"All of us are a story. It is not that we have a story. We are an ongoing story."

(Michael Warren, Touching the stories of young people, New Catholic World, March/April 1979, quoted in Story Art, July 1986).

I have recently become the editor of Story Art, the quarterly journal of the National Story League. I've only been a member of the National Story League for about two years, so I've been reading back issues to learn more about the organization and its publication. Story Art has been published for more than 70 years, so I've had a lot of catching up to do!

I think about stories everyday -- my own story, your story, the stories of people I meet, the stories of places I visit, the stories of times gone by, the stories of things to come, the stories of people and places I don't yet know. It's natural for me; I see connections everywhere. But I didn't realize it until I came across the quote referenced above. Here's the whole quote:

"All of us are a story. It is not that we have a story. We are an ongoing story. When we forget this, our life becomes a series of unconnected events, connected only in the sense that they all happened to us. But when each of us gets a sense of our own history, there is a whole different quality to the events of our lives . . . we have a sense that we have come from somewhere and are going somewhere in life. We find a sense of direction."

Good stuff! This quote was included in an article about sharing family history with kids. More about that later.