when we are the spirit doll : The Wild Men of Europe by Charles Freger

Photograph by Charles Fréger FRANCE Spring festivals in the Pyrenees feature local men playing the role of bears awakening from hibernation. www.charlesfreger.com via National Geographic

Photograph by Charles Fréger AUSTRIA Every five years the men of Telfs collect lichen to create Wilder Mann, or Wild Man, costumes for the town’s Carnival festival. Tradition dictates that they nibble on a piece of this lichen before the festivities.

Photograph by Charles Fréger PORTUGAL During Carnival in Lazarim characters called “caretos” parade through the village in hand-carved masks to a bonfire where effigies known as thecomadre and compadre are burned.

Photograph by Charles Fréger BULGARIA On New Year’s Day men cover themselves with goatskins to impersonate the Kukeri, who both embody and chase away evil spirits. In the past they’d brush against women to bestow fertility.

Photograph by Charles Fréger SCOTLAND Thousands of burrs adorn the Burryman. The man who plays the role at the Ferry Fair in Queensferry must collect all the burrs himself. Once dressed, he walks the town, accepting offers of money and whiskey and bestowing good luck.

Freaks of Nature

Ferns of the Rocky Mountain National Park

I am embracing the term 'freak of nature' - isn't that what we all really are?!! Wouldn't life be so much easier if we realised their was nothing to change about ourselves, try to be, nothing to correct? In our strangeness is our beauty. This psychedelic beauty is a microscopic photograph of the reproductive structures of a fern taken by Igor Siwanowicz and winner in National Geographic photo competition. The beautiful FERN is the plant calling us to move our work and home into Sherbrooke Forest. I am so excited to learn from this plant and her medicine. Now if a plant can be this wild and colourful, couldn't our natural nature be just as strange?

“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you.”

FRIDA KAHLO