seconds: note one

Friends helped me realize that playing is how I live my adult life. I have always found other ways to proceed and have found when I simply engage in activities, ideas pop into my head about ways to make most activities more playful. There seems to be a constant adjustment to what comes next. Call it an internal wobble.

When I try to write a description of play for someone else, something essential gets left out. Basically we can make anything playful, so the idea of proposing exercises that promote play introduces a problem. The exercise can be playful, but it can also be completed in a fashion that I wouldn’t consider playful. So how do I provide a qualitative difference when it isn’t a matter of what we do, but how we do it? It is about a relationship between an inner and outer world and a consideration of what happens as we proceed. Something already appears in my written voice that separates me from my play state. But here’s what’s next.

As an 18 year old, I first stumbled back on play. It was an unhappy period, finding that what I filled my time with didn’t alleviate my distress. This event came after the time I tried to eat seven Swiss Chocolate bars at once. Well actually I ate them in series and failed to complete the game. Chocolate has never been the same. I’ve never tried that game again with chocolate, but I did try it once with cookies without the dire consequences, except that I can’t buy more than two types of cookies at a time.

One afternoon, I simply began to arrange some objects in a container. I cut some things, and glued some things, and made a kind of collage out of images and text, and small objects. Something unusual happened. I lost all sense of unhappiness, or of completion, and time folded back on itself. I just fell out of the usual parameters and found at the end of the afternoon that I felt fine. I can’t even describe it as feeling better. I removed myself from the measures and checks with which I had usually assessed my state of mind. I had a fine time. I remember few details, though I do know that at one point I checked the time and I still had most of the afternoon in front of me. I felt as though I had been engrossed in my activity for a long time. At another moment I was surprised that an hour passed in what seemed like a moment. I was puzzled and pleased.

A lot of time passed before I had another experience like this one, where time vanished and activity simply unfolded. But something had been revealed, and I chose to call this play. I felt like I had stumbled upon something of great value that I couldn’t accurately describe.

As I have explored this realm, some things seem to help me get there and some things help me stay there. I am pretty sure this is idiosyncratic. But I think the process and certain aspects of the process show up again and again. So I will offer some of these notions and hope that along the way they will provide you with a way into your own play state. I’d really like to encourage you to invite yourself into this realm. And I then encourage you to explore what’s next. Hopefully my descriptions will encourage you to define your own experience more clearly, rather than lead you to expect us to share the same experiences.

a seventh approach: spirit induction one

This text takes inspiration from the timeless quality of playing. This timeless quality always seems to heal some inner imbalance. Aspects of healing extend from physical cuts and scratches to emotional hurts and neglect. It extends to spiritual aspects of living. Thus, this book encourages play, bringing us back into personal balance, exercising basic skills of our inner awareness.

Breathe this book.

an out of order eighth approach: mind as inquiry

an out of order eighth approach: mind as inquiryThe odd and wonderful thing about play stems from attempts to figure out why we play. Every attempt so far fails to show that any assumption about play holds true. Our bias to favor a deeper value for playful behavior intuitively makes sense, but science doesn’t support any hypothesis we propose. Our problem stems from the need to make sense of something that in its very nature remains senseless. It remains senseless but not unimportant. I hope that after this exploration play still seems senseless, but that that senselessness comes to represent something cherished, however impractical or insubstantial. We can view senseless as without direction, because in this realm of play the value of direction yields to the value of whatever happens in each moment.

a sixth approach: soul induction one

The soul* always plays. Sometimes we forget.









*I use the word soul to refer to that fragment of the universal experience that feels like our personal link to the universe as it folds and unfolds.


I once called my musings Play for the Soul because I found my inquiries into a sense of soul full of similarities with play. A journal entry from 4-24-2003 listed the following associations on what the soul might be.


