Celebrations

A festival for every day of the year... honouring people who have left their mark on my world and touched the lives of many other people.

By sharing how these people and how these events inspired me, I hope to share an appreciation of how we all can bring our gifts to the world... cherishing the inborn talents and unique style we all have to offer.

The word 'genius' stems etymologically from the word spirit. The genie in the bottle... or the lamp as we see it described in the story of Aladdin... a young man rubs a rusty, neglected vessel only to find it contains a great power that can grant wishes. The idea (and the evidence) of the genius we can see in the world challenges the suggestion that we are born as 'tabula rasa', empty slates, without a destiny.

Talking to mothers about the characters of their children, it seems naive to contest the idea that we do not arrive in the world with some kind of essence... and many cultures share the notion that we are born with a gift to unfold, a unique offering to present to the world. Not finding and sharing that inner genius leads to depression and can even become a toxic burden to carry.

Here, we celebrate those people who listened to their inner voice and were able to identify and nurture those gifts and share them with the world.