Human beings are narrative creatures, stories co-create our worlds. It matters what stories we tell.

I’ve just been reading a few short stories from the We Are The Possible Project at the University of Exeter. The stories are written to co-create new narratives about the climate emergency. They begin life in interdisciplinary and boundary crossing creative writing workshops.

One of the short stories is entitled Wild and there’s a paragraph near the beginning which says:

“The truth is it started all over the world, a kind of synchronicity: young, old, rich, poor performing small acts of wilding, sewing seed on verges, around the roots of pavement locked trees, retrofitting homes with bird and bat boxes. It was as if there was a global communication going on, like trees in a forest signally each other through root systems or flocks of birds flying ahead of an incoming storm.”

Reading this story made me feel hopeful. I’d like to find a way to use it in my teaching.

Photo by David Trinks on Unsplash