Fairy Letters, Empty Vessels, and Other August Stories

Susangela Saracino

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✨Planting seeds of magic✨

Dear friends,

We’ve officially crossed the threshold into August. While most people choose July and August for their big summer escapes, I’ve spent July—and will spend this coming month—working at a summer camp here in Vienna. My holidays will come in September; I’ve never been a fan of traveling during the hottest weeks anyway.

Stepping into this summer camp was a conscious choice: a way to challenge myself, immerse deeper into the Austrian work environment, and secretly test out new ideas and methodologies for my future workshops.

The heat has returned to Vienna with full force this week, and next week promises to be even warmer. My strategy? Taking my class swimming as much as possible, eating ice cream, and hanging in there.

Meanwhile, our apartment is finally taking shape! The new furniture is arriving over the next few weeks, and I’m already daydreaming about hosting warm, lively dinners with friends.

The Magic We Puddle into Vessels

Working with children every day has been an intense, eye-opening mirror. It has made me realize something fundamental: children are vessels.

In so many ways, they are just like my Wonder Dolls at the beginning of the creation process—hollow, receptive, waiting to be shaped. But unlike dead materials, children depend entirely on us, the adults, to flood them with magic, wonder, diversity, and gentleness. Tragically, I often see how many children are filled with noise, acceleration, and a lack of enchantment instead.

Some days ago, to close out July, I decided to plant a small seed of resistance against that.

I convinced the kids that the big tree in our garden must be inhabited by fairies—because, of course, wild clovers only grow under fairy trees. The girls were spellbound. They immediately set to work building a tiny, Hobbit-style entrance at the base of the trunk.

Yesterday one little girl came up to me with a drawing she had made for the fairy. She confessed, with a sad little voice, that she had been leaving that drawing under the tree for three days, but the fairy had never taken them. "Maybe there are no fairies here," she said.

My heart melted. So, while they were away during sports time, I carefully took her drawing (which I am now secretly hoarding as a treasure) and wrote a letter back from the fairy. I wrote it in "Fairy Language"—a whimsical, invented script—and packed the envelope with glitter, shiny stones, wild seeds, and dried leaves.

When she found it, her eyes turned into saucers. She looked at the seeds and whispered, "I’m going to plant them to see what magical plant grows."

For hours, the entire group—even the most skeptical boys—could talk about nothing else. They debated whether magic was real, stopped playing with their usual plastic toys, and spent the rest of the day interacting with the trees and the dirt.

It was a tiny act of Haptic Resistance. A way to teach them to respect nature, to step away from plastic, and to remember that we desperately need magic!

 

 

Looking Ahead: Autumn Whispers

Even though I’m grounded in the heat of August, my mind is quietly preparing for the autumn shift. A few things are brewing behind the scenes:

• The Wonder Dolls Lab: Our collective alchemy rituals will resume this October with a calendar full of new dates in the works, alongside a very special collaboration.

• Exhibitions: There are a few exhibition projects in the works, but I’m keeping them secret for just a little longer...

• New Jewelry Collection: I am launching a brand new, extremely limited-edition Sustainable Jewelry Collection. If you’d like to get a sneak peek and be the first to know when the collection drops, you can sign up for early access here:👉 [LINK: Early Access – Sustainable Jewelry Collection]

(And if you feel like supporting my creative practice or buying me a virtual summer ice cream, you can always drop a little love on my Ko-fi page! It means the world to me!)

Take care of your social skin, drink water, and stay gentle with yourselves.

With love and fairy dust,

Susangela

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