Thursday, March 3, 2011

The mystery of memory

Memory is a mysterious and often unreliable thing. Ancestry research has shown me that many times. Our memories are very often more 'stories' rather than facts. There may well be facts woven into the story but details are often stitched into place with more whim than wisdom.

Every memory we have is either our version, or story, of something we experienced, or a story told to us by others, often our parents. When people talk about their 'first memory' there is a good chance that the memory may be a story they have been told by their parents, rather than a personal remembering of an actual event.

Not that I believe it matters. The stories live of and in and because of themselves and it is in the remembering of them, the collecting of them, like brief blossomings from a distant past, that we come to know and understand who we are and perhaps, how we came to be what we are.

The stories I 'know' of my life begin long before any actual memory and are sourced in photographic images and stories my parents and grandparents told. Facts and fiction woven together into something we could call faction; a story which springs forth from facts but which is dressed in fantasies of perception. Which is all life ever is no matter how much we may insist on its 'reality.'

All is perception, even that which we call real.  And to that degree, all is a story which 'tells itself' through our nature and our circumstance; 'paints' itself from the palette of Self we have to hand. The same experience for two people will always be remembered differently.

This is why siblings so often tell different stories about family life and parents. There may be shared circumstances and even events but the 'stories' will be told through each individual filter of perception. There can be so many lives lived in the same home with the same parents and the same events that one can only marvel at the awesome diversity of human nature. And question the truth of everything.

And this is my qualifier, for the blossoms I am collecting are my own even though others may recognise some, or even many of them. My stories, however much fact or fantasy may be involved, are what have made me and that is the only thing I have to offer to my children, my grandchildren, or any of those who will come after me and who may care about our family and our stories.

Within the collecting of these stories are blossoms from my parent's past and other family members and these may appear in different shape or form to that held by spouse, sibling, parent, child or any family member who shares in them. But this is my remembering, or rather re-membering, in a putting back together some scattered pieces of the past and they are neither right nor wrong... they simply are my stories.