Inspiration, the environment and storytelling

 

An inspiration, a challenge, a provocation: 

storytelling and environmental connection

a word in explanation: recently I was asked to give a 10 minute presentation on how my work uses storytelling to explore environmental issues and personal creativity...I thought I'd post the piece here as well!

A story well-told is a conversation, a personal conversation, between the storyteller and a listener. If I have been telling stories to, say, a school assembly of several hundred children, at the end individuals want to talk about the story “you told me”. An effective story draws the listener in, engages them, enchants them even if only for the minutes it takes to tell the tale. The experience is personal. It is received by the individual listening as a gift from the ‘teller. (Good challenge for storytellers there: to remember our storytelling is a gift we are giving to our listeners, not an obligation on their part to listen!)

crows laugh while raven watches

As Creeping Toad*, I am a storyteller, an artist and a creator of celebrations, using creativity to encourage participants to explore the world around them and to find ways of expressing those discoveries. I use art to promote a sense of personal and communal emotional connection to the natural world, helping people build their own skills, develop their own languages of expression and reflection. Stories are central to that exploration. The conversations that unfold here, are part of my personal inspiration. Watching people explore the interface where self meets world is a delight, I can feel new stories unfolding while at other times I try to follow the advice I give workshop participants and simply sit. Simply sit and let the world fill me with whatever is passing, from the continent-roaming breath of a wind to the miniature detail of a beetle’s life. My creativity is informed by the world I move in, and I am inspired by the experience to create stories, or poems or to dance the rhythms of a lifecycle. To be creative isn’t necessarily to produce something: it can be just as rewarding and just as significant for the individual to let a moment fill them with wonder and the movement of grass in a breeze or the laughing shout of a passing crow.

there are always stories

In environmental contexts, we know the science, we know the facts and figures and the scary deductions, but it is the stories that call responses from a wider public. It’s the accounts of the struggling mother raising her cubs, that turtle: last of its kind, the brave people standing between the rhino and the gun that bring action. With a cynical turn of mind, I might talk about conservation economics, the commercial value of “fluffy animal” sales pitches and how easily people will be charmed by the apparent smile of a dolphin, but the more determined side of me is glad for any engagement.

 

Cynicism aside, stories are important. We are a storytelling species – we turn everything into narratives (go away and think about casual conversations and how often a story is being told) and when trying to inspire people to engage with the world around them more deeply, it is the stories that draw people out, lead people in, into the landscapes that they walk through and the forests of the imagination that open golden leaves in their hearts.

 

waking the Night Mare

 I'm not all that interested in stories with strong moral contexts. You might argue that most traditional stories contain moral lessons, but they don’t. Some are simply adventures, excursions, romances. Nightmares. Yes, one might find a moral if you really want one (eg “don’t steal cattle or a ferocious young woman might come and chop your head off” isn’t necessarily helpful in the 21^st century) but equally, listeners are likely to take their own moral from, or find their own interpretation of, whatever story you tell. Just finding a story that is nice/nasty/scary/silly is a good indication of how strongly people respond to stories individual ways.

 

 

Extract from We are the Trees.  

We are the trees

Who dread the wind.

 

We are the trees,

Where the spores settle,

Where the fungus spreads,

Where the fingers wither,

Where the bark splits,

Where branches break.

We are the trees holding onto hope

In seeds and seedlings,

In long breaths held and 

Hearts clenched against the dread.

 

We are the trees who

Grow the keys of hope.

(Note: this poem was about ash trees – hence the “keys” reference – ash tree seeds are called keys)

 

For me, it is that individual response that matters almost more than anything else. A story should offer enchantment: an opportunity for listeners to step into the world they think they know through a different door, to take time to think, to wonder, to feel in different ways. And at the end to look at the world they walk through and recognise that there are stories everywhere, that the pigeon flying past, the bumblebee in the flowers, the rats in the subway, are all living their own adventures. Inviting “listeners” to become “storytellers”, in Creeping Toad workshops we try to take nothing for granted: there are adventures everywhere: for ourselves as well as the animals we’re looking at. Increasingly these days, people recognise that the plant worlds live through adventures as well. In a recent lockdown project, we gathered phrases from people about the woods they were visiting, looking at the landscape as both humans and as trees, especially as ash dieback (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus), spreads through those woods and we are steadily losing our ash trees. The scattered phrases were drawn together to give us two poems: “We are the people” and “We are the trees”. Around the poems grew celebration: two tall tree puppets who danced through those woods to the music of a lone saxophone, while the poems were chanted as conversations between trees and visitors. A moment of love and inspiration shared.

 

We live in a world worth celebrating. Stories are one way of inviting people to engage creatively with that world, to investigate, to create, to share, to celebrate. To play. I am a storyteller: the awareness of living in a world full of stories is a great source of inspiration for me as an individual, for the individuals I work with and for the communities (human and other-then-human) we are all part of.

extract from We are the People, 

the companion poem to We are the Trees, above

 

We are the people 

Who climbed the trees,

Who ate the picnics,

Who watched the birds,

Who fed the squirrels,

Who ran the paths,

Who were still in the shade,

Who sang,

Who built faerie doors

At faerie dens,

For faery tribes in 

Faery glens.

 

We are the people 

Who walked,

Who wondered,

Who laughed,

Who talked,

Who held hands,

Who strolled,

Who held their hearts and loves and hopes

Under Ash trees.

The poems "We are the Trees" and "We are the people" were composed from comments by members of the public about why the woods of Buxton had proved important to them during the lockdown months of 2021. Edited by Gordon MacLellan for the Stone and Water projects “A Year In Our Town” and "Ash Woods"

Images in this post:

• me in action at Plas Power Woods: c/o Laurence Crossman-Emms and the Woodland Trust
• Raven, Lichen, Nightmare and Grinlow Woods: by G MacLellan
• Tree puppet face and tree puppet in rehearsal: c/o Aidan Rhode