Storytelling Workshop Series To Focus On Community Bridge Building, One Person At A Time

What if instead of turning your back on someone who looks or sounds different than you, you decide to lean into that person?  

With one idea or another, in your mind and heart you, move toward that person instead of away.  You consider making a new acquaintance or friend out of someone you might otherwise consider to even be an enemy. 

Instead of seeing that person as someone who could or would bring danger into your life, you open to learning about their view of the world as being a gift for you, in some ways that might surprise you.

After all, it's been said that -

"An enemy is one whose story you haven’t yet heard." Gene Knudsen Hoffman, Quaker Peace Activist

So it makes sense that, if you share stories with those you would not ordinarily, you take a different route, possibly an opposite direction -- and -- create some kind of bond. 

Perhaps you might even have the beginning of a friendship, or possibly someone with whom you might endeavor to solve a neighborhood or community problem.  At the minimum, you will have brought some new thing – you -- to a stranger. And that is gift enough!

Eric Berne M.D., the psychiatrist who developed Transactional Analysis, my psychology home base, answered the question he posed in the title of his last book, What Do You Say After You Say Hello this way – 

“To say Hello rightly is to see the other person, to be aware of him as a phenomenon, to happen to him and to be ready for him to happen to you."

If you took the initiative to approach another person, even five or ten times in a year, in your neighborhood or community, imagine how different that place might be for you and those someone elses.

Storytelling is something you can do as your next step after “Hello.”

We, at the New Horizons Small “Zones of Peace” Project hope you will be inspired to learn the art of storytelling and story listening we are getting ready to offer at our – 

Storytelling Workshop Series

Saturday, October 14, November 4 (this event postponed in lieu of pending series at local college), and December 2, 2017 

2:00 to 5:00 p.m.

Reserve early, space is limited!