“Storytelling lets you build a place,” my friend said over Skype.

I’d been telling her about my grandmother’s house and family and how having a place to come together creates a venue for serendipity and that I’m scared that when she’s gone that will be gone too.

“Storytelling,” she said, “is construction.”

I knew, when she said that, that she had to be right. That there was no way that she wasn’t because even though I’d never vocalized it I knew it to be true. I knew that somehow, by telling each other stories through a computer screen and microphone, we were building a room that spanned the 2,943.4 miles currently between us. I knew, because we were already doing it.

And so my brain started whirring like it does sometimes and I started talking faster and faster till the words skipped my brain altogether. Words from the gut, I call them.

Storytelling is brick and mortar as much as any Starbucks coffee shop on any street corner in New York City is and, maybe, even more so. It is beams and load bearing walls. It’s the perfect shade of robin’s egg blue and a rough hewn farm table with benches carved from maple.

It doesn’t replace a physical space, because it exists separate from a physical place. It’s needs are different, it’s appetite more particular, it’s diet more varied. Stories don’t need electricity or plumbing, but they still need inputs. They need inspiration, plot, protagonists, and villains. They need tension, conflict, and resolution.

More than anything, stories need passion. Passionate work to inspire them. Passionate people to drive them. And a passionate someone brave enough to tell them.

These days people don’t seem to understand the importance of a good story as well as they used to. I try to remind them that things don’t just speak for themselves, that while all they think they are doing is selling a product or advocating for a cause, they’re actually building a community through words, images, and videos far more real than any physical place.

Because when you close your eyes and all you see is darkness, it is the stories that are built inside of you, that you’ve nurtured, cared for, and share with others, that soar higher than any skyscraper and ground you more firmly than gravity ever can.

On that note, I will be in the Dominican Republic and Haiti from July 30^th – August 14^th and it is unlikely that I will be posting much during that time. First, I will be travelling with Onwards collecting stories for our official launch this September. After that, I will be staying at Swell Surf Camp continuing my quest to learn how to surf and working on telling some stories of my own.

With love,

Pippa