Storytelling Starters ~ By the Way
Keep a storytelling notebook? It’s a good idea. It can become a little storehouse for all kinds of odd and wise sayings, proverbs, tongue twisters, thoughts and poems. I looked in mine the other day hoping to find the words of a song I simply couldn’t remember. Annoyingly, my notebook didn’t yield them. Even more annoyingly, I couldn’t find them anywhere else – not for ages and ages.
And meantime? I’d so much enjoyed going back through my notebook, I decided to pick out some of the things there for this week’s blog. I do hope you enjoy them. Even more, I hope you’ll find one or other item useful – perhaps as part of introducing a storytelling session, perhaps as a filler between two stories or maybe simply as an entertainment, something to say over supper.
So in no particular order (as they say on Strictly Come Dancing), here they are. And by the way, the photos accompanying them this week are of some very gorgeous art that has recently gone up on street walls near me – literally by the way.
A daft joke:
Two old women fell down a hole. Question: How did they get out?
Answer: One of them had a ladder in her tights.
A Bantu proverb:
If you are patient, you will see the eyes of the snail.
A limerick:
There was a young man of Leeds
Who swallowed a packet of seeds.
Within an hour
His nose was a flower
And his hair was bunches of weeds.
A riddle:
Question: Why is the letter A like a flower?
Answer: because the B comes after it.
A wise and evocative image from China:
As a white colt flashes past a gap in the hedge, even so do our days pass.
A short poem – Splinter – by the American poet, Carl Sandburg:
The voice of the last cricket
across the first frost
is one kind of good-bye.
It is so thin a splinter of singing.
A Bushman saying:
A story is like the wind; it comes from a far-off quarter and we feel it.
PS: There’s lots more where those came from but that’s it for this week. See you next week for something else. Meantime, as they also say on Strictly, keep on dancing.
Tags: poem, proverb, riddle, saying, storytelling notebook, street art