In this premiere episode of 'From Cork to New York,' Maria Gillen, a storyteller from Cork, and Jim Brule, a storyteller from New York, share insights on how they met through a shared love for spiritual storytelling. They recount their experience at the Guinness World Record Storytelling session in Marrakesh and discuss the importance of connection through stories. They weave a path down the Story Road, beginning with Jim, as he shares the Chinese tale of 'The Cowherd and the Weaver.’ Maria responds with an Irish story, followed by a Jewish story from Jim. The episode delves into their personal stories and the concept of legacy storytelling, emphasizing the power of stories to transcend boundaries and preserve values across generations.

00:00 Introduction and Greetings

00:57 How We Met: The Story Road

01:39 The Marrakesh Experience

02:16 The Power of Storytelling

05:23 Jim's Story: The Cowherd and the Weaver

14:16 Maria's Story: The Little Red Book

24:39 Jim's Story: The Baal Shem Tov

29:13 Legacy Storytelling: Values and Connections

36:37 Conclusion and Farewell

Hello from Cork.

Hello from New York.

Is mise Maire, an Seanchai Corcaigh.

It's Maria the Cork-based storyteller.

It's me, Jim here in Fayetteville, New York.

We can't wait to tell you a few stories.

Hello, it's Maria Gillen.

I am the  Seanchai from Cork City, and I'm talking to the fantastic Jim Brule.

What a great name.

Jim Brule.

Anything to the dessert, Jim?

Crunchy on the outside and sweet on the inside.

Okay,

so I just wanna give our listeners a little bit of context

of about, about how we met.

So, Jim and myself, we met on the very curly story road.

Um, I, I was very interested in spiritual storytelling.

I'm very interested in the Irish model of the Bean Feasa, the

wise woman, uh, storytelling.

And Jim had this idea to bring some people together with a

spiritual aspect to storytelling.

So I said, yes, I'd love to join that.

So we meet every second Tuesday and we have a great group of people.

And I didn't realize that Jim Brule had arms and legs, until I went to

Marrakesh this year, and both of us were involved in the Guinness World Record

session on the beautiful Jemaa el-Fna square in Marrakesh in the Red City.

And there we met heart to heart and eye to eye and soul to soul.

Isn't that right, Jim?

Oh, it certainly was.

And what a, what an amazing gathering: a hundred storytellers,

all sharing the same place for a week.

Yes.

And from every corner of the world, every continent was represented.

That's amazing.

And, uh, we got to talking then about connection and about

connection across the sea.

And of course I tell for our American visitors every Wednesday, which

is, um, a highlight in my week.

I love going to Garryvoe Hotel, where the staff are amazing and setting

up and just telling from the five deep wells of Irish storytelling.

And of course, tell us a little bit about your background as a storyteller.

Oh, well, you know, there's a story there and uh,

yes I do, I know the story, but I wanna share it with our listeners.

So I've had kind of two parallel paths throughout my life.

One is I've had a commercial career that's been in three different areas.

And also a professional storytelling career.

And the two of them overlap entirely.

So I've had a decade as a family therapist; I was in the world of

artificial intelligence in the 1980s and did that for about 15 years.

And then I worked in healthcare reform as a regulatory expert.

And through all of that came stories.

Because if you're trying to understand people, if you're trying to understand

the way people think, if you're trying to help people understand things.

You do that best with stories and that was pretty clear to me.

No arguments here.

Yeah.

You know, I suppose, we mirrored one another's paths quite a

lot because I, I left the corporate environment when I was EMEA manager.

So I was Europe, Middle East, and Africa Manager for a company and, a a,

as you say, I noticed that most of our steps forward were achieved through

storytelling and stories, you know, and we studied things like the emotional

intelligence and transactional analysis.

And as I was listening to the lessons of those, or reading up about them,

I could hear my mother's voice, and my grandmother's, voice and my

great-grandmother's voice, and they would say, sure, 'tis common sense girl.

