Welcome Autumn

Since writing this post at the beginning of the summer, Thom has been through a few sketch books and quite a large amount of paper… I have been a bit more savey. I’m still using the same book, and it looks a bit tattered now from being soaked with water wash for all sorts of water colour, clay or pastel experiments.

Dear Thom,

You have spent the entire summer thinking about and drawing dragons. You have drawn, painted and modelled an impressive collection of different species. We have been spending hours reading together the How To Train Your Dragon books, by Cressida Cowell, as you loved the films so much. You told me that the dragon on picture number 2 (above) is a fire dragon.

Prior to dragons, you were fascinated by pirates, as we read Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie. We even met a real pirate in Eastbourne, during a Pirate gathering. You were dressed in your fine pirate outfit and this big grown up Pirate surprised you, when he drew out his dagger out of his belt, in between waiting tables to start a play fight with you. You got a bit scared and decided that you would rather take your pirate outfit off and just go to that Pirate gathering in normal day clothes.

To my surprise, you got really captivated by the story of Pinocchio retold by Michael Morpurgo that we read after Peter Pan, just before we entered the Dragons Era.

We had a recent butterfly interval, during which we spent a few days making butterflies in all the ways we could think of, covering the doors of our craft cupboard.

We have only lived here for a few months but the patio has already hosted numerous creative endeavours…

Such as a few action painting projects…

and some large scale chalk creations…

You have also been showing a very keen interest in photography and I have let you play with my camera quite a lot.

You seem to really enjoy making your own short videos. In one of them you keep repeating: “The caterpillars are singing along with the birds”. I thought it was beautiful.

While I have been struggling with back issues, spending a lot of sunny days bed ridden, or being seen by the osteopath or the physiotherapist, you have spent a lot of time riding your bike back and forth on the cycle path to get gelatos (“strawberry cream ice cream in a cone, with chocolate sprinkles please”) with Daddy (and sometimes with me too).

The Tooth Fairy paid us a visit for the first time, as you lost your first milk tooth. It was exactly around the same time you managed to ride your bike without stabilisers for the first time, at the beginning of the summer… and you have been riding it steadily ever since!

It was the day of the football World Cup final and we ended up watching it in a pub that evening as we were celebrating your bike riding success with a pub dinner. You asked me questions all throughout the first half of the game, getting us a few looks from irritated football fans.

Yesterday we came across a few dressing up bins outside a charity shop near us… and we found a couple of very cool outfits… so now you are waiting for Halloween :)

Your current favourite place is the Rock Climbing site. As two climbers pointed out to me this afternoon, you seem to be a “natural”: you just climb up and down trees and rocks with such ease and speed to the dismay of  everyone around.

You and Tara are both really good climbers and such a combo! It’s sometimes hard to keep up with you two! You have just spent the afternoon together, paddling in a stream, playing with stones.

I hope that you are enjoying this journey as much as I do, and remember:

“To live will be an awfully big adventure!” (Peter Pan/J.M. Barrie).

With lots of love,

Mum.

the colours of my soul

The colours of my soul

spread on the paper

dripping through that brush

expanding at the contact

of water in wet paper.

the brush slides

my soul colours spread

themselves, mixing with

one another.

it’s a dance, it’s a rythm

it’s a song.

I shed a tear

As I watch you play

Your favourite seaside game

On a windy day

I see, what a shame,

I wasn’t even watching.

At the time, back then

I was just busy talking

Hiding in my den

In my head, my thoughts

I didn’t see the beauty

Happening in front me.

Luckily Tara filmed it

And now I got to watch 

A tiny part of my life

That had somehow escaped me…

Watching myself not watching

Missed moments of you growing

While still being there.

Being physically right here

But my head is somewhere else

And the sad thing is…

I bet it will happen again.

Creativity as a Daily Practice…

“Life is a journey, not a destination” – Ralph Waldo Emerson. Our world has been turned upside down recently, as we moved house… We left an old cottage in the woods for a more urban dwelling in a very quiet town on the edge of the forest. We had to readjust a little bit to our new surroundings, and now we are pretty much settled in. We had to change our habits and a house move was a great opportunity to get rid of a lot of our possessions that were just sitting around. I believe that if we have too many things, then these things end up owning you as you will need a bigger house to accommodate all of your belongings, therefore you will need more money and will have less time for yourself, and your dear ones… I  was worried that our cat Henry was going to suffer the move as he was so used to living in our old neighbourhood where he was thoroughly enjoying a busy social life of his own, with some of the neighbours, people and cats alike. He was invited for dinner to a few houses a few times a week, eating with his feline friends and their people! I’m sure he is sadly missed! So I was worried that he would struggle to live in a town, even though we have a private garden surrounded by other gardens… He is so sociable… But soon he made friends with another cat, had a few fights with the hot locals and has already seduced a few human ladies…. I have caught my neighbour feeding him cat biscuits the day before yesterday.

