When people ask where our stories come from, the honest answer is: mostly, we didn't make them up. We're standing in a very long line.
Some of the oldest stories humans have are the ones we told children. Aesop's fables. The Jataka tales of the Buddha's past lives. Taoist parables about water and stone. Folk tales passed mouth to mouth across the hills until someone finally wrote them down. These stories survived for thousands of years for a simple reason: they work. They say something true about being alive, in a shape small enough for a child to hold.
We adapt from that inheritance, carefully and with respect, and we write original fables in the same spirit. We're not interested in inventing a brand-new mythology from scratch every night. We'd rather hand a child the good old stuff — the patient river, the proud stone, the moon learning to wait — retold gently, read beautifully, and meant for sleep.
There's a humility in that, and we like it. We're not the source of this wisdom. We're just trying to be a decent steward of it: to carry these stories one more generation down the line, into one more dark bedroom, at the end of one more long day.
Lumi · Lumi