'Tis common sense.

But common sense is in short supply these days, unless we tell the stories.

As my mother would've said, common sense is very uncommon.

Yeah.

And getting more uncommon as we go down the road, you know?

Um, and I suppose both of us then had an interest in the connections

to be made through story.

And how it can, um, rub lines out, you know?

Mm-hmm.

And it can, um, it, it doesn't respect borders or anything like that.

Stories or storytellers.

Yes.

Hence, 100 storytellers in Marrakesh.

Right.

Hence our connecting, you know, kind of through storytelling.

Jim, I know that this little, uh, session , it's a mix between stories,

and then chatting on the story road.

So I'm wondering, would you have a little story far us?

I might have a story.

Yes.

One, one of a few.

One of the things that's become interesting to me of

late is stories from China.

I've gotten really involved in looking at stories there.

'Cause for me, the real interest is when cultures meet and they have different

forms and different stories, and this is a story that's one of the four most

important stories, the Chinese tell us.

That was determined in the early 1900s.

They said, if you know these four stories, you've got it all.

And this is one of those four, it's called the Cowherd and the Weaver.

And I think listeners may recognize certain elements of this story as well.

In the Chinese stories there are gods and goddesses, and it's not like

they're in charge of things so much as they just live in a different world.

And one of these goddesses was a Weaver.

And what did she weave in her realm?

She wove clouds together.

And she would make the most intricate weavings of clouds and stitch

them together or take them apart.

And her work was so fine that nobody could tell where her seams were.

It was really quite, quite amazing.

And she was one of seven sisters and they lived together up there in the heavens,

and they lived for a very, very long time.

So long that she thought, you know, I would love to visit Earth.

This weaving clouds is great, but I need something a little

new, a little different.

And so she decided to visit the earth with her seven sisters.

Now you should know that while this was going on, there was a

man down on the earth and he had encountered this amazing bull.

He was just a farmer.

He wasn't a fancy man or a royal person or anything like that.

He was just a cowherd.

And this one bull was really an amazing bull because it would speak to him

and it would talk to him and would give him advice, and it would make

sure that everything was going fine.

So on this one day, he's got his friend, the bull, with him down at the

stream to water the bull and down from the heavens come these seven women.

In glittering gowns, sparkling and shining.

And if you've got a beautiful sparkling fresh stream, you're

gonna want to go swimming in it.

So they took off all their robes and they jumped into the river and

they were splashing and swimming and having a wonderful time.

And of, of course, his eye fell on one of them.

And the bull said to him, If you will take her cloak and replace it with

your own, she won't go back to heaven.

She'll stay with you.

And he was so enamored of her that he of course, snuck in and figured

out which cloak was hers and stole it and replaced it with his own.

The time comes for them to go.

And this one, the one sister, the cloud weaver, she can't go back up.

There's just this one human cloak.

And he runs out to offer to put it on her.

And the other sisters see him and they all fly up into the air and there she is.

She's left with him.

But you know what?

As attracted as he was to her, she was to him.

And she accepted his cloak, and the two of them come to get to

know each other and time passed, and of course they fell in love.

They fell in love, and they fell in so deeply in love.

They had children.

And the bull?

The bull was thrilled that his friend had this wonderful wife now and this wonderful

family, and he did everything he could to try and help them become prosperous.

Now, as happens, we all get older unless we're a goddess.

And the bull was reaching the end of his life and the bull said to him,

After I die, take my hide because if you should ever need to travel

anywhere, you can put on my hide and it'll take you wherever you wanna go.

I'll bet you can probably guess what happens.

What happens is the cloud weaver's mother, who's living up in the

heavens, misses her daughter.

And says, what are you doing down there?

It's time to come back.

You don't belong down there.

And oh my God, you've got a human husband and human children?

That's unreasonable!

Come back up!

And she snatches her back up.

