100 Days of Wonder – #30
It’s been another busy Monday and I managed to go for a run so here’s just a short post. Disney has provided lots of inspiration and nudges to be more creative. So over the last few years we have carved pumpkins for Halloween and most have had some sort of Disney theme. I’m not that good at it but Kath is. Here’s a Dopey one she did a few years ago. How brilliant is that!?!
We haven’t carved ours yet this year but we really need to make time. We so often push fun things to ‘later’ or ‘when we have more time’ and that needs to stop. We have time and being creative and having fun is a priority so let’s all pause, step away from work and email and do something fun!
100 Days of Wonder – #29
So, Halloween. So much of Halloween is commercialised nonsense aimed at getting us to buy stuff we don’t need and actually that’s probably how it entered my consciousness really. But I like the dark and the spooky and the other worldly, always have, and Halloween gives me a nice excuse to tap into that and explore what that side of me is and means. I like to think of its origins in Samhain in Celtic pagan culture which marks the end of the harvest season and the start of the darker months. The idea of Samhain or Halloween as a liminal festival where the boundaries between worlds blur speaks to my inner little witch. I suppose we see that closeness to the otherworld reflected in the idea of Halloween as the start of Allhallowtide in the western Christian calendar- a time to remember the dead. I am less keen on the modern interpretation of Halloween as a celebration of horror – because while I am content with a dose of spooky otherworldly magic, I am not and have never been (however hard I tried to pretend as a teenager) a horror fan. Maybe that’s why a Disney Halloween sort of appeals, it allows me to tap into the playfulness and possibilities of other worlds and magic and feed my imagination that keeps asking interesting iterations of ‘what if…?’.
100 Days of Wonder – #28
It has been a gorgeous autumnal day today which I spent at our University Open Day talking to lots of prospective students. I like Open Days, they are full of excitement and hope and the promise of things to come. We are also one step closer to Halloween so I am a pretty happy bunny. I’ll talk more about Halloween in the next few days but the picture I picked is deliberately more autumnal than spooky. It was taken in September 2017 which is the only time I have been to Walt Disney World at a time of year that wasn’t January. I like autumn for all sorts of reasons but have realised that I actually just like having proper seasons where you have more than just a vague temperature difference between them. Here in the UK, I love the changes in colour. It’s not just the leaves on trees, it’s everything. They blue skies are somehow a slightly different blue, the grey that so often settles in at this time of year is a reminder that not everything has to be sunshine and roses all the time and the deeper darker colours of autumn just somehow make my soul smile. They are perhaps more muted, less extrovert and in your face than some of the bold spring and summer colours and that suits me. I love the mist rising from the river, the fog that descends, the way you can be stuck in a cloud all day but half a mile down the road it might be bright sunshine. I like the moody and the dark but I like it even more because it is interrupted with spells of warmth and brightness. I also like the idea of autumn as the first phase of renewal. Autumn signifies getting rid of the old to make time for rest before the new. I like that pattern because it so explicitly recognises the rest that comes with winter. It’s not entirely compatible with an academic year cycle through. So as my soul is moving to shedding its metaphorical leaves and leaving behind the things that no longer bring me joy, the academic year really just begins. As we move towards winter, we gear up to be busier than ever whether that is socially or academically with assessments, marking and seeing everyone before Christmas (why?) … and as we head into renewal, at least in our academic calendar now, we are actually getting into the finishing straight of teaching. So I think sometimes my soul is a bit confused. I get more reflective as autumn moves on and I try and be explicit about finishing things and not immediately starting something new. I try and move with the cycle that recognises the move from one thing to the next but with rest in-between them. That’s not always easy, but I suspect it is essential to doing things well and staying well.
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