Soul experience.

"Imagination is woven into the child's drawing. This reveals the close connection between the forces of memory and the child's own experiences. Imagination is born after the third year and from now on it adorns everything .... Soul experience now becomes pictorial presentation. Children's souls 'play' with what they have experienced and what they remember, and it is lifted up into their imagination."

Michaela Strauss
from Understanding Children's Drawings: Tracing the Path of Incarnation

Children are natural creators, myth makers, capable of World Building and existing in that somewhere-realm between spheres of physical and spiritual.

Sometimes the only "guidance" required is the space to move their bodies, the time to do so.

Luxuries, really.
Really.

The most luxurious part being our own awareness, as adults, to grant this time and space. And to remember to do this for them:

     to let them just, be.

When was the last time you were so lost in work, any work, and able to exist between the physical and spiritual? Was it this morning? A decade ago? Do you even remember the feeling: Time is gone. Form is gone. Logic is gone. And what one is left with is what some call freedom, some call bliss, some call nirvana. A stillness of the mind. Through creation.

When did this concept become a luxury?

And while it seems like everyone is searching for such a thing, and people want to sell you such a thing and entities want to help you attain such a thing ... really it could be society's act of de-valuing it in the first place that has placed such a high value on it now. 

It is the soul experience that makes us human.

Children know this, without knowing.

"The soul-spiritual nature of small children is primarily engaged in the process of bodily incarnation. They build the bridges of life between body and soul. In their diagrammatic pictures, that which is engaged in building the body rises to the surface of visibility. They are as it were, the sand washed up out of the ocean of organ-formation, out of the subjectless and objectless 'No-Man's-Land' of life processes."

Wolfgang Schad,
from Notes on the Study of Man

As adults, can we retrieve it? This mystery?
As artists, this is the constant journey. The living question. The fierce will. The World Building. The space to move our bodies. The time to do so. The re-valuing.

The soul experience. 

Artist-led collaborative student work, grade 1, 2013. Vintage wool yarn, found objects. Hand crocheted, hand woven.

For related links, see the post Soul fever and most posts under the sidebar category Children.
​