Everyday Whimsy & Tiny Bookshelves

My tiny bookshelf with banana for size comparison.

I'm a big believer in whimsy. I have no anthropological research to prove this, but I have a hunch that western humans have become progressively disenchanted generation after generation. It probably began after the enlightenment when we started thinking everything could be explained away with the scientific method. That's certainly when we started reading scripture in literalist ways that the original writers never intended. We started sucking the wonder, imagination and deep symbolic meaning out of stories like a man living in the belly of a whale for three days or a whole city being toppled by some ragtag soldiers traipsing around the walls seven times and then blowing their horns. Somehow we started believing that if something wasn't literal then it wasn't true. What a shame. And how boring!

Then we got so obsessed with industry and capital and consuming more and more and more. Now our world is so invested in productivity and grind culture that we barely have a moment to notice all the weird and wonderful things all around us, let alone the time to create anything magical ourselves.

In this light, whimsy is an act of resistance. Choosing to spend some time each day in the fanciful, the enchanted, the nonsensical is a choice to reject a societal belief that our worth is equal to how many hours we work or how many digits are attached to our salary. It is a choice to step out of the literal and into the mystery.

Whimsy has become a spiritual practice for me. As an enneagram 7 with ADHD, my appetite for novelty and joyful creative activities is a seemingly bottomless pit. After decades of trying to squash all of that energy into traditional spiritual practices that require the same activity at the same time day after day after day and failing day after day after day, I decided perhaps that was not what God desired for me. I started leaning in to my whimsical nature and started treating my curiosity and wonder as holy. Things are better now.

I try to engage is a little whimsy each day if I can. Sometimes it's walking in the woods and imagining fairies amid the moss and the mushrooms. Sometimes it's getting lost in a good novel. Sometimes it's writing or painting or creating something. This week I found myself making a teeny tiny bookshelf. I've seen online creators making tiny versions of the books they've read through the year and I am a sucker for anything mini. I had this little dollar store bookshelf in my dollhouse project stash and the Spirit grabbed me. So I spent some time panting it and papering the backboard and making the tiniest little books to fit on its shelves. It gives me so much joy. Which is just exactly why I think we all could use some whimsy in our lives - more joy, more imagination, more wonder. May it be so.