Well, fortunately, the cowherd has his bull's hide and he makes two

baskets, one for each of his children, and he wraps himself in the hide.

And he starts to fly after her.

Now she's already up there.

It takes him some time to get there, and her mother is just so angry

with her and she says, I don't want you to ever see this man again.

This is not your station.

And she says, but I love him.

She says, you are a goddess.

He's a human.

This can't happen.

And then the queen mother looks down and she sees the cowherd

flying up in the bull's hide.

And what does she do?

She takes the needle that her daughter uses to thread clouds together.

And she drags it across the sky, piercing the sky in what you and I might call

the Milky Way, and she's on the other side of the cowherd who's coming up.

And the cowherd can't get to her and she can't get to - this

divide has separated them.

Their hearts are breaking

and they don't know what to do.

They keep pushing against the Milky Way, and it has these little bumps

in it from where they're trying, but they can't get across it.

And so it continues, and it goes on and on.

Finally the queen mother realizes how brokenhearted her daughter is.

Now she can't go against the rules.

But she can have a little bit of mercy.

And so she says, On one day a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month,

I will let the magpies fly up to heaven and they'll form a bridge across the

Milky Way, and the two of you can come together and meet and kiss and embrace.

Only for one day a year.

And that day is called Qixi, and it's the Chinese Valentine's Day,

when everyone gives their love gifts.

And that's the story of the Weaver and the Cowherd.

Oh my God, Jim, I actually turned my mic off during that story because

I was having such big reactions to it that that's such a beautiful story.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think our listeners would recognize the selkie

stories in that Chinese story.

Yeah, yeah.

You know?

Amazing.

You know, so then it's tradition that I tell you a story back, and

we like it to be a connected story.

So we call this threading.

So there was loads of stories rolling around in my mind as you told that story.

Including the, um, the selkie story, but a new story that I'm telling at the

moment that came to me through the Bean Feasa, through, through the ways of

weaving stories in the Bean Feasa way.

I'm going to share with you now.

This is how the threading and the weaving works, you know.

So it's about the, the lonesomeness of a mother when her children leave.

So we heard there about the anger that a mother has; and sometimes,

um, they have a different reaction.

And this is the story of a mother who had a reaction that was different to that.

Once upon a time in my town Jim, in Cork City, which is a city of hills,

seven hills that lead down into a flat space, like a little saucer surrounded

by these mountains, there lived a woman.

And when she'd look out her window, she could see the lights

of Cork coming on one by one.

This was not today nor yesterday.

This was in a time when electricity was new to my country and to my little city.

And this woman, while she reared nine fine strong children, and

she called them her little ducks.

And they loved her and she loved them, and she did her best for them.

But in those days, this country was not a rich country and one by one.

They kissed their mother on her cheek and one by one her little ducks,

they flew away one to New York.

New York was a really exciting place then where the buildings were

beginning to come up out of the earth.

And her son, he got a job in one of these skyscraper buildings,

a new name for a new building.

And he would climb out on the girders for his lunch, no such

thing as health and safety.

He would wear his normal shirt and a pair of dungarees over it, the

hobnail boots, and he'd take his lunch out of a little silver pail.

And sitting up there in the clouds, he'd watch as the new teeth of the

new city began to rise ever higher, and he would think, oh, I'd love to

let them know about this in Ireland.

I must write a letter.

Because in those days, there wasn't many telephones.

But life was so exciting that somehow he never wrote that

letter back home to his mom.

And then one of the daughters, when she left and she went to Canada and up at

the top of Canada, she came in contact with this nation called Gananoque, fine,

strong, tall, native people with stories so brilliant that they'd draw you in and

they'd weave great worlds around you.

And somehow she forgot to lift her head and to whisper those

stories back home to her mother.

And so it was for all of the nine children and the youngest one of

all went just across the pond to England where life was very much the

same and still very much different.

And she was getting older and older, was Nora, so she took down her big red book.

It was the only little fippery that she gave herself, the only

money that she spent on herself.

