Welcome to the Ring

Many years ago I was running a workshop at a festival. I was working with some boys doing shelter building, on entering deep into the woods we came across a ring of trees with a clearing between them, which felt quite scared.

The boys were constantly talking about blowing things up and shooting animals etc with laser guns, I think they may have been playing to many video games? I told them that we could not build out shelter inside the ring of trees. They of course they wanted to know why, I replied that this ring of trees was a scared place and very special therefore it would not be good to build the shelter here.

They asked why, so I asked them if they had seen the film 'Lord of the Rings' they had all seen the film, so I replied 'Welcome to the Ring'

Instead I showed them using small sticks the type of shelter I wanted them to build and then sent them of into the woods to build it. As they ran off to do this, one of them stopped, bent down and picked a flower. He then ran back to the shelter made from sticks and placed the flower on top of it saying to me "this is for the fairies"

This all happen within a period of twenty minutes and for the rest of the day they had made no reference to lasers, bombs or killing things.

Nice.