![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lawrencecconnolly.com\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/Storyteller-300x298.gif\")
[\u2026] there would be three months of enforced isolation and leisure, between the harvest that takes place just before the rise of the swamps and the clearing of new farms when the water goes down [\u2026]. As the swamps rose, the old men found it too difficult the walk from one homestead to the next, and [\u2026] as the swamps rose even higher all activities but one came to an end [\u2026]. They drank and sang or they drank and told stories.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\nThe above is from \u201cShakespeare in the Bush<\/a>\u201d (1966) by anthropologist Laura Bohannan. Recounting the activities of a Nigerian tribe during the rainy season, it serves as a reminder that social isolation is hardly new.<\/p>\n Thus, to cope with what for us is a new normal, we can revert to the old \u2013 the transporting power of song and story.<\/p>\n If this were the Nigerian rainy season depicted in \u201cShakespeare in the Bush\u201d or a long Anglo-Saxon winter in early Britain, we\u2019d need to gather physically for a storytelling session. But we have other options.<\/p>\n Thanks to the good folks at The Wicked Library<\/a>, I have a new story to share. It\u2019s titled \u201cThe Other Kind,\u201d and it centers on a man who has chosen a life of social isolation, a wounded warrior who finds uncanny meaning in his nightmares.<\/p>\n Are you with me? If so, I\u2019ll meet you in the library. The doors are open. You can enter via Spotify<\/a>, iTunes<\/a>, YouTube<\/a>, the Wicked Library website<\/a>, or by simply clicking the player below.<\/p>\n Come inside. I have a story to share.<\/p>\n Listen to “TWL 1002: “The Other Kind”, by Lawrence C. Connolly” on Spreaker.<\/a>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lawrencecconnolly.com\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Scop1-206x300.jpg\")
In the past, when nature forced communities inward, people relied on songs and stories to see them through. (And yes, they also drank, but that\u2019s a topic for another post.) We see similar examples throughout history \u2013 from the traveling storytellers of Anglo-Saxon mead-halls (see earlier posts An Evening of 21st-Century Scops<\/a> and \u00a0Scop 101<\/a>) to the bards of ancient Greece.<\/p>\n