It was these old books that were legal papers a little bit bigger

than the A4 size with blue lines across them, and she would see this

as a new place to put her stories.

And into the red books she put all the news she could glean about her

children, and she put in all the stories that were meaningful to them

as they grew up, and she put in all her wisdom stories so that they would

have her wisdom when she was gone.

And then one night there was a knock on the door.

And it was her son, home from New York.

Hello Mam!

Do they have nice tea over there in America?

No tea Mam, just coffee.

Oh, don't tell me you drink coffee now.

Now, when I'm home, Mam, when I am home, I drink your tea.

And over copious amounts of tea, he told her about these skyscraper

buildings and how he had his lunch in the clouds, and how the city never

slept, and how you could get fed at two o'clock in the morning with pizza.

Pizza was a kind of a cake with a kind of a stew on top of it.

It was the most magnificent food.

And she laughed and she smiled and she said, when you are gone to bed now, I

will put that in my little red book.

And soon the time came that he had to leave, and she was so lonesome 'cause none

of her ducks had been home in a while.

When there was another knock on the door, and this time it was her daughter

home from Canada with all the great stories of the Gananoquean people.

And the words that she wore around her mother.

Stop, she said, I have writer's cramp trying to get those stories

down in my little red book.

And are you happy there, my little duck?

Are you happy in Canada?

I surely am, Mam.

I've met someone and we've settled down and the babies are coming.

Oh, that's great to hear, she said, that's great to hear.

I'd love to see them, but I know it's hard to make the

travel across such a vast ocean.

And so all the ducks came home one by one by one, until she

found herself on her own again.

And then she would open her book, and she would read herself the stories

of our children until the time came when she had to go and meet her maker.

Happy to go for the life she had led was full and full of happiness.

And then all her ducks came home.

And as was tradition, the neighbors came in and they surrounded

the body in the Irish wake.

They told of all of her good and kind deeds, and it took a long time.

Three days it took for that funeral to happen, and the ducks were sitting around

the kitchen, their eyes red raw from the loss of their mother, with smiles on

their faces from the great memories and the stories that she had left behind.

And then, as if something had knocked it from its place, her little red

book fell out of the bookshelf and the children fell on it as if they

were starving for her stories.

And they began to read.

And first they read of New York and Lunch in the Clouds.

And then they ran.

They read of Gananoque, and of all the fantastic stories that

came home from across the sea.

And they went through all of the different countries where the ducks had

come to land, including the one just across the pond in England, and the

stories of Arthur and his round table and how people were all the same as one

another, no one better, no one lesser.

And when they'd finished reading the stories to one another, Maire

looked at Padraic and she said, When did you come to see mom to tell

her of your stories in New York?

And he looked at her and he said, Sure, I wish I'd made the

time, but I never made the time.

How did she know?

And then he said, when did you come home with all those stories from Gananoque?

Sure, I never made it home, she said, but I wish I did.

And yet, and yet, somehow those stories came across time and

across space and ended up in their mother's Little Red Book.

Sin e mo sceal.

That is my story.

Oh, what a beautiful story.

What a beautiful story.

An ending I didn't see coming.

And it makes it all the sweeter.

Makes it all the sweeter.

That's it, you know.

So that was a dream story, you know?

Yeah.

Where you kept kind of, there was bits of it coming and one day

sitting here in the radio station, it just came out fully formed.

Ah.

And there it is now.

Well, may I weave a story into that then?

Yes, please weave a story into that.

Uh, one of the wonderful things about this story is that it is a

story that seems very specific to one people, and I know that it's shared

by many in the way that you would say nobody in this community ever told

anybody else in that other community, but they both have the same story.

But the version I know starts with a very, very wise mystic in the Jewish tradition.

His name is the Baal Shem Tov, which means the Master of the Good Name, and he was

said to have amazing mystical powers.

