I recently encountered a story that may or may not be original. Even if it’s not, that’s fine, but I’m interested to see if anyone else has encountered it before.
Roughly, it goes like this:
A seed wants to grow.
A fox offers to take it to a good spot to grow in, but then gets hungry and drops the seed.
The wind offers to blow it to a good spot, but then gets distracted and drops the seed.
A stream offers to move it to a good spot, but then, I dunno, pursues another branch or something, and leaves it high and dry.
Finally an oak tree notices the seed and tells it to stop moving around already. The seed stays where it is and grows into a beautiful tree.
Sounds a little like the tale of the stonecutter. I couldn’t find exactly the story you talk about but I would look at Zen stories as a good starting place.
Interesting. The story was written in about 20 minutes by a kid, with much better structure and prose than my example above. In talking with her mom, we realized she’d been hanging around a Buddhist monk for a bit, and maybe either was adapting a story she’d heard there or was just telling an original story with a fairly Buddhist flavor to it.
It’s a stretch, but maybe the kid recently read this little science book (PDF) and melded it with some Buddhist concepts? It has a similar structure: seeds move by animals, wind, and water, and the book closes with “When the seeds stop moving, they can start growing.”
That’s very interesting! I doubt she read that book recently–she’s likelier to be reading Harry Potter or Hunger Games–but she may have read it or something similar in the past and have been thinking about it.