Soul: hovers outside awareness
Soul; non linear and timeless
Soul: all at once and always
Soul; holds no dual nature; both/and
Soul: in every cell of our body
We can experience Soul concentrated in our body
Soul; continues before and after what we believe in as life
Soul: present rather than known
Soul; can seem absent, though present
We can go through life without connection to Soul
Soul: always in balance; never requires belief in it.
Soul; doesn’t compete.

a fifth approach: mes boîtes

here's is what the bird told the sleeping beauty after the fire. he says it in his own language and she dreams it: #^there is something about all the shoe boxes that got left in the house last may in hinton after the arsonist's fire; and after the fire department’s dowsing of the flames that took off much of the roof that brought on a game of ordering. i've loved boxes since i first saw amal and the night visitors as a child. so these are my boxes. i had a series of boxes that i filled across my life, containing objects that seemed to hold specialness. i had numbered the first 3 and then created dated shoe boxes of the objects that had collected on my desk. the later boxes included unfinished projects as well as bits of the world that i had picked up from the street.
i was amused to see some objects appear in several boxes. i gathered the boxes from the floor of the neighboring house where they had sat to dry out over the summer. some fell apart and had to be placed in other boxes. i brought the mess back to stephen and liz's basement and explored them from there. i got a few new shoe boxes and created a series of nine boxes, playfully putting bits away and moving a few objects from one box to the next, making little notes as I borrowed things from one time period and tucked them into another. at first it seemed unlikely that i could contain the material. Some things seemed too wide or bulky. over the course of five days i arranged all the pieces into what became nine boxes. some pieces fit inside others. once i finished i took a series of photographs to make a "slide shoe."

the boxes will eventually join the series of journals i write. a few objects in each box may move into other boxes to complete what i had set out to make, but didn't complete. a few characters made of neckties might benef from metal bits that would nicely weigh their limbs. things like that enter the create works. i write some text on the lid interior and delight to find that i have done this in the past as well. i imagine adding notes in the future.

the pipe cleaner little man that naomi schiff made for my fifth birthday has his bed in a mexican dish that came from the house on andrews lane when we moved in in 1974. i could almost count the years of my life from five on with different pieces.^#

a fourth approach

I am still framing the day playfully. [though this was supposed to be a run-on sentence.] The elements were tasks on the list in my mind. And then loose threads of being in a town I left almost a decade ago where I had 30-year roots. They still show up. A college town changes, but some of the characters remain the same or recycle. I walked into 411 for dinner and thought Heidi was at the bar; only she isn’t a member of this cast. The conversation brought to life a few friends who have been dead a long time. I know people who have been dead for nearly 30 years. I am fascinated.

I knew that one of my first boyfriends had ended up with a blueberry farm in the northwestern part of the state. I think he told me that the last time we unexpectedly ran into each other. I had been thinking about him in the way that someone can be remembered without personal details, because a week ago I had eaten lunch in his hometown. I hadn’t been there, for even longer.

The morning developed around the theme of not wanting to get out of bed and I decided to play at indulging myself with heavy eyelids. I lightly wondered why I was still lethargic, but ended up reading for an hour about the brain and pain and education in three different sources. Eventually a shower was more inviting than bed. During my stretches I was particularly curious about the further stretch of my Achilles tendon. Breakfast had the extra treat of a few homemade raisins.

I don’t know why I get such a kick out of the sour candy–like taste of my Washington raisins. But from the beginning they have brought me a joyful zing. I want to jump up and down and say "I made these, are they great?"

Remembering that John Scott had asked me who was going to help me deal with the mess in West Virginia, I decided to enlist my brother’s help in filling the Andrew’s lane pothole. I still wonder about the natural formation of potholes. There must be certain knowledge about this. A few shovels and brooms, some broken cinder block and we were well on our way. In fact we were done very soon. Ray mostly checked something on his blackberry.

I decided that banks were the task of the morning. I suddenly had the urge and energy to roll up max’s damaged Polaroid pulls from his 60th birthday party that had been altered by the fire in Hinton. So although I didn’t get out of the house until noon, I did manage to visit 3 banks and one post office and copy center and accomplish five nested tasks. There was something about walking down the street and seeing the college town as it reinvents itself for the next set of students. This seems obvious rather than nostalgic. The panhandlers still rub me a little wrong. While in the copy center an odd fellow came in and overhearing his comments, I had to wonder about his sanity. It almost inspired a playful inquiry into the not all accounted for characters that a town supports. And that made me think back on the panhandlers and their stories. I felt like a town could have a portfolio of characters that everyone knew. It seemed to playfully promote safety rather than compromise the right to anonymity.