Well, one day the Baal Shem Tov saw that a terrible disaster was going

to fall upon the people, and there was only one way to lessen the blow.

And so he gathered his disciples all together.

And he said, Come with me into the forest in the middle of the night.

And being good disciples, of course, they came.

And he took them out deep into the forest to a clearing none of them

had ever seen before, and he had them gather wood and twigs and tinder, and

assemble it in a very, very specific way.

And then, to light the fire.

But as they lit the fire, he said a prayer that was full of incantations and magic.

And when the fire finally burned out and the incantations were done, he turned to

his disciples and he said, We've done it.

We've averted the crisis.

It was enough.

Well, many, many years went by and the Baal Shem Tov passed on.

And another trouble came to the community and his premier disciple

said, I know what we can do.

And he gathered his disciples together and they went out to

that same place in the woods.

And they gathered wood together and tinder and kindling, and they

built the fire in the same way.

And as they lit the fire, the disciple said, you know, I, I know where to

build the fire and I know how to light it, but I don't know the prayer.

But it was enough.

And the crisis was averted.

And then of course another generation went by and another trouble came and another

disciple stepped up and he said, Well, I wasn't there, but he told me where it was.

So let's go out to that same clearing in the forest.

And they all went out to the clearing in the forest, but they didn't

know how to build the fire and they didn't know how to say the prayer.

But it was enough, and the crisis was averted.

And finally another generation went by, and there was another crisis to

come and the rabbi said, You know, I don't know where the forest is, or the

clearing, I don't know how to build the fire, and I certainly don't know

the prayer, but I know the story.

And that should be enough.

And it was.

Oh, wow.

I love it.

I love it, you know.

So many threads that you could go off down the road on there, you know?

Yes.

But I think the one that is singing in my heart is the intention one.

That intention.

Mm-hmm.

Is powerful, you know?

Mm.

And being connected back through the line is so powerful, you know?

So for me, um, a simple Hail Mary connects me back through all my generations, you

know, and just brings my mom, you know, kind of close to me again, you know?

And of course to, to, to our tradition, our Lady.

Mm-hmm.

The mother is the mother.

Mm-hmm.

You know?

Yes.

Yeah.

You know, oh my God, what a beautiful story.

And I told that story to a dear friend, a friend we share, Hears Crow.

Yeah.

Who's an indigenous grandmother.

Yeah.

And she said, no, no, no, no.

That's our story.

Yeah,

she and she had the same story.

So different characters, but the same story.

Characters and the same story.

Oh my God.

I love it.

You know, so I'm conscious now as well that we could go threading and weaving

because you and I are threaders and weavers, Jim, but also before we do,

I wanted to talk about legacy stories.

Mm-hmm.

And how that really captures your heart, you know?

Mm-hmm.

And I want to talk into the root of it, which was, uh, for,

from, from Syracuse, you know?

Mm-hmm.

And the magic that happened there.

So it's not my story to tell even though I love telling that.

So can you tell us how you first came in touch with legacy stories

and then what it means to you?

Sure.

So legacy storytelling, for me, it's something I'm very attached to.

When we think about legacy, lots of people think about the money that they're gonna

give or the gifts they're going to pass down from one generation to another.

And you know, we all have a painting that a great-grandmother

did or something like that.

That's part of a legacy.

But I realized that for me, what's most important, the most

important legacy is my values.

Can my children really take on the values, or at least appreciate

the values that I try to live by and pass them onto their kids.

How else are we gonna do that but with stories?

I mean, it's the only way we do these things.

But as I thought about, well, how do I help people to kind of unearth

and share their stories of their values, I realized that if you ask

somebody, what are your values?

They go straight up into their head and they think a lot about, oh, how good of a

person am I that I have this great value?

And it's almost like writing your own obituary.

Not that there's anything wrong with doing that, but it, it's

just a little too self-centered.

And so I wanted to find a way to have people be able to capture their values

in a story that wasn't about them.

