Tickle the earth & nourish the moon.
Photo by Tamanna Rumee on Unsplash
I was not yet a mother but was always drawn to the color and whimsy of the OILILY brand, a Dutch retailer who specializes in happy and colorful clothing for women and children. Back when they had retail outlets in the US, I always enjoyed walking into the store just to absorb the onslaught of sunshine and rainbows that emanated from both the racks and the walls. So much color, so much whimsy, so much joy in their prints and patterns.
In the days before social media and before amazon became de riguer, I was compelled to join their mailing list just so that I could get the same feeling of sunshine and rainbows right into my mailbox. Their fancy thick-papered catalog was, of course, full of the patterns and color that I loved about the store and one day in March 2005 I opened up their catalog to also find a story. The story was somewhat hidden as it was more of a backdrop image to product pictures, a secondary visual that only people like me would actually read. I am always curious about words and intention so I read that story carefully, word by word, and loved it so much that I copied it down into my journal.
The spirit of the story was just as sunshiny and joyful as the store itself (branding on point!) and I have kept it through to this day. So, despite there was no personal author noted, I give you this story as presented in the March 2005 OILILY Catalog, Journal #42.
May you too find joy in this story as I did. And, when you do, please take time to tickle the earth and nourish the moon.
"She's just four years old now. But sometimes her questions seem older than the turtles on the Galapagos Islands. Like last Friday…. At the end of that day we sat in the garden and our long shadows looked as if Giacometti had sculptured the light. My daughter gazed at the ground. Then she asked, “Can the world stand to be tickled?” She didn’t wait for my answer, but ran to her room and came back with a small handful of feathers; one from a peacock, one from a parrot and one from a pigeon (she’s been collecting the dream of flight). After a couple of minutes tickling the ground she pressed her ear firmly against the earth and smiled. She seemed relieved. “I hear laughter down there,” she said. “I think I hear the world begging me to continue with all ten of my own fingers.” She went on tickling the soil in even greater earnest. This time with her bare hands. That night our yard looked a little worse for wear, as if a small herd of confused cows had been playing rugby. I didn’t mind. The earth deserves a good laugh now and then.
Besides, my daughter had proven my theory. It goes like this: the surface of the earth is 510,666,000 square kilometers, but children express their creativity on the individual square meter they play on. It’s funny: people travel hundreds of miles to the Louvre, MOMA or Guggenheim to unravel the mysteries of art, while children open their own little museums of magic right in the places where they play. My role? Well, I’m not the grumpy attendant who cautions against laughter in a stuffy gallery, nor do I play the part of the posturing spectator. For me it goes deeper: the creativity of children can sometimes unlock my own self-expression (aren’t we all relatives of Houdini?) I think one of the strengths of kids is that they offer us little keys in unlimited editions to unlock the ateliers in our minds. Just take a peek at the paint, canvas, clay, paper, charcoal, wood and glue that waits for you… - and then go on inside. Home is where the art is. This summer holiday we won’t stand in line waiting to get into foreign museums. We’ll stay at home. That’s the place where we celebrate our whole life as if it were a work of art (and it’s no use alerting Sotheby’s, we’ll never auction off our freedom).
The first day of our holiday the family sat around the kitchen table with a bunch of kids from the neighborhood. We made a long list of creative projects and decided which ones we wanted to start on first. We started with the task of making 97 little brightly painted plaster garden gnomes. The next morning at 5.00 a.m. we snuck through our street and posted each gnome near a neighboring house, in their gardens and on branches of trees in their yards. When the sun came up it looked as if the street had been invaded by the friendly inhabitants of a strange gnome-planet. That morning was hysterical: excited local newspaper reporters and television networks swarmed into our street - but we kept our secret. The next project was the construction and painting of new traffic-signs. “Right of way for submarines”, “Don’t feed the rhino” and “Beware: crossing contact-lenses”. They received hilarious responses from the neighbors after we installed them along the road.
And then there was the biggest project of the holiday. The full moon project. On July 14th I invited my husband, children and their friends to a gathering on our terrace at 10 P.M. It was the night of the new moon. We all stared at the darkened sky. I told them the sky was so dark because the moon had been shrinking from a lack of love and nourishment. Everyone understood the implications immediately: all over the world romantics and artists alike would be starved of the inspiration of her silver beams. That night we started the full moon project. Our ambition was to make the moon grow full and strong again. We built an enigmatic metal construction in the spirit of Tinguely, using lots of steel wire, jingling empty vegetable cans and parts of a worn-out mountain bike. In the top we inserted a yellow flag with the words: “Dear moon, just wait!” It must have attracted her attention, because the next night we saw a pale silver sickle in the sky. That encouraged us to go on. Over the next few days we all wrote love poems and letters to the moon, which we sent up at night, attached to colored helium balloons. Although the moon began to recover quickly, she still looked hungry. No problem: we fed her home-made pizza made from painted cardboard and fruits made of paper-mâché (especially pumpkins and melons) - these also found their way to the heavens at night. It helped: hardly a week later the moon was as plump as a banana, and she kept on gaining weight. In a few weeks the whole sky was glowing again; it looked as if Chagall, Van Gogh, Kandinsky and Pollock had mixed all their yellows. We celebrated with a raucous full moon party on the terrace.
Three nights later I woke up at 3.25 a.m. I heard stumbling on the balcony near our bedroom. It was my oldest daughter gazing at the sky in her nightgown. In a thin voice she asked: “Mom, why is the moon fading again?” I smiled and tried to comfort her: “Don’t be sad. If all the beauty in the world was unchanging, our sense of fantasy and surprise wouldn’t go on being tickled. Would it?” She fell right asleep as soon as I put her back to bed. But I kept awake. I listened to the laughter up high in the sky and down deep in the earth…. I listened peacefully all the way to sunrise."
-OILILY Catalog- March, 2005. Journal #42
Today, I will look for the keys that my children hold in order to unlock the atelier of my own mind and may your day too be full of nourishment for the soul.