His Royal Highness Henry the 1st.

Thom and I have been immersed in The story of Peter Pan, reading a new chapter of the book every night…

We watched a beautiful Peter Pan broadway musical and we had great discussions about the story, went to a pirate event by the sea front, had a boat ride around Eastbourne’s harbour and Thom enjoyed dressing up as a pirate a lot… Although I thoroughly enjoyed reading J.M. Barrie’s book, which gave me a deeper understanding of the character of Captain Hook, captain Paul Watson remains my favourite pirate ;)

I have been struggling with sciatica for 9 months now, and things got worse a couple of weeks ago when I did my back on top of it… After 3 days stuck in bed I ended up being just about able to make my way to the osteopath,  who said she would have rather seen me 9 months ago… So it was time for me to surrender to stillness… Stillness is a great place for me to make felted animals from…

Here are 2 of the animals I made :)

Thom called the blue tit Mr Nice

And this is Lady Nice, which I made for Thom’s birthday but I gave her a makeover…

And I made another owl for the birthday of a special little girl who turned 7 last week…

Thom and I have a great project on the go, we have exactly the same sketchbook and we do a double page spread everyday. Whatever we feel like doing. So far it’s been water colours, drawing and glitter for both of us. It’s nice to sit down together at the coffee table and start our daily creation :)

Yesterday’s paintings

Today’s creations… (You may have noticed, owl is one of our totem animals :)

We have also been doing some action painting in our new patio, which I found to be very therapeutic! Thom really enjoyed mixing all the colours together to create new ones and we were drumming with our brushes on a large sheet of paper pegged on a laundry line… It was grand… We ended up experimenting holding the brushes with our toes, and then just walking in paint and all over big sheets of paper rolled out on the floor… It got messy, but it was fun. I think process art is definitely the way to go, for children and adults. If we are not attached to produce something “nice” then we can thoroughly enjoy the creative process, the release of tension and blocked emotions and letting go of inhibitions that hold us back. Plus for kids experimenting helps them to understand better how things work, build their confidence and problem solving skills (along with free play and good stories to feed their imagination… ) Well to my humble experience anyway…

:)

What about you? How do you nurture your creativity? Do you manage to make time for it?

I definitely feel happier when I do :)

Speak soon,

Noemie.

Birthday Week

This week was Thom’s Birthday Week.

We had a great party with Thom’s friends in the woods/valley near our house. It was such a beautiful day: a pack of wild children running around the woods, climbing trees (amongst other things), hiding in dens, playing in streams, eating fresh home made bread, eating chocolate cake, wearing “bounaches” just for the picture…

The Moustache Crew was here… When they wore moustaches they were called Bert, Charlie and Jack…

 All the kids went back home with a seed bomb each, now they can scatter some native wild flower seeds in remembrance of this glorious afternoon we spent altogether! W. amazed me as he decided to leave his seed bomb on the Airman’s grave, as a WWII memorial offering.

The next day was Thom’s actual birthday day. It was a quiet and simple day, slowing down, opening presents throughout the day and playing with his new toys :)

Then the two following days were spent meeting up with friends and trying out the new skate park with Daddy.

Today Thom has chicken pox. I thought it would be nice to end his birthday week with a last pressie, handmade, just for him, so I made him an owl this afternoon…

It’s my very first felted animal and as I can’t follow instructions I just improvised… And she turned out ok I think.

It’s special because the owl is “his” special animal and I made it myself, using the fleece we had collected from the woods and valley near our house. We are moving in a few days, we will still be living in Ashdown Forest, but in a town. Of course the forest will still be next door and we will now be able to use our bikes to get around which I am very excited about, as I’m fed up with driving all the time. So this week was also a bit of a moving-on celebration, having friends over in “our” valley to celebrate Thom’s 6th birthday and taking a bit of this magical place with us, with this little owl…

Tomorrow I am off to my yoga teacher training for the day. No doubt another interesting journey :)

Have a lovely night,

Noemie.

Nourishing the soul…

Through Art, walks in Nature, inspiring books, meeting up with friends, and having some down time to process it all…

eating good food…

… Pondering…

Visiting new places…

and of course playfulness! playing is such an important part of it all!

Have a lovely night,

Noemie.

On Creativity…

My recent times have been busy with home-educating my son, my yoga course, gardening,  enjoying quiet family time, educating myself on the Ayurvedic system (and being amazed at how much it makes sense), and spending quality time in the woods with my canine friend Tara.

