Story Walk – Creativity Through Nature
Let us learn how to weave stories in nature and grow our creative side. Discover some beautiful ideas to create a story walk in your neighbourhood and make use of those stories to create new connections – with each other as well as with nature.
The Story Walk is part of our Nature Play initiative: a unique program for parents, teachers, and their young storytellers.
In a thought provoking talk by Sir Ken Robinson, he talks about the role of creativity in our lives. He says, “Nobody has a clue despite all the expertise, what the world will look like in the future. And yet, we’re meant to be educating for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”
This article has a collection of creative prompts that introduce you to the basic principles of story-telling and show you a simple format for inventing engaging short stories. Tap into your imagination with these ideas and see what stories find their way into your mind.
“Seeds of stories, can create a forest of friends”
~ healingforest.org
Story Walk – Activities
A story walk session typically takes about 60~90 minutes. It is suitable for all age groups and creates more delightful results when people of different ages participate together.
Give around 15 minutes for each activity – 10 minutes for exploring, walking, writing and 5 minutes for sharing the stories. If there are a large number of participants, create smaller groups of 5 or less for sharing. Smaller groups create more meaningful engagements.
Any safe space in nature works for a story walk. Make pairs to create responsibility and manage the group better. At the end of each activity, have pre-decided meeting points for sharing stories from that section. These ideas are mere suggestions. Feel free to make your own. Stay creative.
GROUP STORY: Each person adds a line to create a story. Alternate people add positive and negative twists. E.g: Person a> Boy falls into a ditch Person b> He finds a diamond… Person c> But a magpie steal it from his hand…..and so on.
* One of the simplest principles of creating good stories is to add twists and turns. A good story is seldom predictable – just like nature.
NATURE BEINGS: Take a short nature walk. Find an unusual object, creature, or being in nature. Observe deeply and you will begin to see a network of relationships. You may find struggle and conflict but also co-operation and companionship. Share the story of your being and its network of relationships with your circle.
ONE LINE STORY: Create a story in one line. The story should have a hero and a villain. (The villain can even be a challenging situation in life) E.g: The crow liked to sing, but had no audience.
* Sometimes one can feel creatively challenged or stuck. One line stories are like tiny seeds that can grow into a huge tree over time. Learning to create one line stories gives you the ability to understand the heart of a story.
TREE STORY: Find an interesting tree and tell its life story. (Maximum 3 lines)
* There is a story hidden in every object of nature. By observing nature through all our senses, we can learn how to bring these invisible stories to life. And telling stories from nature is a wonderful way of deepening our relationship with it.
TURNING POINTS: Divide into pairs. Tell each other two turning points from your own life-story. One bad, one good.
* Humans are part of nature too. And like everything else, each one of us carries our own unique story. Sharing the turning points of life helps us give a brief window to others about our journey through time.
FUTURE STORY: Use your imagination to travel into the future. Write a story from the future for your present self.
* This closing exercise allows participants to spend some solo time in nature. Reflecting on Time in nature is a humbling and meditative experience. The gift of storytelling helps us connect with our present self and imagine new possibilities for the future.
Here’s a short summary of the story activities in a handy poster that you can save for use later. Feel free to add more ideas for the ‘Story Walk’ in the comments section, so that others can learn and experiment with them later. Do add stories from your walks to our Facebook group and check out some amazing forest stories from around the world.
Bonus Story Ideas
The Secret Life of Clouds: Look up at the sky. Imagine the cloud as a storyteller. What adventures has it witnessed on its journey from the sea? What secrets does it carry, and what lessons does it share with you?
The Meeting of the Trees: Picture a council of trees gathering under the moonlight. What do they discuss? Are they planning for the next season, sharing wisdom from their roots, or telling tales of the animals they shelter?
The Feather’s Journey: Find a feather and imagine its story. Where did it come from? Was it part of a bird soaring above the mountains or gliding over the ocean? What messages or memories does it carry as it drifts through the world?
How Story Walks Enhance Creativity
Sitting beneath the open sky, storytelling becomes a bridge between imagination and the natural world. When parents and children weave tales of how the wind carries whispers of the trees or how stars guide the dreams of animals, creativity blossoms. Nature offers endless prompts—patterns on leaves, the flight of birds, or the murmur of a stream—each sparking new ideas and unexpected connections. By imagining how a fox might solve a riddle or how a flower greets the sun, we engage lateral thinking, finding fresh perspectives in familiar surroundings. Through storytelling in nature, we learn to see the world not just as it is, but as it could be, expanding our minds while grounding our hearts.
“We know two things about intelligence. One, it’s diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinaesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn’t divided into compartments. In fact, creativity more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.”
~Sir Ken Robinson
Nature provides space for imaginative play. The focus is on learning through experience. Because all our senses are engaged, learning in nature is more long lasting.The brain gets a boost from the elements of nature, and interactions with others. It leads to increased confidence and creativity, resulting in enhanced problem solving skills. However, the biggest benefit that comes from Story walks is the unhindered flow of ideas. The stories you write are seeds that can create a forest of friends.
Story Walk: Closure
Our minds have extraordinary capacities, and creativity enables us to face the many challenges of an uncertain future. In fact it is the creative people who will be responsible for shaping the future we step into.
Earth needs more storytellers and stories from nature, so that we can raise awareness about the unprecedented changes that are facing our planet. We hope you will get a chance to try out the story walk. Download the Story Walk poster here.
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Healing Forest 