Anthropological Mum: Season of Mists

Image from Dept. of Culture,
Media and Sport blog

Although Piglet does more of the 3 'R's than when she first started school, she still comes home with artwork, is encouraged to take part in sports, goes for day trips to museums and parks. I wonder sometimes what world she is being prepared for. I look at people in the adult world of work and they seem too busy, too tired to go for group walks,sit down and sketch, join a five-a-side football team. As people hit middle age and their cholesterol levels rise, they often hark back to the years when they played sport at school. It seems a pity we don't have a society that continuously encourages such activities.

I like British Buddhists for the way that as adults they will do collective art projects, engage in nature and everyday meditation.

I don't want to join in with them, LOL. If I go along to British Buddhist events, they treat me with cautious reverence - as if I might innately know more about Buddhist philosophy via my Japanese blood than they do through their years of study. It makes me feel like when we were children and our cat had an eye infection. To remind us to apply its ointment one of us stuck up a picture of an eye over the kitchen doorway. Visitors used to ask in hushed voices what it was. We would say: "Oh. It's to do with our grandmother's religion. Don't talk about it." We would snigger and kick each other like children. (Well, we were children, LOL.)

The taste of madeleine cakes provokes
vivid memories of childhood for Proust.
Image from French Embassy site.

I don't paint well (does that matter? not to Buddhists) and since tearing up my knee at rugby I don't do much sport (other than high speed Piglet pursuit). I do have Piglet, so I do fun things with her, pretending that it's part of being a mum as opposed to just fun. I also blog, so I decided to make an Autumn Collection, like the Spring Collections fashion houses put together; a sort of Proustian set of ephemeral moments captured in picture, sound and text.