How to tend a story garden
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Inside the Creation Stories of Dancing Mother
How to tend a story garden
by Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy
What is a story garden? It’s a place devoted to seeding and growing our life stories, the ones we want to remember and preserve for our future generations. These are the stories that nourish us deeply throughout our days, and especially the hard days when everything is challenging or we feel hopeless and disconnected from our dreams. Our story garden is where we go to revive ourselves, and to remember in vivid detail our power, our magic, our possibilities.
Every good story is being well-watered and tended to with love, care, and honesty. This is how our language becomes intentional and our meaning gets clearer. The story garden is where we practice drafting, compiling, outlining, scribbling, typing, and voice recording the words in ways that we can come back to again and again.
When tending our stories well, we learn how to handle them with respect, keeping them warm in our heart, as we figure out how to walk ourselves deeper inside the story. Once there we can sit there for as long as we need to, and receive whatever it is that story has for us. We select each word. We make the time to taste each syllable, decide if it really fits and feels right.
And our story garden is also where we practice inviting others into our interior worlds, sharing the pieces of our stories that can be seen (when we’re ready) with ones who are willing to listen, and who are able to witness us live into the substance of whatever this story is holding. Tending our story garden is a continuous labor. We rise, we fall down, we get stuck, we get tired, we feel overwhelmed. We try and try again, to get into the heart of the story.
Finally, and because a story we are meant to carry won’t ever leave us completely, we climb back up and out of the cramped space we keep packed tight with our fears and disappointments, with our illusions of inadequacy and indifference. We shake off the denial that had us almost believing our stories don’t really matter anyway.
Once free, we breathe in the fresh air of possibility, and we touch the soil of ourselves. In this moment of recovery we feel the full weight of all the stories we hold. We commit to growing on from here, with more reverence for what we must be, for the light that must source our life and the multitudes of stories growing within.
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Curious Seeds is a story building space for parents raising learners in the wild, lush, freedom of life as it is. This is a soft-time circle for parents deepening into their family’s stories of learning and systems of creation. Curious Seeds is for those who are realizing that their stories can help them document their learning practices, and also seed new possibilities for themselves and their communities.
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