#storyseeds Friday: Small animals, signs and portents

If you follow me on Twitter or on Facebook, you know that I'm posting daily #storyseeds, a short prompt for creativity and imagination. I started doing them as much for myself as for anyone else. They make me stretch my mind a little bit each morning and they help me remember that I am a creative being. It's fun, a little therapeutic, and a little useful for others. I'm posting expanded #storyseeds here on Fridays, both as a chance for me to experiment with more complex prompts and as a way for you to have a playful start for the weekend. Let me know what you think, which worked for you and which didn't, and send me any prompts you'd like to see posted! I can't promise I'll use them, but I may very well.

Today is Groundhog Day, that date in the United States on which a poor, hapless groundhog is pulled from its den and forced to look for its shadow. The tradition may derive from a German tradition by way of the Pennsylvania Dutch, wherein an animal, originally a badger, looks for its shadow to predict the coming of spring. In the British Isles it's a hedgehog who looks for his shadow. Alternatively, Groundhog Day may be linked to Brigitmas, which celebrates Saint Brigit, originally the goddess Brigit, whose animal was a groundhog. Her feast day was February 1. Either way, it's a reminder that spring is coming, winter won't last forever, and creative fires should be stoked regularly.

1. Embodied
   Rough hands grab you and pull you out of your comfy bed. They make you face the light and demand that you tell them if the world will end or continue. What do you say? Whose hands are they? Why do they think you know?
2. Described
   Would you rather be a groundhog, a badger, or a hedgehog? What would it feel like to live on four legs and close to the ground? Tell me how delicious worms and grasses are, and what it's like living in the earth.
3. A seed...
   You wake up tomorrow morning and have no shadow. 
4. Story-story-go!
   Go for it, shadows and all!

Please post any answers you'd like to share, I'd LOVE to know what these prompted for you!
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