Synchronicity...I DO like that word!

While my girls were enjoying a birthday at one of those organised kid's party places, and I sat waiting for them, I started reading Mythago Wood again.  But it was too noisy, filled with children screaming and laughing and music too loud for reading much of anything.  So I set it aside and instead I flicked through the little notebook I always carry around with me to scribble those odd thoughts that occur at odd (and always inconvenient) times, otherwise I forget them.  Sometimes I'm quite surprised to rediscover what was going on in my head just a couple of weeks ago.  And I found this page.  This is an ongoing theme for me, I come back to it and revisit it often.  It's on my 'to do' list, to actually make some of the things I've written about here...I think I might need a bigger studio!  But it also made me think about Rima Staines' latest post on the role of the artist as an intercessor between the human world and the world beyond.  She says...

"I think that artists over the centuries who have made with their hands and their souls objects that are beautiful, are intercessors, portrayers of the inexplicable wonder of life or the divine or whatever you choose to call it. And in seeing these beautiful objects, these sights that delight the eye, some transformation takes place within you, because of what the artist was feeling whilst creating."

This afternoon I was having a little surf through the web and found this gorgeous creature here .  And it reminded me of something I made years ago (about 12 to be precise) when I was studying theatre at Uni.  I was Head of Lighting on a pantomime.  Which meant Lighting designer/operator/rigger-on-very-tall-ladders/general-dogsbody/etc. And I was having trouble with one particular light, which I could not get to work.  Finally, after much faffing about including changing what was probably a perfectly good light bulb (which is NOT an easy job perched at the top of a very LONG ladder over the auditorium leaning on a not-so-stable lighting grid!), I discovered that the lighting grid had been labeled incorrectly, and plug numbers didn't match up with grid outlet numbers...grrrrrr!  Anyway...I sorted it out, which left me with what probably had been a perfectly good light bulb, but I could no longer use it because they aren't any good if you touch them...apparently.  So I took it home and transformed it, with feathers and beads, leather and other bits and bobs, into The Lighting Operator's Talisman.  I put it into a nice box, and presented it to the theatre manager, to be handed on to subsequent Heads of Lighting for good luck and a stress-free show.  Some years later, I bumped into a fellow ex-student who had completed the same course a few years after me.  And who had been Head of Lighting once.  And who had been duly given The Lighting Operator's Talisman to keep for the duration of the show.  She was quite excited to meet the person who had made it, and I was rather chuffed to discover it was still being passed on.  It made me wonder how long it would take before it stopped being a bit of a joke and became a real tradition.  I wonder if they still have it!