When I was little, my daddy taught me about fish hooks.
Opening his tackle box and lifting out a tiny golden hook he said, “You have to
be very careful. The end is barbed, see? If that gets stuck in your skin and
you try to pull it out, you’ll make a bloody mess.” He told me about the time
he had one stuck in his thumb and had to cut the line and push the hook all the
way through so that the barb didn’t catch.
I think storytellers aren’t so different from fisherman.
They cast their lines out, trying to catch our hearts. Sometimes they just
graze them or miss altogether, and we walk away, already forgetting their
tales. Other times they hit their mark, embedding their sharp words in our
tender, bleeding hearts. You can tell a lot about a storyteller by the way they
remove their barbs – pushing the tale through us in a clean wound or ripping it
away, leaving us raw and bloody.
Very rarely, when the story teller is skilled and we’ve left
our hearts wide open, the hook lands so deep and so true that it remains stuck within
our hearts. And every time we feel that ache of its barbs, we remember the tale
that lives forever buried within our very being.
