Happy World Environment Day !

Happy world environment day in advance everyone !

Once again, thank you all for the love and support .

Hope you enjoy the magazine, and if you do, please forward it within your circle to spread the message ; wish to spread this far and wide 🙂

Also , please do share your experience of this magazine in reply , we would really like to know what you feel. Please write to us (Priyasha Sharma , Rutvid Dholakia) at thesummerblossoms@gmail.com

Looking forward to collaborating in the future as well 🙂

Hope you feel like writing/painting/gardening/cycling/ singing , calm, happy and energised through this magazine.

Happy reading everyone, the magazine is 50 pages, do read at leisure.

Love.

Priyasha, Rutvid

The Summer Blossoms Art Initiative

https://www.facebook.com/thesummerblossoms/
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nature photography – https://www.instagram.com/rutvid.dholakia/

“I can’t imagine anything more important than air,
water, soil, energy and biodiversity. These are the
things that keep us alive.” – David Suzuki

Prayaas_magazine_world_environment_day_June_issue_2020

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Exploring Connections

We are essentially a network of connections. And nature has used its brush strokes to create stunning patterns which are always there to remind us of these connections – connections waiting to be discovered by each of us.
– The Summer Blossoms

As a part of the workshop, the children explored these connections through thread art , and created this 7 – piece – Art Installation.

Each of these seven pieces represents one of the seven elements we are trying to connect – You / neighbor, I, Bees and Butterflies, other Animals, Trees, Flowers and Birds. We explore if and how these 7 elements are connected to/through these seven threads – Earth, Sun, Water, Air, Freedom, Respect, Love.

The final product is this set of beautiful paintings done using thread art . Each color
represents one of the connections, and each thread runs through all those elements it connects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2NoU9apfFw

These videos are recordings of the discussions with the Summer Blossoms children while working on this art installation . Please do put on your headphones and spare some time , the children have some interesting things to say. ( Five part discussion)

Hats off to you children ! Brilliant work !

The Summer Blossoms’ Painting Marathon

And the painting marathon begins – experiments with Madhubani art by the children 🙂  

https://thesummerblossoms.wordpress.com/2016/10/01/the-summer-blossoms-painting-marathon/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhubani_art

Ink on paper, A4 size, Gel pen.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. —Picasso.

The first two weeks of Summer Blossoms

(The photographs are best viewed in full screen mode. )

We are essentially a network of connections. And nature has used its brush strokes to create stunning patterns which are always there to remind us of these connections – connections waiting to be discovered by each of us.
We started with a question – can you read leaves ? The reply was a ‘No’ from the kids. There began our explorations , 5 hours every week.

‘Color is visual fragrance.’- Sadhguru

To observe anything deeply is meditation to me. And I find colors in nature to be beautiful creations to observe. One of the first activities was to observe our surroundings in colors – one color one day. We then discussed the same color , and where it is found in nature. We studied and experimented with colors, what happens when you mix 2 colors. We used our fingers, sometimes brushes, and sometimes threads. It is quite incredible how 5 colors create most of the colors around us. We  continue to do this activity once every week.

yellow brush, pen, a house, no parking sign, 3rd Cross Board, Yellow cutting board 🙂

 

Patterns and shapes

One of their assignments was also to draw using only 3 shapes – triangle, circle , and a square. These kids came up with such brilliant things !

Come observe

I gifted each of the students a personal diary, for them to pen down their thoughts, anything interesting they might come across, experiences, poems, quick sketches etc.

This is what Messi learnt from his aunt the day he picked up a broken butterfly wing – how a mother butterfly attends to the broken wing of her young one – she sticks it back , or tears off her own and gives it away. The lesson was to leave the broken wing where it is, for the mother butterfly might be searching for it.

Once upon a time….
I find stories a great way to explore connections. We started our story telling sessions with a question to the children – what is your story? One of the children said, aunty , I don’t have one. And so it started …what is a story ?

This is a beautiful game I picked up from Prague, I absolutely love the design , and the kids LOVE playing this – the same kids who did not have a story to tell , excitedly jumping all over , impatient for their turn to tell a story.

The idea is to create a story using the images on the dice ( you can throw all six , or lesser , depending on how comfortable you are with creating a story)

Story- telling through painting – Each kid was given 8 words to paint a story with . ( In progress. )

We explored different ways of story – telling in books as well as movies  .

The kids particularly enjoyed the Fleischer animations.

In The song of the birds (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FDdIMti2U0), we explored how music conveys emotions. We had a very good discussion about whether the birds should be afraid of flying . This discussion was particularly important , because just the day before, I had handed Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull to one of the kids. After about half an hour, I asked if she was getting bored. She said yes, not to my surprise. Then I asked her to imagine herself as the seagull. Her reply was both disturbing , as well as bolstering – I realised how important it was for them to get rid of their fears – ” No aunty, I don’t want to be a bird. Someone will cut my wings and kill me.” I did not ask her why she was afraid, I already knew why. So instead I asked her ” Aren’t you forgetting something very important ? That if you are a bird, you can fly anywhere. you don’t need money, or a passport, or an airplane ticket. You said you wanted to see the world, you could do that so easily. Wouldn’t you like to dream about that ?” She nodded a little excitedly, a little apprehensively. 

In the Ants in the Plants ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3Qyn7apy0I ) , the kids had so much fun observing the tiny details – the corn gun, the way the ants communicated, the ant shops and bakery, the army costume, the snails , the SOS signal, the Emergency Aid,  the spices as a weapon …. The kids filled up their diaries that day , filled them with these tiny details that they found so very interesting. We  ended the session with a few questions – Do you think you can be happy if you have hurt an innocent bird? The ant-eater’s food is ants. What do you think about it ?Did you see similarities in how the ants and humans function? How were they similar ? Do you think it is possible that the ants have a world like this? Can you understand the language Ants speak? Could it be that they have a language for communication, just like we do ?

If this is something that interests you, you can read the complete post here – https://thesummerblossoms.wordpress.com/2016/04/23/383/

Wish me luck universe !

It’s been quite an incredible 4 months, I would not know from where to begin penning it down. So many events, both outside and inside ; feels like I have been on a self – spun merry-go-round – slowing down only to be spun faster, and feeling dizzy each time I slowed down. The trick, as I am slowly figuring out, to enjoying the merry-go-round – which was the intention behind getting on it in the first place, is to find my own rate of spinning – a self-sustainable joyful pace. And as I find that pace, the views become calming and exciting, instead of distressing and fleeting.

One of the views has been of working with differently-abled children at a local NGO which addresses the needs of children from the lower income groups. When I started volunteering a month back, I was overwhelmed – overwhelmed by the disturbing stories of emotional and physical abuse behind a lot of the kids , overwhelmed at the same time by their incredible and indomitable capacities of happiness and love. Now that the amplitude and the period of my pendulum-like emotions, both have decided to move towards a state of equilibrium, I find myself face-to-face with an explosion of facts.

This is my first experience of working with an NGO, first experience as an art educator/therapist, first experience of working with children, first potential experience of getting involved in the running of an NGO, basically a lot of firsts. I am extremely excited and nervous of the unknowns here, trillions of butterflies multiplying billions of times in my stomach, and I have ideas and thoughts flooding my mind.

Ironically, the children are proving to be my pacemakers, helping me find that self-sustainable joyful pace I find so extremely crucial, my personal elixir concocted from the extensive talks with Rp.

photograph

I pray that I will be the best version of myself daily, and that my views will be those of smiling faces. Here’s also to the realization of yet another dream! And in case I haven’t thanked you enough universe, THANK YOU!