painting faces

i love to paint.

i love animals.

i love children.

this summer i had the delightful opportunity to combine 3 of my favourite things into one! Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary is a lovely gem of natural beauty, run by truly warm and wonderful folks. i was the resident face painter, bringing my brushes in tow for several special even days focusing on snakes, slugs, spiders, dragonflies, and more.

like a tibetan mandala, face painting only lasts for moments and each new canvas is a unique little person, with stories, ideas, and personalities. i've painted fish, owls, raccoons, damselflies, lizards, leopards, ladybugs, turtles, fairies, hummingbirds, orca whales, peacocks, wolves, frogs, spiders, snails, slugs, cats, and numerous butterflies and snakes. every one was a little, or a lot, different and every one was absolutely fun.

this summer, i have many lovely distractions working in nature houses and helping with special events, all focusing on natural history and wildlife. for one such event, a nature day camp for kindergarten aged children, the children will be making blackberry jam...a delicious introduction to invasive, alien species. i managed to pick a good bucketful of shiny black berries to supplement their own collection on monday...

here is my concern. i didn't need the latest research on "nature deficiency" to tell me what i have already seen: more and more, children are not developing sincere experiences with nature. i went to Google "blackberry" to find a pretty image for the jam labels...expecting to find drawings and photos of ripe fruit i found instead pages and pages of palm pilots, electronic personal organisers...not a berry in the bunch!

the childhood i enjoyed, rich with unfettered, largely unsupervised, child-directed explorations of dirt and ditches, is no longer the norm.

i truly believe that children need to be dirty.

they need to build diminutive dams in the ditch and watch tadpoles.

they need to watch the seasons change and know that nature has its own rhythms.

they need to dig a hole as deep as their muscles and stamina will allow to discover that they indeed, can not dig to China.

i have thin, dark scratches on my legs from the striving pursuit of the top-branched berry...i hope i can guide a few children to earn the same badge of honor and the sweet reward that follows.

i wore a fancy white linen dress, and my nephew said "who are you, aunty? you're a princess..." and so the dress- up began.

it was fairy-this and fairy-that for the remainder of the morning...we drank mint tea, ate nuts and berries, and each had a diminutive slice of blackberry sponge cake...who says boys don't play teaparty?

during our polite conversation, about fairies and honey, he informed me that REAL fairies pee in the bush. i'd never thought of that before, but who can argue with his logic?

we are the gnomes...

ho ho ho. the gnomes walk in a row, and when the gnomes are going out, they make no noise and no do shout. ho ho ho. the gnome walk in a row.

the elder brother was particularly enchanted with his gnome garb and hid completely from passersby...spending much of his prefered leisure time with video games, sports, and hotwheels, i was surprised to see how quickly and eagerly he took to this kind of imaginative play. poor kid though, with his blue eyes he suffers from the same sun-provoked squinting.

little nephews dressed up for a photo adventure for nanna's birthday...they had a wonderful time hiding in the woods and being invisible in their gnome hats. it is so easy to take genuinely warm photographs of children when they are sincerely happy in their element...

hack! hack! the rocks we crack! shake! shake! the mountains quake! we are the gnomes we dig for gold...