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Seasons

Here in my mother’s garden it’s already late summer – the last of those subtly-scented roses, the last of the summer light and warmth before the fall begins and the old statue is laid bare again. Back where I lived down south, of course, it’s just turning towards spring: a different season indeed – a different world, almost, it seems now.

To each place its own seasons. And that’s just as true for families, communities, businesses – they have their seasons too.

And with each season, its stories.

What are some of the seasons for your family? – the cycle of birthdays, anniversaries, lives remembered, the cycle of the school-year, of religious festivals, of other themes that come and go as the months and years go by. What stories attach themselves to each of those events, those seasons? Whose stories are they? If the season is the trigger for a story, what are the events and other details of the story itself?

Your community – what seasons and cycles do you have there? What are the events that mark those seasons – the annual pageant, perhaps, the farmers’-market, the flower-parade, those regular theatre-shows? How did they start, how did they become a fixture in your community’s calendar? Who were the people who started them, and who keep them going now? What memories and stories do these events bring back with them each time they return?

And your business has its seasons too. Some of these seasons you might well prefer to forget: those quarterly stock-reports, the annual cycles of budgets and tax-returns, the un-joys of performance-reviews… a sigh indeed, no doubt, yet what stories arise for you there? There are those other seasons, too: the conference-season, all those different seasonal-themed sales, buying new stock for the holiday-season, the company vacation, the annual strategy-retreat – each of those will have their own stories as well.

Which of these stories are personal, relating to just you yourself, or one or two people you know? Which of the stories are more foundational, that say more about who you are as a family, a community, a business? What is that stands out for you there, especially about those latter stories? What images arise – sights, sounds, scents, and sense too? What can you learn from them to pass on the future generations?

A lot of possibilities for story-work there: capture and re-use those stories in your Zahmoo story-bank.

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