A little picture diary of precious moments with a dear wee one and her magical collecting basket

On the first day we met...

Oh how happy this dear wee one is to have a new collecting basket for her walks and adventures. It is a gift from a spidery lace maker who's web she protected the other day. 

Stepping lightly she glimpses a beautiful treasure, a raindrop glistening on a baby rose leaf...such magic is not easy to gather, but perhaps through the delicate hoping of her heart it might slip into her basket?

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The next morning....

No rain has fallen since yesterday....but oh my can you see, such wonder is still here, this collecting basket must be as magical as her heart.

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When the sunshine came out to play with her....

Skipping along in the sunshine today, her toes barely stop in time when they find themselves amongst tiny purple petals.

She has to tip her face right back to see when the softness is drifting down from...

High high above in the blue sky, amongst a gentle humming she can see a little treasure beginning to float its way to earth.

Oh so tenderly she fills her gathering basket with this gift and then she plays at adding decorating patterns to her sparkly skirt

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On a delicious afternoon......

Climbing climbing oh so high, she is taking care to hold on tight, while she picks the tenderest tiniest mint leaves and fills her little basket. Such special collecting she is doing today, all for the kindness of helping her friend the ice cream maker who needs these delicious leaves to make her favourite flavoured treat

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One moonlit night....

She had found a lovely place to watch the moon, and maybe she was starting to drift to sleep a little. Then through sleepy eyes she saw something sparkle, a silvery dream seemed to be floating closer perhaps a gift from the moon who was watching over her

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When she showed me her most precious foundling....

For the last couple of days she seems to have been hiding, now and again I have heard tiny running steps, but when I stopped what I was doing and tried to see, everything became suddenly very quite and still. This evening though she must have been in a hurry, because she made quite a lot of scuttle and I was able to follow the sound, right into a little red bonnet. 

And there I saw... she has made her little collecting basket into a rocking cradle...

Very very gently I asked and after quite a while she let me hold, the most delicate fairy babe I've ever seen, where she came from who can tell...

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This wee one is now on her way home to play.

These diary entries were first offered day by day on The Magic Fairy facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/themagicfairylady

bags of playful loveliness

Plato is understood to have said that 'The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.' These words make a deep kind of sense to me. Plato framed education not in today's narrow cultural definition but more fundamentally in the becoming of our human potential. Here then, the meaning of 'effective' encompasses far more than academic achievement and the appropriateness of the word lovely in the translation from ancient Greek seems therefore to reflect within itself the sense of that whole sentence.

love·ly 

adj. love·li·er, love·li·est

1. Full of love; loving.

2. Inspiring love or affection.

3. Having beauty that appeals to the emotions as well as to the eye. 

4. Enjoyable; delightful.

n. pl. love·lies

1. A beautiful person, especially a woman.

2. A lovely object.

It is instinctively true to me that in order to become our potential, our playful relationship to what exists should be through lovely things. How else are we to have an affinity to loveliness, how else will we notice, create and cherish the lovely.

The other evening I was talking with the young philosopher who is my daughter. In that time when many wonderings seem to come, she had, of her own accord, started to differentiate whether or not things were 'useful', she was looking around her and began to question the usefulness of lace. She didn't want to dismiss it as not useful, and so we talked about the experience of lace, the making and the seeing and the touching of it, and we talked about all the care that it holds in its beauty and all that a love of lace might help us notice and love in nature; spider's webs of course, skeletal leaves, the edges of petals such as pinks.

In my creating towards children's play and their relationship with their world love slips from my finger tips into permeable authentic beautiful materials, small beings take up residence creating their lovely form with deep respect for the vital role of play.

And so it is that I offer the story of a small spritely girl who is full of smiles and the warmth of summertime, she is a living playful lovely.

Experiencing her arrival....
Now and again someone invites themselves in, you find yourself offering tea in your best blue teapot and they settle themselves amongst your spools of colour, they smile sweetly explaining that their hat is simply too pretty to take off today, and ask for the tailor to start stitching a coat, and then in between sips and nibbles, they murmur little things like, 'oh i do wish I had a tiny doll to sing to' and 'I once saw a fairy's soft silk purse' and 'I wonder if it would be possible to make me a small resting place' and soon enough you're wondering too

A sunshiny smily day....
The one sunny afternoon I was easily coaxed into the garden to sew, for as she whispered smiling 'you never know... this might be the last days of hot summer sun.' She had her heart on some red brown branches and was very pleased to walk her tiny purse fairy round about the beginnings of her dwelling place.

