OUR MICHAELMAS STORY
The Vipava Valley is a magical place: there is something profound about nature here, something almost mythical about it. It feels it has stories in every hidden corner, and it invites you to read them by sparking your imagination.
With the arrival of autumn, I really adore the fog dumplings in the mornings that cover the waking, yawning valley. There is a little hill above the village where we live, and it looks as if there was the source of the fog. As if, hidden inbetween the trees there was a cave with a spring inside where the white fluid mist started cascading down into the basin. I was so taken by it one morning when we were leaving for the kindergarden, that, I pointed it out to my son: “Look, the dragon is awake, filling the valley with its breath!” His eyes got wide open, and he looked at me with a timid surprise: „How do you mean the dragon?”
I see some of you maybe flinching now a bit, and thinking: is a 3 and a half year old really ready for mixing fantasy with reality? And true, I also believe that such things can scare a child. I find it a fine balancing act at this age between making them understand how the real world works without confusing them, but also slowly showing them the world doesn’t necessarily end there where our eyes cease working. Because after all is everything we can’t see really unreal?
This little episode actually developed into several interesting conversations during the stretch of day. We returned again and again to our shared morning moment, and talked about play, imagination, and of course, if dragons really exist. “Do they, Mum?”, he asked eventually. “Well, I think they do. But not there up on the mountain, or in the forest. I think sometimes there is a dragon within us. It’s like when we do something bad, that we didn’t really want to do, and then we feel sad after. Like when I get a bit angry and I raise my voice. But then I feel sorry and I apologise to you. Then it really feels like it wasn’t me doing it, but something like a dragon inside.” At this point he didn’t ask back, he didn’t say anything, so I wasn’t quite sure how much he understood of it. But I left it at that.
Then a few days later, it came back again in an unexpected moment. He had a real meltdown over not succeeding with something he wanted to build. He lost all reason and started throwing his toys around, screaming and kicking. It took a long time until he could calm down. But once he finally did, he cuddled to me and said: “I am sorry. The dragon is not here anymore.”
It is a moment that I am going to treasure for a long time. Because this little experience showed me not only that it is never too early to talk about good and bad with children, but also helped with a little realisation. I came to understand that giving them a picture, a kind of embodiment can actually make it much easier to do so. If we believe giving their hands things so they can understand abstract concepts such as numbers or time better from early on, maybe giving them an image – even if it is drawn from our own adult’s fantasy – can be helpful to talk about emotions and ethics in the same way. It just made me truly understand the ancient wisdom of why legends and fairy tales exist, and why it is never too early to offer morsels of them to even very young children.
Approaching Michaelmas, I find it curious how the dragon came up the other day within our own life and how I offered unconsciously a tidbit from the message of this celebration to my three-year old. If you would like to read more about the origin of this seasonal autumn festival and how you could incorporate celebrating it into your family life, then you can find more ideas and inspiration in this post.
Picture: Jasmina Lozar.
