The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

by Catherine Burns

Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Being open about who you were at a moment in time when you were in a difficult or an impossible place matters more than anything.

The number-one quality of all great storytellers is their willingness to be vulnerable, to tell on themselves in front of thousands. Each story told is a gift to the listeners.

But the audience brings a gift of their own. We live in a world where bearing witness to a stranger’s unfiltered story is an act of tremendous compassion. To listen with an open heart and an open mind and try to understand what it’s like to be them—why they think like that, dress like that, made the choices they did—takes real courage.

Sometimes it is easier to try to make sense of the world one story at a time.

Mark did not care if you were some kid unaccustomed to this type of thing. He talked, and he argued with you like you were his peer, and he fully expected you to keep up.

chinos?

skits.

tethered

alfresco

ricocheting

perp

dais

“Just walk fearlessly into the house of mourning, for grief is just love squaring up to its oldest enemy. And after all these mortal human years, love is up to the challenge.”

fervor.

puny

giddy

Francis also epitomized the historical animosity between religion and science. This grew legendary in 1961, when Francis resigned from Churchill College at Cambridge University in England to protest plans to add a chapel to the college grounds. Francis felt that a new college dedicated to science and mathematics and engineering was no place for superstition.

Winston Churchill, in whose name the college had been founded after the war, tried to appease Francis, and wrote him a letter pointing out that the financial means for the construction of the chapel would be raised entirely by private means. It would be open to people of any faith, and nobody would be forced to attend. Francis replied by return post, proposing the construction of a brothel—a bordello. The construction of the bordello would be financed entirely by private means. It would be open to all men, no matter what their religious conviction, and no man would be forced to attend. Included in his letter was a check for a down payment. So ended the correspondence between the two great men.

gnashing

accept what you can’t change.

abject

suffused

CHRISTOF KOCH

Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist.

I have more to offer the world than Excel spreadsheets.

I know I should say to them, Listen, y’all, it’s hard out there. Life kicks your ass. Play it safe. But I never do. I tell them, “Go for it. Enjoy it while it lasts, but brace yourself, because when it doesn’t, sometimes you’ve got to figure out who you’re not so you can become who you are.”

snafu

threadbare

as a kid my dad had been picked on by black kids because he looked white, and had been ostracized by white kids because they knew his family was black. He would come home from school with his jacket torn, and his parents wouldn’t ask him what happened. He didn’t want his own children to go through the same pain and confusion that he did.

“Well, you know who you are. You’re Bliss. That’s who you are. And you have a whole life in front of you to figure out what that means. Look, the minute you let other people start to define you, you are just giving away your power.”

Neptune Theatre in Seattle.

avuncular

And being a kid, a black kid, in foster homes in Maine, and burn-the-world angry, there’s not a lot of foster homes that wanna hang on to you for very long. I started going through ’em pretty quick. I learned the magic number was five. If you get to five foster homes, you’re marked. You’re trouble. So you can’t get placement, and you are homeless. And then you go into shelters. You can only stay in a shelter for thirty days, and then you’re on to the next, and on to the next. This is affectionately called the “shelter shuffle.”

trepidatious

smitten

This is what I know. In the deepest, blackest night of despair, if you can get just one pinhole of light…all of grace rushes in.

that was the beginning of the work that now, thirty-three years later, has become the story of inherited breast cancer and the beginning of the project that became BRCA1.

DR. MARY-CLAIRE KING is American Cancer Society Professor in the Department of Medicine and the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. She was the first to show that breast cancer is inherited in some families, as the result of mutations in the gene that she named BRCA1. Her research interests include the genetic bases of schizophrenia, the genetic causes of congenital Mendelian disorders, and human genetic diversity and evolution. She pioneered the use of DNA sequencing for human-rights investigations, developing the approach of sequencing mitochondrial DNA preserved in human remains, then applying this method to the identification of kidnapped children in Argentina and subsequently to cases of human-rights violations on six continents. In 2016, she was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Obama.

winsome

A friend of mine once told me that the grass is greener where you water it: I had forgotten to water the grass.

sneered

fedora.

Snitches get stitches.

The North Korean calendar system begins at the birth of the original Great Leader.

The vacuum of knowledge about anything other than their Great Leader was shocking, but I was under a strict set of rules to never tell them anything about the outside world.

Then I began to notice something strange about my students. They lied very often and very easily. Their lies came in different tiers.

Sometimes they lied for no apparent reason, as if the line between truth and lies just wasn’t clear to them.

They were so easy to love, but impossible to trust. They were sincere, but they lied. But if all they’ve ever known were lies, then how can you expect them to be any other way? It’s as if their great humanity was in constant conflict with the inhumanity of their system.

tumultuous

Brave men are always afraid. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the willingness—the guts, if you like—to face the fear.