Short stories for adults that transmit wisdom and knowledge

The stories of the oral tradition contain dreams and desires that try to reinterpret realitysometimes redirect it.

Scholars have differentiated the tale and the legend in an etymological sense: what is counted and what is read; on this occasion we will flee from these and other classifications and analyzes to delve naked into the fascinating world of legend, using as much as possible the same languages ​​that have served to remember the old stories since time immemorial.

through the tale man lives adventures and solves enigmas, becomes a hero, faces love and death and learns to recognize them. Faced with the unique, linear, tangible and excluding reality in which our rationality tries to establish itself, we can choose, experience and go through stories that open wide to different worlds and that represent alternative truths for the mere fact of being invoked.

But the story has also been wisdom transmission vehicle in its purest essence and in all traditions there are good samples. Among the Sufis it is said that these stories can be interpreted at different levels, since they have the capacity to transform the very foundations of human consciousness and free ourselves from prejudices or get in touch with reality and the essence of things.

Stories, haikus and wisdom

Particularly interesting in this context are the stories attributed to the ineffable Mullah Nasrudina whole compendium of wisdom and humor. In one of them, some religious concerned about the forms and the correctness of the protocol, ask Nasrudín:

-Master, during a funeral, do you have to walk in front of or behind the coffin?
-It does not matter answers Nasrudín. The important thing is not to be inside.

Much more subtle, the old oriental haiku points out again, by means of a minimalist short story or poemthe futility of rules and precepts:

“A mouse steals food from Buddha’s altar. Chrysanthemum petals rain down on his head.”

We could count the stories of all peoples by the thousands, just considering moral fables and tales of wisdom. But the universe of the story is infinitely broader.

Irish Myths: The Story of Deirdré

Many traditional stories, regardless of whether they have been transmitted in prose, verse or song, fall squarely into the realm of poetry because of their moving beauty and because celebrate the triumph of love, justice or lifein the face of suffering and adversity.

Some of the most beautiful examples we find in the legendary land of Irelandin which following the old Indo-European custom there were wandering singers and storytellers who brought and carried history and mythology, the collective memory that they preserved and revived in each of their performances.

So they sang for centuries Deirdre’s Story; national heroine in which it has been claimed to see a personification of Eire itself:

The warriors hold a party at the home of Feidhlimidh, a famous reciter of stories. His wife is about to give birth and, as she crosses the room, the baby she is carrying inside her utters a great cry that everyone hears with a start.
This unheard of event is interpreted by the druid Cathbad, who sings a prophetic poem that heralds the birth of Deirdré, a woman whose indescribable beauty will bring much misfortune and quarrels in the kingdom.
When Deirdré is born, the frightened men want to kill her, but King Conchabar takes her under his protection and raises her without allowing anyone to see her, since he harbors a secret desire to marry her when she reaches the right age.
Years pass and Deirdré becomes the sweetest and most beautiful young woman ever seen and remains hidden from the world until one winter day, leaning out of the window, she sees a raven drinking the blood of an injured animal on the snow. .
At that moment she confesses in an outburst that she will only love a man who has hair as black as a raven, cheeks as red as blood, and a body white as snow.
Leborcham, the nurse, tells her that she knows such a man; it is about a handsome young warrior named Noisé who lives nearby.
From here, destiny seems to collude with the prophecy and Deirdré flees to meet her lover.
Faced with his doubts, Deirdré pounces on him and grabs him by the ears: “Shame and mockery fall on them if you don’t take me with you,” she tells him.
Thus begins a long flight in which the lovers take refuge in the forests and in other kingdoms, always pursued by King Conchabar.
Once in Scotland, the king of this country also falls madly in love with Deirdré and they then escape to an island lost in the sea.
King Conchabar finally agrees to his return, promising them that he will take them under his protection. But it is a cunning trap and Deirdré will be imprisoned while Noisé and his companions are murdered.
For the next year Deirdré never smiled, hardly ate, drank, or slept. As much as the king tried to bring him the best delicacies, musicians and minstrels; she always rejected them with the same song: “Every time Noisé prepared food on a simple bonfire in the middle of a plain, in a clearing in the forest, it was sweeter to me than any food seasoned with honey.”
Fed up with not being able to get her love, Conchobar asks her one day who she hated most in the world and without hesitation the beautiful Deirdré answers that Eoghan, the murderer of her lover.
The king announces that he will send her to live with Eoghan and Deirdré kills herself by throwing herself against a sharp stone.

