And Me
Focus of the week – a glorious weed called Cow-parsley
Yesterday I found myself transported back to my past life as a teacher and to one particular memory…
I’m in my classroom sitting on a ridiculously low chair, surrounded by a wriggling mass of tiny 3 & 4 years olds. It’s the start of the day and time to allocate the first activity of the morning and everyone is eager to find out where they will begin their merry-go-round of fun and play.
Close to me and almost squatting on my feet, is James. His hand darts up and down with exuberant delight and uncontrollable excitement every time I announce an activity. His small hand punches the air in front of my face, his body lifts off the carpet and he calls out… “And me… and me” (always twice). James is 3 and these are the only two words he knows and they get a lot of use.
He’s telling me that… he wants to rush to the painting table, he wants to make Easter bunnies with toilet rolls, he wants to run to the Wendy-house and he wants to play in the mud tray in the kindergarten garden. He wants to do it all and he wants to do it NOW!
Even now my heart wells up as I remember this sweet boy, with a massive hunger for life and saying YES to it all.
I wonder where you are now James? Did you manage to keep holding on to that irrepressible joy, set in a happy heart? Did your love for all things creative survive, or did it die under the weight and demands of the academic system? I hope your creative kernel grew roots fast and sustained you through, what we call, the education years.
I want to imagine you as a creative engineer now, bursting with enthusiasm, using your skills and passion each day as you work on the crisis to hit us next, after this pandemic – the climate crisis! I see you stepping up to the task and saying, “Hey, count me in…And Me…let’s do this and face what needs to happen and create the technology, right now, to save our planet”
A child’s approach and attitude to all things creative, is so instinctual and so blissfully impulsive. No time is wasted in hesitation, or self judgment, they just plunge in with one driving impulse – to lose themselves in the experience of feeling fully human. It’s intoxicating to watch.
It’s been a bit of an, ‘And Me’, sort of week for me too. On Monday I walked home from the fields with a bunch of cow-parsley and it has sat dominating my kitchen table for most of the week. I’ve sketched it large and sketched it small, I’ve married it with collage and bathed a rather tight ink drawing (bamboo pen & ink wash) with some bright, ballsey pastels. Cow-parsley is the most glorious weed I know and I adore it throughout all its stages of metamorphosis, from April into the deep of Winter.
Its striking simplicity has kept my attention. When I haven’t been drawing it, I’ve been marvelling at its intricate dainty flower structure and getting ever-so slightly addicted to its heady scent (a friend tells me it’s poisonous…really?!)
And…what I’ve been noticing is that, like James, instinct & intuition needs to be everything in my creative practice. It feels like they are the only weapons I have, to keep me focused and heading in the direction I need to walk, to enter my creative zone (the place where I begin to ‘let go’ and start taking risks to grow wings). If I don’t hold onto these two, I start to drift. Then I realise no one is at the tiller and before long I’ve lost my way.
Falling into the power that sits within my instinct & intuition seems to be the place to head to. Here I can sign up for all that’s going on within my creative journey and do my own versions of punching the sky and saying, “Bring it on…let’s go…And Me”.
