Here’s Shannon’s, fourth and final correspondent post. I wonder, too, how to implement the action of craftivism into more aspects of my life and always welcome discussion. And I hope that I never stop living my life strongly and fiercely and truly and bravely as Shannon, who is so inspiring to me!
My favorite season is almost here. Halloween, Samhain, call it what you will, these are the days when the wind blows and blows until it tatters to shreds the veil between the living and the dead. It is the New Year for witches, the time when we get to cackle and fly and otherwise rub our hands with glee; the spirit world where we love so much to walk is upon us!
And of course, the children love it too. The whole world is given over to imagination for a night, and they get to be whatever hero (or monster) they have been dreaming of becoming. Alice made her own costume this year, all from scratch. She will be a little witch, specifically Kiki from Kiki’s Delivery Service, a girl at the verge of adulthood going out on her own for year to discover how she fits into the world. So fitting…
Opal will be, for the second year in a row, a cheerleader. Dear girl dreams of merging into a world that I cannot fathom… Anyhow, her costume is an actual cheerleading outfit, only from a different school! Like Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl, she will be rooting for the “wrong” team. When she wears it to her school (which is serious about it’s team loyalty, aka nationalism-in-training) we are suggesting she say she is an exchange student. How do the kids do it? They can reveal their secret worlds so unabashedly.
Some old songs (you know, from the 80’s) tell us that “every day is Halloween.” They berate us for stifling the urge to give ourselves over to wildness on all nights but this one. They warn us that playful spirit repressed turns into dangerous spirit, into monsters in the closet that can devour our well-being if we do let them out to cavort. What I will not give a voice creeps along the edges of my of my consciousness, latent and even hostile. But if I make a party for those Edge Dwellers I find that although I have to step very carefully, my walks are full of adventure!
When I travelled to Europe this last spring, I expected to see colorful people everywhere. I envisioned of foreign and exotic cities saturated with old world magic, secrets whispered in alleyways and cracks in the sidewalk, long played out histories reflecting off of urban facades. I was dreaming of course. History was present, sure, but not like I fantasized. People were people as they are everywhere, tired from the days work and the struggle of getting by, dressed conservatively, don’t want to makes waves, stir things up. Life is hard enough as it is. Only in Berlin, where I spent a tantalizing half an hour with my pal Marek, sitting across from a park, eating sandwiches and watching freaky people, did I get an inkling of carnival atmosphere. But Berlin is special, they say, a playground for outsiders.
So, I wasn’t disappointed that my imagining wasn’t real on those distant streets. I only felt a little conspicuous myself, a rainbow girl out of a song I used to know. I learned how to inhabit my self-consciousness so fully that it almost lost its discomfort. How to laugh in the faces of those who were laughing at me. It’s a useful skill, to be sure! However, I would have liked to experience these places when the streets were full of howls and monsters and sprites, when the tired people let their secret friends out to play…
This is my final column for craftivism.com, and I never got around to addressing that question that burns me up, namely how can craftivism (the action) be carried forward into our daily lives to create lasting change. You can be sure I won’t stop turning it over in the back of my mind, that I will keep jumping on the opportunity to discuss it with any willing party. But here, at the time that marks the cusp of the old year and the new, the sprit world and the world of the living, I issue a tiny challenge and a personal resolution: let us make Play a bigger parts of our lives, let us allow our myriad inner characters more recess, let’s dress up like our heroes and BE them, more than once a year!
