After ten weeks of behind-closed-doors creation, my daughter, Morgan, gave me this gift. I have always been a Fraggle fan ever since my daughters were little girls.
To say I was gobsmacked with what she created would be an understatement; how her mind came up with such a beautiful idea and how her skills materialized it in such a wondrous fashion is a huge source of pride for me.
For the Fraggle-lovers among us, we might appreciate how she captured a lovely variation on what Jim Henson originally had in mind with his wonderful little band of creatures. There is a softness and warmth in the final art piece that embraces the wonderful world that came into our living-room in the mid-eighties. The Fraggles (as in most of Jim Henson’s creations) endeavored to help lay a foundation of values as it entertained our children. Much of these values were about how we relate to each other and how we relate to the world around us.
That she created such a piece from recycled materials says a lot about Morgan. She crafter over 90% of this from little bits and pieces that lay around her, giving each piece another and arguably higher purpose. Bottle tops, beads, bits of waste paper, old containers … they were all reimagined and refashioned into something beautiful. In fact the only real thing she bought of substance was the huge amount of glue that holds it all together … so no doubt she is on a substance abuse watchlist somewhere.
The central figure in Morgan’s piece is herself as a Fraggle artist. She imagined herself into that world … a world that she has many times said to me that she would love to live in. In one of the pictures, it looks like a collection of pencils, but they are in fact tiny little twigs from our yard that she pared and turned into imitation pencils.
I guess the reason I wanted to us these images for this week’s email isn’t so much about how amazing my daughter is or how lucky I was to receive such a gift. Both are true, by the way, but I really wanted to use the fact that this wonderful piece was made almost entirely of recycled materials. It is in stark contrast to how we have morphed into a disposal society that repairs nothing and reimagines even less. Our willingness to discard things that our grandparent’s would have fixed and kept is a true reflection on consumerism at it’s worst. The irony of the fact that I make my living within the framework of a retail industry isn’t lost on me. But that doesn’t mean that we have to just dump things that are dirty, dusty, or a bit worn.
Environmental consciousness screams out when we hear stories like those in the past few weeks, where Canada has been shipping out unapologetic amounts of trash to third world countries. Who even came up with that idea and how did it fly past the censors? We will censor nudity on TV, lyrics in songs, and ideologies we don’t agree with. But we will allow first-world countries to create so much trash that they ship it out to third-world countries to deal with?
But the saddest such story that might have caught your eye was a couple of weeks ago. The American expedition to the ocean floor set a new world record dive of almost seven miles … an incredible feat of human adventure and achievement. And when they reached the bottom of the ocean floor, what did they find? …a plastic bag. Can you imagine?
The real beauty of the Fraggles was their delight and innocence. The guiding principle of each Fraggle show was their moral compass and how it guided them through any situation that life would throw their way.
Perhaps it’s time to search for our own moral compass. We could certainly find one … Down at Fraggle Rock.
Have a wonderful week ?
