Stories Composed and Performed by Bob
Robert began his life in a small farmhouse in rural Ohio. With no peers living nearby, his friends became the aging out buildings, the chigger filled grass, and the family garden plot.
Oh….also the family cats, a pet turtle and a small flock of sheep.
Oh….and an older brother, a baby sister and two loving parents.
Let’s just say that this is where he developed a feeling for lifelong relationships – both inanimate and animate.
At the age of six Robert’s human family moved to the small city of Delaware, Ohio. He managed to take the wisdom of relationships he’d acquired in the farmhouse and transfer it to the basement and attic of an older Victorian home, a large garage, a large tree-filled yard and his grandparents’ farm.
Oh….it was much harder, but he also learned to value the relationships he found in the dozens of peers he now encountered daily in his first-grade classroom.
Somehow, he came to terms with the attendance and homework demands of school. Graduating from high school into the VietNam years, Robert attended college, earning a bachelor’s degree in elementary education. During a brief stint of teaching overseas, he realized his deepest interest was not in the piloting of a classroom but in the fascination of individual personal histories that were contained within it.
Stories.
And, so, it became clear that he did not belong in the classroom, but in a counselor’s office.
Lots of stories.
As a middle school counselor, he traveled through thirty-two years of stories of middle school youth in a small, rural, Michigan town. As the decades passed, the stories of individuals grew into the stories of generations of families, of changing landscapes, of tragedies and revelations. There were also stories of his own life renovating an older home, then designing and building his own. The story of living on twenty acres of developing forest. There was the story of a marriage of true partnership now lasting more decades than he can easily conceive.
Oh….and the story of both attending and working within the deeply reflective workshops of Dr. C. Michael Smith in which the stories witnessed during his life bore their own fruit.
The stories gave birth to their own stories.
The Road To Everywhere Series
Introduction
Maree and Jasu are a couple who have spun their lives by refurbishing a small abandoned farm. In the course of their lives, and beyond, there are of course their own adventures, but also the adventures of many others whose paths they have crossed.
Maree’s Journey
In this 3 part series Maree struggles to resolve her relationship with an unexpected change in her life. Click the link to listen.
The Stone Rivers Series
Introduction
It is crucial to understand that each of these stories occur within the setting of a much larger story. In this larger story what has occurred is that civilization as we know it has, by exhausting the earth, increasingly restricted itself to smaller and smaller areas. Meanwhile, there is another, nascent, culture learning to survive in the abandoned areas. There is one individual, Leonthicus, who, although raised in the developing culture, is attempting to claim his heritage in the dying culture.
The Story Of The People – Part 1
The Story Of The People – Part 2
In this incident from the Stone Rivers story one man encounters another man’s truth.
Other Stories
A grieving man encounters connections to his lost wife that lead him down an unexpected trail.