We turned the fairy purse inside out so that she could fly with her stary flowers and found that the kind intuitive branch had provided a small notch of just right reachable height, this made us smile a lot!

Deliciousness..... 
My younger daughter loves to bake, this playful joy seems to call the fairy folk and house gnomes from their little places to dance around the table tasting and adding their own secret ingredients, helping her cakes taste like magic. This spritelet was so excited to join in the fun of puff pastry tartlets and her little hat and apron were such sweet indulgence for me to make. 

soft dancing surely helped the pastry puff 

Bringing about the lovely surrounding house.....
The wind had been doing wonderful blustery things for some days and so we had been hurrying along with the little house and the warm coat. One morning I came across her trying out the pockets of her moss green walls, finding one for her baking apron and hat and hanging up her little dolly bag again, happy that she could still reach the hook. She borrowed a silk snowflake, a gift from my daughter, and used my wooden spool for a table. After she had made herself at home she decided to go find some tea time edibles in case anyone came to visit, so taking her wee basket she asked the bunny to hop through his borrow doorway closing her house safe and off she went.

of course her wishes were fulfilled when her dancing friend sailed in for a visit

and they had a lovely play with their fairy dolls

Then she strung her hammock between the house branches and when to sleep in the glow of her butterfly lamp.

Awaking to all the new possibilities of play....
In the morning the sunlight shone through the hand painted silk rainbow flower window to wake her for another day of adventure

we took everything out of all the little pockets 

as we unfolded the house

when everything was laid out on the mat we felt rather pleased 

and gathering everything together

With a little magicalizing a house buttons into a bag full of loveliness 

safely in for a little meander 

would that tangerine be more fun to eat or to role down a hill?

Here we go a wandering 

and peering from on high

to spy a little treasure growing nearby 

And now... where will she take all this loveliness to play? How does the story continue?

remembering again and again, it is really barely me

Last night just before bed I was searching through a small bowl of bird's egg blue. This bowl holds what I lightly call my fairy soup. It is full of tiny fairies for unexpected visitors, and treasured beings in their becoming, not yet fully fledged. To call it fairy soup is not, you understand, an indication of the edibility of fairies! It is more born of an initial giggle at the mix of colours in the bowl, and then a gentle delight in the metaphor of nourishing warmth and of the delicate mix of ingredients and materialising subtle flavours in soups as in nature. 

Last night I was looking for a particular baby fairy when my fingers came across something which I had quite forgotten. I lifted it out and I saw what I held. Perhaps this being had become since I had placed the rose in the bowl in the summertime, perhaps my eyes have become more sensitised in the intervening time, perhaps I had already almost seen her when I laid her in the bowl, laying the trace for my soul to now thrill in the awe of recognition. 

See her green bonnet asks only for me to contribute the tiniest soft silk face, and perhaps even that will be too much. She will be a Valentitnes gift for one my daughters. Quite probably she will fly, with so many other fairies who have come, from the mobile in my younger daughter's room, because the eldest now has a minamilist white feel to her growing up space. 

But before being given to my girls, she has been of herself, a gift to me. She has spoken to and thereby nourished the part of me that knows that these beings who meander or rush or slip or fly, who breath into cloth through my grateful enchanted hands are really barely my doing - they are the life of the elements forming my eyes, meeting my fingertips, dancing through the imaginal layers. 

When I listen and await in love, they come. When I trust and simply follow, the become into the form that my hands are able to birth.
When they flow through other hands in different ways, it is still they who come to be seen and held and loved, because...

It Felt Love

How
Did the rose
Ever open its heart
And give to this world
All its
Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light
Against its
Being,

Otherwise,
We all remain
Too
Frightened.' ~ Hafiz (trans. by Daniel Ladinsky)

So parents, grandparents, family friends, do please let yourselves find moments to create fairies and gnomes and elves and sprites, in your own way for your children who will recognise them. Let your children know you greeting the living beings of rock and flower and sea washed twig with your hands.

Do this for your children, that they will sense how to do it for their children, so that the elemental beings may continue to have access by which to permiate our material and our senses, to remind us again and again to wonder in awe at what life might be in the unfurling petals of a rose.