María Elena Walsh
Permission to Imagine
What happens when a cow decides to go to school?
For María Elena Walsh, that question did not need correcting. It needed a song.
An Argentine poet, writer, composer and singer, María Elena Walsh created one of the most distinctive imaginative universes in Spanish-language children's culture. Her travelling turtles, potato queens and upside-down kingdoms accompanied generations of children.
But María Elena did not write to offer children a smaller, simpler version of the adult world. She opened an enormous one, where words could play, rules could be turned upside down and the impossible deserved to be explored.
And that is where much of her importance for creativity lies.
Absurdity as Permission
As children, perhaps what attracted us was simply the nonsense.
A cow going to school. A travelling turtle. A kingdom where everything happens backwards.
As adults, we can recognise something deeper inside that play: permission to alter the rules of reality without apologising for doing so.
María Elena turned absurdity into an invitation. If a word can behave differently, perhaps an idea can too. If we can turn a world upside down for three minutes, we can also ask why the real one always has to work in the same way.
Her songs and stories did not merely exercise her own imagination.
They exercised ours.
Talking With Children, Not Down to Them
Part of her singularity also came from taking children's intelligence seriously.
Wordplay, humour and absurdity did not appear as simplified versions of the adult world, but as different ways of entering it.
María Elena understood that childhood could live comfortably alongside strange words, double meanings, contradictions and questions without immediate answers.
That too is creative education: not explaining everything, not closing a possibility too quickly, not rushing to put everything back where it belongs.
Sometimes you have to let the cow go to school.
And see what happens.
Wonder Has No Age Limit
María Elena also wrote and sang for adults, and defended freedom of expression with the same voice capable of inventing impossible worlds.
Perhaps that is why her work can remain with us for so long.
As children, we discover the play.
As adults, we discover the irreverence hidden inside it.
She reminds us that wonder does not belong exclusively to childhood. We can recover it whenever we listen to an unexpected question without rushing to answer it, play with a word until it stops meaning what it usually means, or follow an absurd idea simply to discover where it might lead.
Try It as a Family
This week's invitation is simple:
invent something that could never happen.
An animal that opens a shop.
A street that moves somewhere else.
A new word for rain.
There is no need to correct it or quickly turn it into something reasonable.
Let the story grow.
Ask what happens next.
Add another impossibility.
María Elena Walsh knew that sometimes an entire world can begin this way.
With an absurd question that someone decided not to answer with:
“That can't happen.”
She taught us something far more creative:
“Let's see what happens if it could.”