Wonderchild and the wound of time

I'm currently working on this exciting and inspiring project, collaborating with my dear friend Maimouna Ly. Maimouna and I have parallel lives, we have very similar stories and we noticed we live very similar experiences at the same time. Maimouna comes from a long line of healers, powerful psychics from her native land of Burkina Faso. We both grew up in the suburbs of Paris and we met here in Edinburgh about 5 years ago and we feel a very deep, soulful connection. In fact, a few years ago, while she was teaching me Reiki, a vision came to her where in a previous life, we were blood sisters and our father was some kind of chief of an indigenous tribe.

We've made a proposal to the Talbot gallery, University of Edinburgh for a journey/workshop that will weave sound and movement in resonance with the gallery's current exhibition " Children are Now"

As part of this project, I've been exploring the fascinating link between the collective concept of time and the way we perceive and experience the passage of life’s stages from childhood to older age. It’s time to re-heart (remember) the cyclical and rythmic nature of life and the completely interwoven transitions from one process to another.One of the first thing thatOne

One of the first thing that comes to me as I read the words "Children are now" is the concept of time. We say "children are the future" implying that only once they outgrow the stage of childhood, then they become agents and can shape the world but in truth, their way of being is crucial in the way we perceive and create our lives.

It's so engrained within us, in every cell of our being that time is only linear and life is a succession of one stage to another, from past to future, from childhood to adulthood but we can clearly observe and experience the rhythmical, cyclical and repetitive weaving of events, transitioning from one state to another completely interwoven to each other, and then repeating again and again, never the same way.

Time can be lived not as something that is going forward but a living breath, in each inspiration, feeling the aliveness of simply being here with its potentiality and then as we exhale, we settle and rest in the expanse of life.

The Wonderchild to me represents the eternal, the untouched source of life within, the spark of divine imagination, innocence, and possibilities. The part of us that is so attuned to beauty, mystery and the unfathomable intelligence that is the fabric of life. It represents the “child of the soul,” the one who remembers (or re-hearts) the timeless realms of creation.

The wound of time is what happens when we enter the fabric of the temporal world, when eternity becomes flesh, and our pure innocence becomes a faded memory.

We become dense and weighed by the cumulative griefs, disappointments and forgettings that happen as we grow up, when wonders are gradually clouded by the responsibilities, the day to day living, the conditioned way of believing we need to be constantly doing and completing tasks.

So the wonderchild and the wound of time speak of the paradox of incarnation: how something infinite and luminous must descend into limitation, and yet through this descent, wonder can be reborn as a creative expression, art, poetry, song, movement etc...

As we change the way we live time, we'll change our consciousness and this race of going forward, from past to future from one stage to another, this linear thinking of time will no longer have such an effect on us. But of course changing our perception and belief of time will take time!!! ( many breaths in potentiality)

In this regard, I think that many mystical creatives, artists, shamans, visionaries, poets, philosophers, writers or people passionate and truly inspired by life etc... have a crucial role in changing the collective perception of time because when we are in the space of creation, we are no longer bound by this conditioned perception of time, we are in the eternal, time feels like it no longer exists or is stretched or simply is experienced as a powerful energy, life force.

I believe that if we want to change the way adults view and treat children, we need to first look and connect to our innocent and curious part of ourselves and that includes of course the wounded part of us.

The theme of the Wonderchild is a very present archetypal force, it represents a soul state of eternal youth, spontaneity and connection to the creative imagination, the workshop we are proposing is an invitation to simply remind ourselves that something in us must stay open, light and visionary, able to see the world as new even just for a moment. We'll invite participants to breathe in the aliveness of the current artists' exhibition and see how it feels like to be in a creative environment on the theme of Children are now.

Mouna and I playing hopscotch at the Talbot gallery, university of Edinburgh