Cultivating Stories

It’s summertime! The days are long and generally pleasant with a mixture of hot sunshine and cool rainy days. So Ive spent a bit of time pottering around in the mornings and evenings trying to keep on top of things in the garden. I find it very easy when harvesting strawberries, for example, to get side tracked by a few weeds that need pulling and then the tomato plants could do with more support, not to mention the pesky blackberry sending prickly shoots out along the fence line.  Suddenly, Ive been out there for three hours, my cup of tea has gone cold and my brain is full of ideas that are no longer directly about plants but stories and folk lore and myths and legends. Now I understand the term - fertile imagination!

And the more I think about it, the more stories and plants are alike.  Hear me out before you give up on me (like I did with the carrots). There are several different ways you can get plants for the garden. You can begin from ‘scratch’ and plant some seeds; you can buy seedlings or even full grown plants; people might gift them to you or you can take snippets and cuttings from other peoples successful plants - with permission hopefully. I’ve even had some self seeded, presumably from birds or animals or blown in on the wind. However you obtain your plants, you tend to them, nurture and fertilise them, trim and prune them, repotting or moving their positions in the garden to get the best results. When the plants mature you share your produce or allow others to take seeds or cuttings from your plants to continue spreading the joy from your garden.

Stories are the same!  You might start from scratch with the seed of a story - an idea, a theme or even just a word. You might actually have read that fully formed story in a book, or heard it from another storyteller or overheard part of it in a conversation on the train. Maybe it has come from a purposeful discussion or workshop about a theme or topic for stories - a nursery for stories so to speak. Wherever it comes from, in whatever form, you take those snippets and bring them home. You nurture the story by pruning the bits you don’t like or don’t suit your purpose or audience. You fertilise the story with vocabulary, expression, pitch and actions to bring it alive in your telling. You alter the setting or the size of the story until you are really happy with it. Then you share your story with others. You tell it to an audience of one or many. You encourage them to lose themselves in the story, feel it, remember it so that they can also share it - either as snippets of the original or as close to the full story as possible. All the time they are propagating a version from the original ‘seed’.  Indeed, isn’t that what storytelling is?

So, next time you hear a story, listen carefully. Can you tell if the story is the original ‘seed’ grown story or has it been cultivated through a variety of gardeners’ care and expertise? But more importantly, did you enjoy it enough to try and take a cutting and spread that story even further?

Happy gardening!