over and over that they were no good.

During these mornings, drenched in deep listening, engaged in focused and zany fun and games we invented communal rituals. We remade traditional Romanian fairytales by including everyone in the story. They not only became individually everything in the story through imaginative response, but in the play of the story they became each character, object, place or animal by naming each thing after themselves. Laurenzio became one of four horses; Valentina became a princess; and on and on. We repeated the story with everyone’s names every day. There were lots of options for each person. Some days someone was a King and the next day they took the role of a door step or a flower. (My biggest task was remembering the flow of the story and including the names). After the wishing circle we raced outside of Scoala Uno (School room #1) into a big schoolyard for a “Virginia wheel” — a grand dance celebration choreographed by the kids. Then we walked in pairs, our crazy procession, to a devastated zoo that we cared for. We went up a hill through the city with large black plastic bags cleaning garbage from the streets as we walked. Until we came to the half ruined entrance of the zoo. There we entered in silence to clean cages, feed animals and generally care for the grounds. There was always time for drawing animals, making new signs, and making up stories .And often we ended with a second wish circle , between the caged dogs and the goat habitat, wishing a better future for the animals who lived in miserable conditions.

I am thinking of those days today, thanksgiving. Thinking about how much fun we had giving and why I am thankful for giving itself. And of course a story comes to mind.

I have read versions of this tale form Afghanistan and from Zanzibar about a beggar who searched rubbish heaps every day in hopes of finding coins so he could purchase food. Mostly, he was not successful. Then, one day he found three coins. Happily he walked with the coins in his pocket to find something to eat. A merchant, leading a donkey with a large cage on its’ burdened back, passed by. The cage was crushed with live gazelles. The beggar pitied the creatures. One small gazelle stared sadly into his eyes. Without thinking the beggar asked the price of the small gazelle. The merchant almost as desperate as the beggar offered to sell the creature for whatever the poor man could give to him. The beggar bought the gazelle with his three coins.

He returned to the garbage heap to search unsuccessfully for more coins. Lying that night beside the gazelle he regretted his foolishness. “I am warmer and the company is nice,” he sighed, “but I am starving and now have two mouths to feed.” To his surprise, the gazelle spoke in a human voice and promised to repay his kindness and bring him great good fortune.

The part of the story that differs in detail in each of the versions I have read are the remarkable events that describe the brilliant cunning of the gazelle who wins the beggar new clothes, wealth, a large home of his own and eventually marriage to a princess. The beggar, now a wealth man and respected man fed the gazelle each night. The creature slept by the door of his bedroom. However, as time passed, the beggar forgot about the gazelle, finding it beneath him to take time to feed an animal. In truth, everyone respected the new wealthy man, but loved the gazelle. One day the wife of the man noticed that the gazelle was starving. His ribs stuck out and his eyes were glazed over. She offered to feed the creature, but the gazelle said he would only eat food brought by her husband. She urged her husband to feed the beloved gazelle. He laughed aloud, “I have no time for an animal. You feed it if you feel so inclined.” But the gazelle refused her food. One morning the princess found the gazelle dead. She told her husband and he said, “So be it. Now we do not have to worry about the beast.”

The princess was so disgusted by her husband’s actions and lack of heart, that she returned to her father’s house. And, that night the wealthy man dreamed of the gazelle. The gazelle appeared to him and said sadly, “You forgot how you came to have enough food and about our friendship.” When the man awoke, he was asleep again as a beggar besides a mountain of trash.

Often I would walk down the road from the resort we were staying at in Zanzibar, Ras Nungwi, away from the splendid ocean toward the village. Ras Nungwi was a remarkably beautiful and quiet place with small thatched roof cottages and well-kept green flowering tropical landscapes leading down to the blue ocean. The road lacked all verdant landscape. It was prickly dry brush and sand. Occasional three-sided concrete structures, roaming goats and bone thin cows with a large hump like ancient portraits from India were visible. Turning right to walk into the dusty village of Nungwi itself, I passed a concrete structure with a large hand-painted sign: BUTCHER. I saw it several times before it struck me that this was the slaughterhouse. This was the place where goats and cows were killed to feed the village that I was so entranced by. It was beside two shops that seemed to be open twenty-four hours a day. Tanzanian textiles of wildly vivid colors and zany patterns. Each cloth was a fashion meeting ground for India, Arabia and Africa, hung neatly together in a modern art collage. I was allured by the brilliant cloths, and disturbed by the sign. Two potently different emotions arose simultaneously.

One evening, returning by taxi to the hotel, I saw a man dragging a goat on a string down a narrow path toward the butcher shop. We were moving slowly in the dark where there were no lights and many people were standing on the sides of the road. I was tired from having walked in the heat along the beach to the village, which took over an hour, tired still from an even longer walk through the village and had resorted to a taxi. I stared at the man and the goat as the driver was telling me his forlorn love story in poor English. He had come to Nungwi in hopes of marrying a woman who left him for a younger man. My mind was active trying to map out the narrow path that led to the butcher shop, wondering about the sound of the goat and if the goat knew he was going to slaughter. We came upon another concrete structure that was a local restaurant with radio music pouring out, drowning out the taxi driver’s tale of love and my own thoughts.

On Sunday evening, back in New York, I told stories as part of an Interfaith Gathering uptown in Manhattan. The evening began with lovely Daisy Khan, director of American Society for Muslims Advancement. She riveted us with her true life experience of ordering the sacrifice of a goat on Staten Island for a Muslim celebration that was interrupted by the hurricane. The goat had to be kept for days until their was transportation. She described she and her husband carrying the four parts of the animals in bags on subways home, since the electric meat cutter could not be used. There was no power. It was a remarkable story of faith and natural disaster. It was also about sacrifice in the name of religious faith and the zaniness of carrying pieces of an animal corpse on a new york train. She told us this to share with us the origin of the meat that was part of the great pot luck feast we were about to share. I loved the telling, uncontrived, generous and actually daring. I wondered what others thought of the story that demanded our tolerance. I was also amazed that goats were sacrificed today. It brought back images of the goat on the rope on the road in Zanzibar.

Yesterday, I told a storyteller friend, lovely Loren Niemi, at a lunch we had at JACK’s on University Place in Manhattan, about the story. I told it since he asked if I was disturbed by his eating a hamburger. I revealed that although I rarely eat meat, I ate some of the cooked goat that Daisy had spoken about and offered, to honor the Muslim holiday that had been interrupted because of the hurricane. In response he told me a story that he had heard over twenty years ago. It was told by a Jewish storyteller named Reuven Gold, who has been deceased for many years. He did not remember if it was a tale from the Baal Shem Tov, he said. It was a story whose affect allowed me to bring together the multitude of feelings I’d had seeing the goat on the rope in Zanzibar.

A new butcher replaced the old butcher in a village in Poland. An old man sat beside him and observed. As the new butcher killed each animal, the old man, who had witnessed the other butcher, nodded his head constantly in disapproval or disappointment. The new butcher kept wondering what he was doing wrong. Perhaps he had not sharpened the blade of his knife enough. If he had a sharper blade the animal would not suffer. So each day he sharpened the blade. And each day the old man continued to move his head back and forth in dismay. Finally, the new butcher asked about his reaction. The old man explained that the old butcher before him was a holy man. “He too had sharpened the blade well, But after each slaughter, he washed the blade with his tears.”