Weaving Memories and Building Ties
I sat with two of my brothers recently and went through some boxes of old photos from my parents’ estate. My Mum and Dad both passed away some years ago and we are getting ready to create a digital library of snaps and stories for the coming generations. Camera tech was pretty naf back in the day and a lot of the old black and white and colour images are blurry and faded. We found some ‘goodies’ however and reminisced over the events that they captured and the memories they triggered. Moments of joy, adventure, grief, affection, hilarity, fear, triumph, beauty, failure etc, were all gathered up in the pile. We spent a few lazy hours telling tales and drinking coffee. There was plenty of bro banter and teasing, a smattering of profanities, good doses of laughter and a few tears in the room.
When we packed up the boxes to cycle home, we all felt a little closer. Our shared remembering and storytelling had woven us more tightly together. We hope our work on this wee project will also help our tamariki and moko, and future generations of our whanau to tell and retell the stories, discover more of their ‘rooted’ selves and build strong and healthy family bonds.
It’s not just blood families that share pictures and yarns. I love the fact that here at Ilam, we have a great tradition of storytelling together. Whether it’s barstool on Sunday, kitchen table on Monday, cafe seat on Wednesday or pub seat on Friday… let’s keep sharing our stories and our memories. Let’s also keep anchoring ourselves in our Jesus whakapapa and building one another up in faith, hope and love.
“Listen, dear friends, to God’s truth, bend your ears to what I tell you. I’m chewing on the morsel of a proverb; I’ll let you in on the sweet old truths, Stories we heard from our fathers, counsel we learned at our mother’s knee. We’re not keeping this to ourselves, we’re passing it along to the next generation— God’s fame and fortune, the marvelous things he has done.” (Psalm 78:1-4) 