In my own quirky way I was getting glue from the copy shop to use on old stamps that had gotten all stuck together in a safe that some possibly quirky fellow had had in his house in DC and that had become the responsibility of the real estate agent to remove. I became the user, reuser, recycler of these stamps. Since they had to be soaked they didn’t meet a standard of philatelic interest. I was using some of these stamps to finally send a scoutmaster in Texas some other stamps for his troop. This man, also a physician had contacted my lawyer brother for some unknown reason and solicited stamps from him. My brother was uninterested though I was quite amused to think that there was finally somewhere to send vast numbers of x-plicates that had begun to fill more and nore space. Although I don’t know this man I included a note to document the times I ha tried to send this envelope over the past year. I had lost his address when my hard drive died, as we say. And I had been surprised to find an envelope that he had sent to confirm he was still doing this project with the scouts. Of course this year’s hard drive crash almost threatens to force a repeat of last years dancce of the envelope without an address, but part of the back up saved his address. So I can only hope he gets a kick of the energy required to supply him with said stamps.

The woman at the post office looked familiar and I asked her how long she had worked there. Did she say 37 years, with Friday being her last day? She liked the old stamps, which reminded her of when she started working at the post office and the rate was 8 cents for a first class stamp.

I went over toward the other bank and was distracted by a photo and the word ‘Hapa.’ Having links to Hawaii the word immediately evokes “hapa haole,“ the term for mixed ethnicity. Sure enough some guy in L A has a traveling show of photographs of mixed ethnic humans with hand written text below their image about how they answer who they are? I think the question is frequently asked as to what are you of anyone we can’t immediately place by appearance. I was delighted with his work and the way it was displayed and how I had stumbled across it and taken the time to explore it. It inspires an oral history project in Hawaii: Are we what we remember?

On the walk home, which took me along a route I used to walk everyday for years, I came to a sudden construction block with no path around. I had to retrace my steps. I had an intuition some path would be blocked, I had no idea how blocked it might be. Along the reroute, I picked up two crushed cans and wondered about the value of a single recycled aluminum can. They remain an icon of our time. The crushed form speaks as well. Which king paid more than the price of gold for a set of Aluminum utensils? When did it become cheaper to reuse aluminum than mine it from Bauxite? Did I drive through bauxite mines at the border of South Dakota and Wyoming in the Riley 1.5? Those photos are sadly lost; part of the first hard drive crash. The Riley continues to run.

I stopped in at Fine Feathers at University Square after I noticed it again last week. The store had been new in my first years here. It was like walking onto some kind of stage. I saw no one, then after a moment I realized there were two women sitting to the far left. One spoke. I asked how long the store had been there and who had started it; how long they had worked there. They answered my questions. They were of another age in some way. The age that wasn’t fully extant when the store opened, I imagined. I think we were each charmed by the other. 34 years she said and she had worked there from the beginning for the owner. What wonderful and possibly grotesque stories of dresses and the people who wore them…
I came home to write this, enjoying peanut butter on rice cakes and a little Point Roberts dried fruit leather.
We’ll go and swim for 45 minutes this evening as a conclusion to the day's play. The love of life is in the details. Was it playful? So it seems to me.

a third approach

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

first next thoughts on play

just past the equinox
painting two hours a day
hot dogs at the golf course cafe at point roberts

this is a new attempt to put my ideas about play in a format that can be found on the internet.

what i realized in my exploration of play, is that it takes a certain attitude to experience life playfully. all my attempts to make exercises that enhance a sense of the healing, required a playful attitude toward the exercises i suggested. that meant that a person could be playful or not. this caused a certain sense of disappointment. (not experienced playfully.) and so i set the exercises aside.

now, i believe that people who have a playful spirit can explore these ideas and see if a healing sense of balance ensues.