Beauty is the story we live.

Have you ever considered your story a beautiful one?  Filled with all that is bittersweet, tragic and comic, a saga of heroism. Your journey, your pathway, with all its twists and turns has the makings of a great narrative.

We are each living a beautiful story, crafted with care and worthiness.  Each story with moments of brilliance and moments of despair.

Summer is reflective of the abundance in my story.  I read good books, celebrate memories with family, and create experiences bound to become the repeated narratives of the future.

Plus, every story seems attached to a delicious fruit from my part of the world.  Raspberries, for me, are a mouthful of summer and they grow on the bushes a-plenty in our valley.  It is a symbol of cheerfulness and abundance.

So, when I read the following hopeful and haunting story from The Art of Possibility, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander,  it became something worth sharing:

Inscribed on five of the six pillars in the Holocaust Memorial at Quincy Market in Boston are stories that speak of the cruelty and suffering in the camps.  The sixth pillar presents a tale of a different sort, about a little girl name Ilse, a childhood friend of Guerda Weissman Kline, in Auschwitz.  Guerda remembers that Ilse, who was about six years old at the time, found one morning a single raspberry somewhere in the camp.  Ilse carried it all day long in a protected place in her pocket, and in the evening, her eyes shining with happiness, she presented it to her friend Guerda on a leaf.  “Imagine a world,” writes Guerda, “in which your entire possession is one raspberry, and you give it to your friend.”

The story moves my heart, like so many of our great stories.  Two little girls.  One simple gift.  Giving and receiving.

What would it be to give one raspberry?  What would it be to receive it; to eat it?  What would it be to give my all?  What would it be to receive?

Every story, giving and receiving.  Every story with simple acts of human heart.  Every story in the dance of life and death.

I told my daughter this story.  Of course, she only understood it as a story of friendship between two little girls.  I shared it several more times.

As I shared, I realized we are all living these stories.  Simple acts of generosity.  Breaking bread together.  Simple gifts without pretence and full of sincerity.  Plain family moments with both mud and lotus.

How can we step into the story of our summer?  What will inspire our presence in the next story?  How will the children lead us?

I’m so grateful for the stories we will share together this summer.  Learn Forward has some unique offerings you won’t want to miss.  So, and social media feeds.  You are sure to be encouraged by the stories of deep hungers, heart, and home.

For the sake of the children,

Karine