Although there are different versions on this point, the most archaic oral accounts conclude that Conchobar ordered that Deirdré and Noisé were not buried in the same grave as the town requested, but separated on both sides of a stream. But the countrymen had planted yew stakes to mark the graves and stakes rooted.

The yews were finally found entwining their branches tightly, and although Conchobar ordered them to be cut down, the Ulster people would not allow it and they protected the trees until the death of the king.

Symbol of tradition and identity

Perhaps we lost the root that united us to the tribe and to the Earth precisely when we stopped listening to the stories of yore. Well, to a great extent, the myth and its transmission were the mechanisms that served to unite and pass on memory, old customs and the meaning of life characteristic of each town.

Indeed, one of the primary functions of tales and legends was integrate the individual and transmit the messages more or less subliminal that teach the “correct” way to behave in the social or natural context, cultivating the feeling of identity and belonging that give cohesion to the tribe, society, country and the environment that surrounds us.

“The country that no longer has legends is condemned to die of cold.” (Dumezil)

If DNA is the vehicle for genetic transmission, the myth has been one of the most formidable and effective cultural transmission vehicles that man has invented. The loss of this reference has made the same principles will be shaken that guaranteed the proper balance of each community.

In this sense, the analysis made by ishilast survivor of the tribe of and thereexterminated by the thrust of the overwhelming civilization of the saldu (white males) in California: “Perhaps the saldu are not well taught by their Elders. Perhaps they have forgotten the teachings on their long journey through the deserts.” This is the only explanation that Ishi finds for the behavior of extraordinarily powerful but ignorant and uprooted beings, since they do not know how to coexist with their environment.

We can affirm the same at an individual level if we consider, following Robert Gravesthat the baggage of myths is indispensable for the formation of poetic and spiritual thought, to encourage the concept of the sacred.

Stories to open and close worlds

But it is not simply the legends and traditional tales that must be transmitted, but the tempo itself and the atmosphere that surrounds them and makes them throbbing and alive.

In this sense also a newly invented story It can house strength and wisdom or transmit new values, as long as the inspiration and staging are adequate.

“The word does not have legs, but it walks”, says a proverb of the Bambara (West Africa).

We certainly consume myths, tales and legends wholesale, through the media increasingly diverse. But this consumption, sometimes compulsive, has little to do with the ritual and the tempo in which a story told introduces us. comme il faut.

At the right time and place, with the right inflection and tone, using the formulas and silences that open and close the magical space (once upon a time)… The tale thus becomes a parallel universe that affects the depths of our being, and much of the secret that makes these dreams more vivid lies in the transmission itself. Perhaps this is the secret that opens a new scenario in a story, throbbing and alive.

Huaiquimill recounts the legends he had picked up by drinking from American tribal sources, and stressed the importance of the way of counting them: “When a story is told around a bonfire, the wind picks it up and mixes it with the sand and spreads it in all four directions, so that anyone can pick it up if they have the ability to listen. This is how the voice of the wind of the Aymara Indians blows.

like a seed, the stories remain latent somewhere and they will germinate when the sun and the earth agree. That is why the storyteller must take into account that in each of the stories that he opens and closes, there is a journey towards infinity and towards the depths of the storyteller and of those who listen; at whose return all are transformedsooner or later, somehow.

the open circle

Through the tale they spread ties of understanding at different levelsman practices magical thinking and the world is constructed and explained from a poetic point of view, essential for compensate and balance the rational side.

The myth is used to preserve and cultivate the sacred dimension of memory, of the Earth and of everything that lives on it, including man. And this is the first step in education towards respect and coexistence.

Obviously we are not talking about a religious vision in which one must believe and conform his life to the myth. It is the opposite, the story brings us closer to spirituality, magic and poetry as spaces that show the world under different aspects and allow us to interpret and experiment in a sensitive, free and playful way.

It is after a lifetime, or in moments of greatest lucidity and inspiration, when we become aware that a person’s own lifeof a people or a nation, It is a story big or small, like a story whose script we partly wrote.

On the edge of death, life is a fleeting story and reality a simple dream. Reason declares itself powerless to understand and loses its raison d’etre.

Until then, all beauty, legend and eternity that we have been able to glimpse in the course of our…