Meow Wolf = Childhood Dreams Realized

Last week I visited Meow Wolf for the first time.

For the uninitiated, Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return is an immersive art experience occupying an old bowling alley in Santa Fe. For the uninitiated from Colorado, it’s kind of like Casa Bonita on acid.

As you move through the exhibit, which is officially called the House of Eternal Return, you wander deeper and deeper into an alternate universe. If, like me, you happen to have been a kid who grew up loving both the Chronicles of Narnia and Tim Burton movies, it’s a childhood fantasy finally realized. Did you ever wish you could walk through your closet and come out in a different world? You can at Meow Wolf. You can also climb through a dryer into a fairy forest.

Inventing alternate realities is a common part of childhood. When we were in elementary school, my sister and I invented and attempted to construct a few experiences to share with our friends.

There was the unfinished wall at the north end of our laundry room. You could climb behind the washing machine and through that wall into…another room! But when you turned off the lights, it wasn’t another room. It was a haunted house that we led our friends through. To heighten the creepy effect, we threw kitty litter on the carpet so that it would crunch under everyone’s feet, creating an air of mystery. (Mom, I’m sorry about this.)

Walking through Meow Wolf, I was reminded of some of our more ambitious construction attempts, like the time we decided to build a carnival in our back yard. Full disclosure, we were not purely motivated by sharing. Our friends could come for free, but we also planned to sell tickets to other kids in our neighborhood.

I don’t remember everything that our carnival comprised, but I do remember we had a lion/dog trained to jump through hoops. We also had two roller coasters. For the first “roller coaster,” you rode a sled down our basement stairs into a pile of pillows (we actually did this all the time, and it was very fun). We were even more enterprising in our construction of the second roller coaster. There was a classic rectangular picnic table in our backyard, six feet long with two wooden benches. We balanced one end of each bench against one edge of the wooden table and rested the other ends on the ground to create the track. The roller coaster car was our Radio Flyer wagon. If you are thinking that sounds like a steep track with an abrupt ending, you are right. If it makes you feel any better, I don’t remember us convincing anyone to actually do this. Besides, the basement stairs roller coaster was too popular.

Is it bad that we convinced our friends and neighbors to sled down our basement stairs? I don’t really think so. If you want to dive deep into theories about danger play for kids, you should seriously check this out.

Like all of the weird, fun things my sister and I did, our neighborhood installations ended abruptly when I turned thirteen and was suddenly terrified that anyone I knew would find out I was still doing kid stuff.

I’m always gratified when I find people who keep doing what they love, even if no one is paying attention. And it’s even more impressive when they do it long enough that people notice and it becomes an actual career. I like to think the House of Eternal Return is what happens when people never stop doing kid stuff.