Tell Us Your Stories

A book title comes from Canada: “If This Is Your Land, Tell Us Your Stories.” Here’s the back-story:  

When the colonizers arrived with paper in hand, claiming land by “title,” the Indigenous peoples could not comprehend how ink and parchment could own earth, water, and sky. 

Finally, a chief asked: “If this is your land—tell me your stories.”

For the land knows its own—

not by deed, but by devotion.

Not by possession, but by relationship.

There’s an old teaching about two brothers who each owned half a field. Each wanted what the other had. Neither would yield. So they sought out a rabbi famed for his wisdom.

He lay down beneath a tree, pressed his ear to the soil, and closed his eyes. Impatient, the brothers demanded he stop wasting their time.  The rabbi rose and said,

“I was listening to the ground.

It told me neither of you owns it.

The ground owns you.

And one day, it will take you back.”

We think we own things—

our land, our homes, even our lives.

But we are only trustees of what was here before us

and will remain long after we return to dust.

All that we claim to possess, we owe:

–to the God who created it,

–to the ancestors who tended it,

–to the earth that sustains it,

–to the future that will inherit what we leave behind.

The real question is not What do we own? but What stories do we carry and pass on?

May we bring flourishing life through our storied lives.