Creatures

Curious Creatures  … from somewhere there                                                                                               Sept-Dec 2015

The creatures National Geographic doesn’t know about

Imagination play really seems to be like a space wormhole channeling free expression back and forth between reality and child’s mind.  It’s a creative statement, question, cry and joy at the same time.

Here is The Flying Worm and what its 6-year old creator says about it – “It has breasts to feed her small worms. Once they are born, they stay tangled around mommy’s body”-” because mom’s skin gives them special food – water and milk”. They milk from the breast – Sylvie explains further.

How does the worm milk taste like?– I’m wondering and she tells me right away that the breast milk tastes like rotten eggs, “but this is good for this type of worms.”- she adds

While putting the finishing touches on her creature, she excitedly keeps explaining : “The flying worm has  shell power and star power. She has stars on her skin and shoots them out when she needs to. She squirts pasta shells to her predators.

Who are her enemies?  – “Grasshoppers. When she licks poison ivy with her tongue, she becomes poisoneus and this helps her”

Media: baloons, feathers, pasta, scotch tape, stars and some imagination.

At age 6, the understanding about the two very basic functions for a living thing- procreation and survival seems to come intuitively. I was thinking about this flying worm- it’s a female worm who gives life, she has powers and she can take life by being poisoneus – it sounds like a Goddess; a consciousness about the female place in the universe. She is also a hand made, silly, pretty with features Mom, whom babies are tangled around her as if afraid not to be left alone.  I know my 6-year old would be.  Isn’t this what every child is afraid of, the same subconscious fear of separation from mother’s body that follows us later in life.  Magical and flying, she provides and protects- kind of a complete picture of what a parent is in a child’s mind. Maybe this goddess-mother is a pink balloon, colorful and cute because if she wasn’t, this myth- like story would’ve been a bit too dark – portraying raw life with some smelly milk, kids holding to mom for dear life and enemies around.

How about the Grasshoppers?

While I am playing thinking about Sylvie’s creatures as a coded puzzle, she is flying around with the balloon worm happy as she can be.  If I just had more time to stop, listen and sink into more of her beautiful stories and creatures, I would know her even better.

Visuals of some more creatures are posted below.

Spiders, ghosts and chickens chirp, crawl and scare out of everywhere.

Small fish with big eyes. I thought these are really cute with their starry tails.

Lego and play dough, 2015