I’m feeling the need to connect with my creativity so I’ve been writing regularly, enjoying looking around me with a sense of wonder, and I even started to draw again.

I think all human beings need to find ways to express their creativity… Music and Photography used to be my ways of expressing myself back in my 20’s, and when I became a mum I started to cook a lot instead and of course I have a well-documented child, as I took quite a lot of photos of him as a baby and toddler.

Although at some point I had no camera… that was a dark era!

Portrait photography used to be my specialty, I used to enjoy taking portraits of animals a lot, and also trees, flowers, stones… I did take a lot of portraits of people too. Some of them were famous in their scene, others were famous with their Mums… it didn’t matter to me who they were. With every single being I had the honour to photograph (note I’m deliberatly not using the expression “taking” a photo…) I got to have a glimpse of their soul, and I must say that with animals that experience is often a lot more powerful than with humans, because animals just “let you in” without any attempt to shield anything.

Since being a Mum I have been constantly amazed by the sense of creativity that is innate to children. They are naturally creative as they don’t have any blockages within their creative process or great expectations for the result. Making a mess certainly doesn’t stop them getting started. Most of us adults have been conditioned when we were kids to care about how the things we make/create look like. We were compared with one another by thoughtless teachers or parents, some of us were told we were not good at arts, or that we didn’t have any talent in a particular subject whereas others may have been told they were creative geniuses and had to live up to the expectations that come with such a statement… I have met quite a few very talented artists and some of them seemed to be carrying their gift like a heavy load on their shoulders… that’s possibly why :-)

But for kids, art is just easy:

Thom and I go for long walks in the woods regularly and it amazes me to see how he comes up with Land Art projects on his own, and really enjoys immersing himself in the zone of creativity, creating a world made out of stones, earth and sticks…

He started to write on his own last year, because he was attracted by letters. So he started copying them on his own and now he writes his own name on everything and inserts random letters in his drawings as a part of the picture, because he likes the look of them.

Nothing seems to intimidate him, a few months ago we went to march to protest against the badger cull in the UK. I asked him to make his own sign and he just drew a badger, from the top of his head, just like that:

Obviously I’m aware that it doesn’t look exactly like a real badger, but I really like the fact that he didnt have anything holding him back from just doing it, even if he has never done it before!

(Re)opening the creativity channel doesnt need to be a complicated process. Even if as adults we may have forgotten the simplicity of just drawing or painting whatever comes to us. It is in fact a very liberating activity.

I find that writing a few pages first thing every morning helps. Most of the time I just start to write with no particular goal and my ideas just articulate themselves, and as I allow the pen to connect with my soul I realise in amazement that I’m releasing a few things that were stuck somewhere, in the back of my mind.

Going somewhere we have never been before can help, and also revisiting old places every once in a while to re discover them with new eyes is definitely an interesting experience too.

The practice of Yoga is a great way to release old blockages, to connect with ourselves and discover new possibilities – extending and stretching our own limitations.

Carrying a note pad and pen with you when out and about is useful as you may feel like writing something down while being in an inspiring place, such as the woods or the sea front… or in a cafe in town. One of my favourite activities back when I was travelling a lot used to be sitting down in a cafe somewhere and just writing anything that would go through my mind. Sometimes it was bits of conversations I could pick up around me, or words from a song… I have filled lots and lots of books like this. With poetry it sometimes feels that there is no thread to follow at all… but every single entry is an instant of my life. I would just spend hours writing, filling up pages and pages… and I would also sketch a lot.

Music is a great way to release blockages too. Singing makes you feel great, drumming can be very liberating and dancing is a very powerful way to release emotional build up!

The possibilities are infinite, but if you feel stuck you need to feed and nurture your creative self. That can be done through spending some time on your own in an inspiring place, to reconnect with yourself, and recharge.  That can be in nature, in the woods, in a park, in the mountains, by the sea or in a museum, a cafe…

Sometimes yoga teachers advise their students to take on a creative activity to release certain blocks, so they might advise them to start playing a musical instrument, or to start singing. Creativity is a very healing process if we are open to let go of our fears/apprehensions and just go for it!

Releasing blockages through creativity is empowering and very useful when one is learning to communicate telepathically with animals or any other beings. It stretches our minds to towards infinite possibilities, giving us a sense of strength and joyfulness that elevates us to a higher state of consciousness because we are really connecting with ourselves and the world around us…

So don’t fear judgements or criticisms and enjoy every single step of your unique creative process, and remember: The journey is more important than the destination.

Namaste!

Noemie.