Story: The Pumpkin Plant

This is a CONFIDENCE story – only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.

Listen to my RECORDING

Read the story below

You probably know about pumpkins; their fruits are large, round and orange in colour. You can use the flesh from a pumpkin to make a pie. Perhaps you’ve seen people take out the orangey flesh, cut a face in the outer skin and put a candle in for Halloween. You might have done that yourself.

Well this story begins with a pumpkin plant that was lovingly grown from seed until it was about ten centimetres high. The gardener prepared some ground and carefully transplanted it into the soft soil, warmed by the summer sun. As soon as the plant was put into the ground it felt happy to stretch its roots out and down; it felt the gentle summer rain moisten its leaves which, with the warmth of the sun grew strong and numerous. The small pumpkin plant loved the feel of the gardener’s hands that

held it and heard the gardener’s encouraging voice speaking to it. All this made it all the more difficult when something changed. The gardener was no longer there!

The plant waited and waited feeling more and more anxious. Without the gardener, anything could happen. After a while, someone else watered the pumpkin plant when it was dry, removed the weeds around the plant to keep it safe and watered in fertiliser to make it grow. So the pumpkin plant grew but it missed the gardener it had known – the feel and voice of the one who’d planted it as a seed, kept it and transplanted it so lovingly into the soil. The pumpkin’s roots were not quite as strong as they should be.

After a time, the gardener returned and tended to the plant just as before. But sometimes in that part of the country, there are storms and high winds which, when they blow across the land, made the pumpkin plant feel distressed – anxious that perhaps it could get pulled out of the ground.

One day, when the wind was blowing hard, the gardener spoke to the plant:

“You are a perfect pumpkin plant. You were planted and cared for with love. The sun, rain and the nutrients in the soil will make you grow big and strong. It’s safe to put your roots deep into the soil.”

The gardener packed more soil around the base of the stalk and flattened the soil down firmly. The plant felt very safe then, however strong the wind blew.

Dorothy Thompson