Page 75 - ECOlogic Book

A Winter Tale
(Winter, 1994)

In the traditions of many primal peoples, the telling of stories is reserved for
the wintertime. Telling stories at any other time of the year is bad form. To
tell a story in the summertime would be to put one out of synch with the
cosmos. Nowhere have I read why this is so, so I’ll make up the reasons.
Here are my guesses:
● There’s nothing else to do.
● As we huddle together by the fire, there’s an intimacy in the family not
to be found at other times of the year, making it easier to focus on the
storyteller.
● Stories, like food gathered at the time of harvest, are stored for times
of chaos and hunger, when darkness closes in. The proper time to
bring them out is when they will do the most good.
● In the winter world, chaos and danger are never far away. The story
brings order to an otherwise chaotic and unpredictable world.
● The purpose of the story, like that of the fire, is to warm us and cheer
us; remind that we are not powerless in the face of danger. We can
light fires and we can tell sorties.
● The story binds together the family as nothing else can. Winter is a
time when family must pull together to survive. The story reminds us
of our interdependence.
● Winter is the time for gathering in, for integrating what we’ve learned
during the more active months. Like trees that appear dead in the
winter, we are active under the bark. This inner organization calls for
reaching into the depths of who we are and where we came from, to
reweave it with what we have more recently become. From that new
fabric, the new person will emerge.

As we consider these possible explanations, we’re reminded of the
importance of story-telling. It seems we are genetically coded to tell stories.
The stories we well ourselves and each other are the trans-genetic coding
through which human evolution proceeds. As Joseph Campbell once
observed, “the dominant myth that informs a person or a culture is like the
“information” contained in the DNA of a cell, or the program in the systems
disk of a computer. Myth is the cultural DNA, the software, the unconscious
information, the program that governs the way wr see ‘reality’ and
behave,” He continues, “When we look at the panorama of the 20
th
89

89 Campbell, Joseph and Keeen, Sam, “Myths”, Oct., 1988 Psychology Today

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