Untangling Tales is about making sense of things.

So much of life plain. doesn’t. make. sense. But good stories do.

I’ve always considered logic a nice break from the real world.

I suppose I’m the type that will take whatever I can get, but even life makes sense sometimes, if you look for it, and look long enough.

At Untangling Tales this usually happens through stories, or writing, or talking about writing; using them to interpret “real life.” So often the words show you another way to look closer.

I know that I have an uncommon obsession with old stories (I mean old stories, not old novels or old books; the sort of stories that connect to one another and have threads of similarity through different cultures). I’ve also noticed that they affect the way I think and the way I see the world.

The Old Stories are a hub of generational wisdom that has the flexibility to be applicable in many situations and life-stages.

Wisdom won through countless victories and losses over centuries.

All good stories assert something. They start a fight.

I like G.K. Chesterton’s short list in Orthodoxy:

• There is the lesson of “Cinderella,” which is the same as that of the Magnificat–EXALTAVIT HUMILES (the lowly will be lifted up).
• There is the great lesson of “Beauty and the Beast;” that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.
• The terrible allegory of the “Sleeping Beauty,” which tells how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death; and how death also may perhaps be softened to a sleep.

We don’t read to escape reality;
we read to see what we know exists but can’t find anywhere else.

~ ~ ~

I think the greatest problems in our world today are rooted in lack of imagination.

Imagination isn’t just a five-syllable word to teach 5-year-olds who can’t pronounce the word syllable. It is the ability to consider the existence of something you haven’t personally experienced.

It is the seed of art and creativity, yes. But as that, imagination is also the starting place of problem-solving and compassion.

Compassion: identifying so much with another person that you must enter into their world, their pain, and do what you can to change it. To make it better.

This is what a story is: it is the change; the growth. And it is the training ground of imagination.

Learning to see more than your eyes can see.

~ ~ ~

Please stick around and share your own thoughts in the comments; I love to discuss ideas.