Dr. Leo Buscaglia,author and Italian born psychologist, said “if we don’t tell our stories in our own voice, through our own eyes, the world will never hear our story.”
Writing the legacy of our lives isn’t easy but if we have the gift and if we have the calling to tell our stories, we are on a mission to leave our words for those who follow. We become a leader to those who do not know how to share or who lack the courage to let the world know what went on in their unique world.
We each have our own story whether we ever delve into it or not.
We all have a gift.
For some it is the paint brush or to write a book but if we bury that talent we will have lived our lives in vain and the world will never know who we really were.
I had a second cousin, the late Mildred Pettis-Leighton, the daughter of my
maternal great Aunt Etta Maples Pettis and Uncle Lon, from Troy, Kansas.
Etta was the sister to my grandmother Myrtle Mae Maples Morris. (Sarah’s maternal grandparents, James O. Morris and Myrtle May Maples-Morris who died at the age of twenty-five. They ran for land in the Oklahoma Land Rush in Woods County, Oklahoma, before statehood. Sarah’s mother was born in the underground Indian dwelling, located on their homestead and this is where she fell through the roof of the dwelling, lapsed into a coma, at the age of two, and suffered some brain damage that would partially handicap her for life.)
Mildred always wrote stories for her family as the Christmas holidays drew near because she had little money for gifts but she could write stories and share those with her family. I received two identical sets of hand written stories from long lost cousins many years after she died.
Though I didn’t know her, she lived upon the page and I have her picture that helps me know her better when she was a child. In reading her priceless pieces, my mother’s name popped up in one of them, and I saw how my cousin cherished my mother in her memories of when my poor two year old mother had to live with this cousin for a while after my twenty-five year old grandmother died in 1908 from typhoid fever, leaving my mom and Aunt Gladys, orphaned.
These stories will live on because my cousin took the time to write them down and pass them on to her children.
Her stories were gifts that only she could give.
I think about the importance of writing our family histories. Some families may be strong and have a great lineage and then one day the unexpected happens. The parents are killed in an accident.
The children are left bereft maybe at an early age and an entire family can go down because no one really knows or cares to bolster the children in need.
Keeping our stories alive helps to nurture the family, the bedrock of any society.
For whatever reason you want to tell you story I say pick up your pen and write even the simplest of stories, one line at a time, and don’t allow anyone to pass judgment on you for daring to write because you are the final judge of whether it is worth sharing or not.
We have to take care of ourselves and allow others into our lives or we will leave nothing and find ourselves alone in the universeWe grow stronger as we share.
I am just so grateful that God has kept me going through this life and I know He always will because Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever and He always gets me to the right place at the right time.
Contact Sarah at [email protected]