I have seen Ryoanji in spring, when the cherry trees bloomed, and in fall, when their branches were bare; in winter, when snow covered the moss, and in summer, when cicadas buzzed beyond the wall.  I have been there among giggling teenagers and gaping farmers, bemused Westerners and beatific monks.  By now it has become a part of me—and it still eludes me.

There are moments on our journeys when we meet a person—alive or long vanished from the earth—and time and distance morph, bringing characters of place and past close enough to look us in the eye, and touch us with fingers that pulse with life, as when I ‘met’ Paul Cézanne in Aix-en-Provence.

Nothing makes the sun come out quicker than a night full of tales, and I know you are waiting for it--just like we are. Perhaps it is now time to finally tell our story as we want, and as we lived together before, not as they tell it. Now, after everyone is gone, leaving us here with you, we can tell it.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, I would have loved to have a baby like the Virgin Mary who conceived him with the Holy Spirit, without carnal contact with a man…

“Only connect,” E.M. Forester famously advised novelists—and this is the governing principle of the International Writing Program, which brings the writers of the world to the University of Iowa for three-month residencies. In retrospect, the IWP, as it is known, was a natural outgrowth of the Writers’ Workshop, and yet at the time it seemed, in the words of its co-founder, Paul Engle, “the craziest idea” he had ever heard.

This story is from the chapter, The Storykeeper, which is about the documentary film made by Erin Byrne and Rogier Van Beeck Calkoen.  René Psarolis was seven years old in 1944, in Nazi-occupied Paris, when a USAF B-17 bomber crashed in his neighborhood. What René ultimately did shows how we can take the stories that touch us and offer them to the world in a way that unleashes the power of the universe.