Where does creativity come from?

The highest goal one can achieve is amazement. ~ Goethe

My first design experiments involved selecting snails along a narrow garden path. Lining them up in rows, I would talk kindly and invite them to take part in games. I would be their big sister, telling them stories and giving them names like Germaine and Margaret. Blended with rose petals and pebbles, they would become part of spiralling collages and patterns.  

Snails were the closest thing I had to a proper pet until we got our dog Timmy. After Timmy was "sent to live on a farm" we got a tortoise which went to sleep for the winter and never woke up. But the snails were always there and Pooka Snails, the large ones with protruding horns, were always my favourite. 

I began a half day at school at three and a half. In the afternoons I would sit on the path, school bag on my back, practicing my letters and reciting to those snails. Here were the foundations of my dream life; finding a quiet space for an inner world, connecting with nature, spending time mulling over the mysteries.

When you are looking at the random play and explorations of a very young child you are peeking into her soul, her love of what comes naturally. For some it will be climbing trees, for others kicking a ball, for the quiet few it will be escaping into imaginary worlds and talking to snails. 

Inner warmth and woolly hats

She and I ran around a field excited by our newly wellied feet. We climbed to the top of a hill liberated from tartan skirts and white socks. We went "skating" on a frozen lake in our first corduroy jeans. She fell through the ice. I brought her home, shivering.

She and I went climbing trees. We were swinging from an old Elder, hanging upside down from the branches. I fell onto my back, winded, unable to speak. She screamed the place down and ran to get help.

She and I were wrapped up warm to go on a train somewhere. I held her hand and carried the suitcase. We went out through a gate bewildered, no clue what was happening. So we made pink and yellow tissue paper people and chatted to them for hours on end.

And here we are with woolly hats, crunching around in our boots on the shaley strand. Bonded by our shared youth, forever.

She points her camera everywhere. Look at this, look at that!! She especially likes a harp shaped hole in the cliff, her own unique take on the world, a great eye. She takes a picture of me and I take some of her.

It's never long enough and after a few days she returns to her life in the icy northern city of Stockholm. The woolly hats and her inner warmth must come in very handy up there in that freezing cold archipelago.

Woman to woman......

I lost my mother to cancer at the young age of 33. In 2013 it will be 50 years ago. The memories I have of her are scarce. I just know that she gave us her best years, a parting gift of unshakable love and a caring respect for those who struggle through life with a broken wing.

One of my earliest memories is of my mother bringing women into our kitchen to feed them and make hot milk for their babies.  Craggy faced women in big shawls, wet from walking the roads. Children wrapped close to their bodies. My mother, only a fresh faced girl, was confident and at ease with them. I remember being in awe of their tales. Where they had been, who they had seen. When myself and my sisters outgrew clothes my mother made little parcels and gave them away. I was shocked one day when I saw "our pram" down the town with a scruffy little boy sitting up in it.

I like to think that even though she couldn't be present, she influenced the rest of my life, my work and my creativity. Fully absorbed in her love of music she had access to a precious inner world. I used to think she was feeling sad, now I understand that she was moved and connected to the beauty of it.

As I blaze a trail through life as an older woman, something she would never do, she is becoming more of a presence in my life again. Or maybe we are crossing paths as I make my way back towards my own childhood roots to meet her again, woman to woman.......




This post was written for Vision and Verb a global gathering of creative women, why not pay a visit, make a comment on any post this week and be in with a chance to win a set of 10 beautiful cards.

Lads!

I've always had a house full of them. Long limbed lads with soft chocolatey eyes and too many plans for wild escapades.

Knotting up the house with twine, wool and bits of wood. Getting under upturned tables and chairs and dragging their stuff in there. Breeding mice and guinea pigs and keeping them in their pockets. Sleeping with a hound who ate a hole in the wall and a cat who gave birth to four kittens on top of one who was trying to sleep.....

Scampering through the fields, even during the night when we never knew they were out. Liberating caged birds and protecting a family of foxes from the hunt. Creating endless film footage of Action Man meeting some unfortunate end, of cars and trucks going off the edge of a cliff, of fireworks going off in slow motion.

Tousled heads conferring while carefully setting up scenes with small clever fingers. Imaginary friends with strong opinions on who was to blame for accidental breakages, usually "Mr. Nobody." The sweetest precious cards and pictures drawn and painted to a virtual running commentary. (One in which I was depicted as a mother rat (!) perfectly and lovingly drawn, feeding a babe....)

And of course running around after any kind of a ball in a whirl of excitement.

Laughing, messing and playing football on a misty wild beach.......oblivious to everything and everyone..........the lean sure movements of lads playing football....... just brought me right back........

Do children have macro lens eyes?

I remember delving deeply into everything.

Collecting pooka snails and ordering them about as they emerged from their shells. Harvesting rose petals and creating watery concoctions to extract their sweet essence. Adding mint leaves into mucky stews and serving them up to the dog.......

Leaving special gifts for the little people. A rhyme wrapped up in a chestnut skin, just the way they would like it. A doll's tea-set cup full of the juice of blackberries, squashed under a stone and decorated with beads from a treasured bracelet.

Elaborate offerrings to entice the faeries out to play.

When the raindrops settled, I saw them in there, dancing and flying about on spectrum coloured wings. Do children have macro lens eyes? Is that the magic we are reminded of when we magnify our world so that all it's ethereal detail is revealed and we are once again enthralled?