Belle & Boo and the Connected Child Within

I've ordered this notebook from Belle & Boo after stumbling across the gorgeous artworks of Mandy Sutcliffe. Belle & her bunny Boo appear in a story board of outside play amongst other adorable characters...

The reason I decided to mention this was the thought that it prompted about children and their awareness of nature, their connnection to imagination and play, their observation of colour, animals and even other beings...not all imaginary friends are imaginary, I'm sure.

Perhaps children see what we really wouldn't like to. We were there once, didn't we sometimes insist to our parents that we were in the presence of something unusual?

I used to lay awake at night and watch the 'moving tv screens' float across my walls, the wardrobe and the door; like ten overhead projectors making animated pictures sail around me. They were transparent too; they would bend and curve in the grooves of my bedroom.

The floating pictures stopped by the time I was ten, roughly the age where we rationalise away our visions as 'make-believe', after our parents have been telling us that earth is dirty and we shouldn't stick our hands in soil, or that we shouldn't play with our baby toys anymore because we're becoming 'big boys and girls' and whenever we think we see something, it's not real.

I had a pet caterpillar once, I named it and claimed it as my own...it passed away two days later but the point is, I was more connected to the earth when I was small. There were things about it that I deemed special and they helped me understand growth and the beauty in everything.

I was sad to grow up without my 'moving tv screens' and it's something I still can't define. I'm not sure what those experiences were and why I experienced them but now I am trying to reconnect as much as possible to what I know as Gaia, and the wonders beyond her...the powers of our higher selves.

And so back to Belle & Boo...'Belle Hugs Boo' was my first print. I have framed it and shall put it up on my wall in the spot where I tend to work on my projects. Not only is it a pleasure to look at, it makes me want to crawl back into my childlike mind; my totally connected and creative self and explore and play.

And to remember what it was like to have absolute love for the things around me; the things I called my own and the things I swore I'd always care about.