Sept 2022 blog – September is always a month of magic, with the pages of a sun washed summer turning over and the sun soaked leaves turning red, all giving way to the howling winds. This is the season that reminds me most of my youth, football comes back on TV, school buses start to appear, and the smells of campfires, dried leaves and fresh pencils seem to be everywhere.
So it feels most appropriate that as an adult, always searching for wonder and magic in the world, that I can return to my family home this month to tell ghost stories around a campfire, imagine my fathers backyard as a near infinite forest full of fairies and goblins, and then of course, spend some time with my nephew, Matthew, doing pencil sketches and talking about creativity.
This morning all these wonders came together in one peaceful moment. The wind whipping its autumn joy around wise old trees, thoughts of the garden and our father and Papa, and this one quiet moment spent together sharing some creative sketch work. Matthew and I hadn’t seen each other since New Year’s down in Florida, and we had a lot to catch up the past few days on all our life’s adventures. He talked about his new voyage into the unknown of RL middle school, his first new phone, chatting with his friends and some of the new sweethearts in his life. I was able to share some of my travels in Europe and show pictures of my month in Paris; all the food, the cityscapes and some clever shots of interesting architecture. “You have definitely done a good job of making me want to go to Paris with those pictures, Uncle Paul”, he exclaimed!
As we sat on the patio later, sipping our morning bevvies and planning a good annual sketch for us to collaborate on, it occurred to me how many worlds we’ve built together over the years through shared dreams and similar imaginations. We’ve built high fantasy lands with knights and ogres and Star Wars galaxies full of starships and strange worlds. But today when I asked Matthew what we should draw, our dreams united as usual, and it seemed he mostly wanted to draw a picture of Paris. So we scrolled through the album of my best shots and settled on a park view of the Eiffel Tower.
This is when it hit me. Matthew was growing up and our ideas of wonder and adventure was shifting a little. But our desire to dream and use creativity to bring those dreams to life will be something we share forever. My wandering rambles across the world fill my soul with grace and help me share beauty with the people around me. We of course can keep dreaming about hobbits and Jedi but we have all new realms of dreamworlds opening up to us as we continue to live our lives and keep forging our own quests. My past may someday become my nephew’s future when we keep sharing moments like these, inspiring each other and capturing our well architectes dreamworlds with the eyes of two clever artists.
Matthew, keep dreaming of beautiful moments in your past – musing on the past but never dwelling on it. Keep imagining new adventures, have the imagination to make the world bigger, and more magical than it already is. Then capture this beauty, write about it, sketch about it, make it live and breathe… then have the courage in your life to forage out there to make it yours. It is your dream to shape, it is your destiny to own, your one life to live. – PC
Paul Carreo 