Shadow Stories: A Meditation and Bedtime Story

Woody Wombat is exhausted. After supper with his best friend Wiley, he can barely keep his eyes open while Wiley chatters on about tumbling games, tasty grass, and rolling to the pond. Woody has been staying up late every night playing a new imagination game he invented—watching shadows near his burrow and making up stories based on their shapes. The game is so absorbing that he keeps adding "another part, and another and another" until he can hardly stay awake. But there is another reason he stays up, too: he does not want to make Wiley feel bad by admitting he sometimes wants to play alone.

The Shadow Story Game

Woody's imagination game works like this. Each morning, after playing with Wiley all night, he returns to his burrow but stays awake a little longer. He sits near the entrance and watches "the last bits of moonlight and the first bits of sunlight make shadows on the ground." Whatever shapes he sees help him invent a story. One morning, a long tree branch cast a shadow that looked like a bridge, and a taller tree beside it seemed like a castle tower. That gave Woody the idea for a story about "two brave wombats trying to cross the bridge and enter the castle." The game entertained him for a long time.