“… the white snake lived by the river and was white because it lost its colours because the river always washed over it…”
                                                              - nine-year-old storyteller -

… And so to start …

… why do we like STORIES so much?  Well, one view is that they differentiate us from the animals… However, as a peculiar nuance in the word chain, STORIES lie between the co-ordinates of myth and history, between song and silence, and between numbers and nothing… Somewhat monophyletic, infusing all… bearing trace elements, spores and residues from a common source … tracking echoes and echo patterns … binding the smallest to the most extreme oppositions of our experience, overcoming the contradictions in vortexes and spirals that are possibly determined by, possibly continually determining, the helixes of our DNA … almost… possibly just…?

... hard to say if  I discovered puppetry, or it me... a damascus moment of the latter, however, occurred on the road in a strange land, under a lunar eclipse, a long time ago… when the world was on the threshold of huge and mysterious change… or so it seemed...

... then…

... a simple man, bearded and dressed in white, himself a traveller of the world… come from afar, wizened before his time and, no doubt, carrying the memories of many hungers, spoke to those of us who had gathered round…

... he told the tale of two lovers; she, of fine breeding, brushed by the moon and paragon-strong. He, firebrand tall, of malachite mind and obsidian light… Yet both were entrapped on either side of the divide, their paths ill-fated, and doomed…

... but this simple man interrupted his tale at this point so that we take heed…  and, in a dance, showed the ending of the fateful events… rising bird-like into the sky…