Tag: childhood
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All books are mechanisms for traversing time and space. These two books that I recently grabbed at the thrift store do that in multiple ways. These Choose Your Own Adventure titles first came out in the lates 1970s and were just the thing for me as a pre-teen reader. I was reading the Narnia books and Madeleine L’Engle’s time warping novels. I also read loads of Ray Bradbury, Asimov, and harder science fiction like Larry Niven’s Ringworld books that mostly went over my head. I was into computers and fantasy at the same time so there was something about stories…
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I have worked for many years now as a Play Designer. Explaining what this means is never a simple thing but I’ll try here as it may inform the rest of what I write which is still bubbling up for me as I type this. I work for a company that makes digital play and learning products for very young children. I design open playful and playable digital toys with a cast of cute characters that primarily end up on phones and tablets and are mostly played with by preschool-age kids. The job is empathy balanced with function and it…
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I think of my six year-old self and my friend Steve. It is the first day of first grade. Summer’s tint is still glowing from our skins. We wear the defiance of hot days roaming between shadows and light. Peanut butter and jelly and soft brown bread remnants on our faces. We are walking, unhurried, along the sidewalk. We are stuck in the adventure, the freedom, of summer. Lost in the memory of wild ranging and wandering in what felt like a vast unmapped wilderness but was really just a few looping residential blocks. We strip summer clothes off, down…
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In my last post I talked about one of the main spaces I work creatively these days and having the tools, supplies, and various points of inspiration and connection at hand while I work. I’ve always been interested in finding the lines that join to and run through things. As a kid, my encyclopedia set and the image rich Time-Life nature, science, and anthropology volumes on our home bookshelves were a world of connections in my hands. Those books felt like they contained the universe. As part of how I make art now, I practice at finding transient connections between…
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^ The wonder of childhood feels like this in my memory — rapid flashes with the occasional moment of brilliant clarity. When we speak about childlike wonder we are drawing on a time when wonder was as innate as breath. For children, wonder is practically key to their survival. Wonder is synonymous with a child’s fluid acquisition of language and their drive to discover and define the seemingly infinite new things that get introduced to their senses. Our nacent sense of wonder is our earliest guide to the world. It’s strange that we relegate wonder to the realm of childhood.…