And so I developed a way of kind of stumbling on some values that aren't

necessarily the greatest, like World Peace or something like that, that

everybody was saying yes, but maybe it's something that's like chocolate,

walking in the forest, any of these other things that are really valuable to me.

But I want people to tell them as if they were only watching these things happen,

not giving or receiving these benefits.

And so that's what I do.

I work with folks as you know, and we find a moment, a snapshot in our lives

where we've witnessed that value taking place, and we tell a little anecdote

about that, and that's the seed for the story that gets woven over time then.

Yeah.

I, I mean, I am still reeling from the story that came up out of my spirit.

Hmm.

Doing this workshop that you, you did, and one of the ways that you

separated us from ourselves was to say that we had to look at a load of

words and then you picked three and the first one you threw away, 'cause

that was your mind getting in the way.

And then you were left with two words.

And I still remember the words.

By the way, I still remember the words that came up.

And then, um, you had to come up with a story that you'd witnessed

where you saw that being received.

You couldn't be the giver and you couldn't be the receiver.

So what a clever way of separating you.

And then the other part of it is, of course, as, as you remember,

you tell that story to someone else,

yes.

And then they tell it for you

Very powerful.

And you haven't told that person what the value was,

that's right.

so that when they tell it to the group.

There are 7, 8, 9, 10 values in that story.

That's right!

That are all part of who you are.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

I was fascinated by that because one of them was, was mentioned

by the group and the other one wasn't, and I was like, oh my God.

You know?

And yet there was so many other values that they saw in the story, you

know, so many other wisdoms that that other people could glean from that

story, which was absolutely amazing.

And I don't have time to tell it today, but I will tell

it on our little show next.

I will tell the story that came out of that.

Um, but it was such an incredible way of holding space.

And I remember you telling me that you had been involved in this group, and

in the group there was seven people from the Jewish faith, and there was

Ah, yes.

Palestinians, and there was seven others.

And a way of not looking at the conflict that existed

between, and continues to exist.

Mm-hmm.

You know, but to see one another as human beings.

You talked about what was important to you, but not about faith or about, you

know, but, but about your ordinary lives.

And this is also a mechanism from that, isn't it?

It is.

It is.

Yeah.

And I loved that.

That it's a great way of rubbing out, um, a stance, taking a

stance, and making a conflict.

It's like the opposite of that.

Mm-hmm.

It's such a gentle way of reaching out and holding one another and

getting to the important stuff.

You know, Jim, I've noticed that you have put up on Facebook that you are

actually running a story circle, which in, you know, around legacy voices.

If our listeners would like to be part of that, where can they

find information out about that?

So my website is called transformational storytelling.org.

And on that website there's a tab called Events.

Just look in the events and there'll be, I, I run usually one or two a month.

Uh, so that's, uh, there'll be plenty of opportunities and

I try to make them available.

The challenge of Zoom is not that we're in little boxes, the challenge is that we're

all the way around the world, so finding a time zone, and so they, they kind of

circulate through the last one I did.

I did the first one for Australia and Singapore.

I did one for the Western United States.

The next one is Europe.

So you know, we're, we're back in your all time zone, so good.

Fantastic.

That's brilliant.

You know, it's, you know, I highly, highly recommend it.

It's a long time since I've been blown away by training because

I'm a training junkie and I do a lot of trainings all the time.

But this one was so much more than that.

It was like a, a life experience and I highly, highly recommend

the legacy voice trainings.

So thank you Jim, thank you so much for joining me today, and I look

forward to a lot more between Cork and New York over the coming weeks

and months and years, God will it.

You know?

Um, and it's a pleasure having you in my life on the story road.

Um, and thanks for coming.

Oh, and thanks for having me.

Yes.

Will we say goodbye from Cork?

And goodbye from New York, but only for a while because we'll be

back again with another episode.

Absolutely.

We can't wait to see you on the Story Road one more time, and from this

time till that be safe on the Story Road.