Journal Potuguese Release - February 2024 - Flipbook - Page 73
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someone who lives in the reality and is not easily deceived as having their “feet
on the ground”; traditional samba is known as “rooted samba”; anyone who
owns “a palm of land” has a place to live and the “children of the land” are all
those who were born here. It is from the land that we derive our sustenance, and,
throughout Brazil, people know how to clear the land, the fields, open the
furrows, sow and harvest. In the Tupi language, people who are born in the
territory known today as Espírito Santo are called capixabas, which means 'land
ready for planting'. It's where I live – in Espírito Santo. Inspired by personal
experiences, both in planting and in gardening, I started therapeutic
conversations based on the metaphor of the garden. Having as fundamental four
steps in the process of taking care of a garden, and aligning this with the
principles of narrative therapy, people are invited to build a narrative that
involves the metaphors of: 1) removing weeds; 2) choosing the good seeds; 3)
hoping like the farmer and 4) celebrating the harvest. The process involves
therapeutic documents such as letters or poems, the relational construction of
meanings, and the invitation for the person to understand their personal agency
through the metaphor of gardening.
The Magic of the Narrative Therapeutic Encounter
According to narrative therapy, our life is made up of multiple events that, when
grouped according to a certain temporal sequence, generate a narrative about a
specific theme. We are not predefined, fixed, and predetermined beings. On the
contrary, in each of us there are stories that await the right moment to come to
light and reveal their power. And each one of them is activated through questions
that are asked, resonances with other people's stories, situations experienced in
the present that connect us with past experiences, in short, in different ways, but
always as an invitation to access, connect, and chain the events. In the words of
Freire (2008) “Pieces of time that, in fact, were in me, since when I lived them,
waiting for another time, which might not even have come as it did, in which
those pieces lengthened for the composition of the larger plot” (p. 19). Thus, I
share here in this article some of these alignments of moments in my life story
that occurred through my encounters with the people I worked with in my clinic –
and how we transformed the images and resonances of these consultations into
metaphors and poetry.
Gardening Narratives and Writing Stories
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy February 2024 Release, www.journalnft.com, p. 7191.