begin here: repositioning play

Welcome. it begins: the book about living playfully that I spent the last decade writing, or saying I was writing or musing I wasn't writing.

Sigh. it begins with a wobble and several layers of journal like reflections. Then I include a series of inductions/introductions.

Of course that really happens all along. Eventually the ideas form into more formal/formzl layers that reflect my play beliefs and current techniques.

Finally the whole thing folds back on itself and repeats the full text in reverse so that the end is the beginning as seems only fair in such things. And both here and there we stand at the beginning, ready to start. The cyclic nature mimics a calendar and suggests a journey. The layers intend to explore beliefs more deeply, though depth can be an illusion. Most of the blatant errors are mistakes; a few are dedicated to the humor of such a venture. At times I knew which were which. Now I offer a blanket apology. I created all the images, because pictures tell another story. Frequently I delighted in how this progressed.

 I appreciate if any piece of this project provides or inspires enjoyment: mostly it is here as a dedication to more playful living in all corners of the planet. May the earth survive us.

don

a first approach: wobble

, wobble

WOBBLE

An introDuction
that was once a Conclusion

Sometime in a past summer the word “wobble” starts to appear in my thinking. I write another draft of my play book and I need a way back into the subject. While stacking rocks upon each other, a loose tooth 'kin dof' play suggests: a sense of balance about to occur. Unlike the loosening of the tooth, this becomes a fitting into place of an element. I move a little and subtly I can move my hand away and the stack stands. My breath separates from the stones. Here begins an offering.

In summer Valentino suggests to me that writing a play book ought to be playful and I have to admit that the play has drifted out of the project. It waddles out to the river we watch as we talk and swims off into the darkening evening. I recommit to write about play playfully. He has suggested that writing about failed attempts to write about playfulness might be interesting. Some description of the experience could provide hints and clues surrounding playfulness: a lengthening nine year mystery.

I laugh inside, Shelly is suggesting a writers' group to get me going again.

I hear the critical voice in the back of my mind clear its throat. Can a cynic be playful? Can a wobble leave in place the underlying intent to engage? My writing self, oversensitive to criticism, determines to pretend to start again. The point: ah, to keep at it in some form and to discover what playfulness in writing feels like. Just as in everyday life, nudging a playful response, living on a playful bias,
simply living simply respectful of resources,
aware that much of this struggle occurs in a lap of luxury
compared to the experience of the rest of the wonderful inhabitants of this planet.

So if our priorities lean more toward the quality of life rather than some measure of quantity, then I extend an invitation on a jaunt, exploring the things that I use to make my life more playful. While on this personal journey I encourage others to discover a personal more playful path.

I turned my life upside down. though that's not essential, just wobble something loose and balance it anew. Maybe eat dessert first at least a few times and figure out if a spoonful of dessert up front makes an attitude about something a bit sweeter.

John asked me when I write, and I mumble something because, of course, I haven’t been writing and have no idea when I will be writing again, and here it comes again a writing time; and I relax and rather happily return to the subject: wobbles.


In earlier drafts I found myself preoccupied with ideas that remained flat. I don’t pretend to think of this as the last writing, but I do like to notice that certain ideas over time have expanded in unexpected ways, for instance the notion of a wobble. Or I prod the way we use the words play and work. I really wanted to provide a bunch of play exercises until I realized that I can do things in a playful way, and I can do the same things in a flat dull way; and they are, of course, the same things.

What 'kindo f' wobble is this. The same work or play activity can be play or work for different people, and the same activity can sometimes be one or the other for the same person. Does an attitude and a feeling at a given moment form a wobble? I am a cleaner-upper kind of guy; and when the dishes and dust pile up, I feel cleaning as an unpleasant chore. If I clean here and there as I go, I find I like the sense of rendering order and making clean. Rarely I pour a closet out on the floor and clean it all up. So you wont find me there with any predictability that I recognize. The goal of this offering supports more of the unpredictable. The quality of the unpredictable in play doesn’t lend itself to careful scrutiny or containment in written words. Of course, that basically would be predictable.

I read that there doesn’t seem to be any scientific basis for a benefit of play. I wouldn’t attack science for that, I would just support the notion that some things remain qualitatively illusive and deserve support for that 'illusiveness.' Few remain illusive; so respect the balance and then allow for the wobble.

In the working mechanism of machinery a slight wobble allows the gears to get from stand still to motion. Apparently the universe contains many wobbles: the earth on its axis, the moon in its orbit. the tide along the surfaces of the shore. How wonderful to find some quality of the big picture based on a wobble. So in the workings of the universe we have a give and take that doesn’t negate the structural laws of life but adds a certain quality to the whole. That’s what I want to explore, ways of adding a certain quality to the whole, through wobbles.

By introducing wobbles I find that I have a better sense of belonging more of the time. Some times I feel like I am trying to get away with something, but mostly that "getting away from' reminds me that I find little support for what I do. I intend to improve the quality of my life in a most simple way I can imagine. I hope to be more and more playfully present for what happens now. I reject more fear, though I can sense how fear confuses. I become suspicious of more wealth, though I can sense how wealth seduces. I suspend owning more stuff though I can sense the owning addiction. I will remain addicted to fitting things together simply and not wasting so much of the planet's resources, hopefully sensing the fun wobbles as I proceed.

I make it sound like I have a bigger plan, which I don’t. I make it sound like I have some major answers, which I don’t. But I have this idea about the wobble and where it gets me; and I hope it can get more and more of us somewhere where we truly like being, so we don’t feel like we have to take something away from someone else in order to have fun and sense satisfaction.

I have several other rules I play by. Only I have to say that these aren’t rule rules. Call them criterion governing experience.

I hope that the humor I sometimes feel as I play with objects will seep into the text. So far I'm not convinced, but that remains one of the story's mysteries.

When I play I give up on certain aspects of life and invest my attention in a similar though separate set of beliefs and expectations. A little surprise forms at times as I lose my position. I start again to develop
positive playful experiences. I imagine readers that make similar discoveries. Doesn't play seep into behavior with a bit of consistent encouragement?

My first rule of play: Do what you want to do first first. Something about us as members of an animal kingdom gives us some kind of access to an order different from socialization, not to judge socialization as bad, but rather that some of us have become over socialized, while others of us have failed to become adequately socialized. The over socialized frequently postpone the thing we would rather do first. The under socialized create a different mess. It may be a bias of observation, but I find if I do what I want to do first, the rest gets done more easily, sometimes in far less time. I am playing.

My second rule: Order something in my immediate environment. I don’t necessarily have to complete this ordering because it usually leads to some other interesting invitation that I want to explore. Or I may only order up to a point before I want a different order.

When I see my way to another project, I try not to tell myself to wait. Usually I hear that voice in my head and have to lightly calm it down. No particular order informs how I play. I have taken to leaning projects against walls, or piling them up somewhere, so I have access to them when engagement resumes.

A third rule: Be involved in more that one activity before completing an earlier one. This seems counter to getting things done, but my experience reveals the opposite. More gets done and I spend less time pondering when I might get to something. Not that I don’t do plenty of pondering, just that frequently I notice it lacks interest and move on. I also find that sometimes some thing serves as the lead activity for another activity. And that that second activity really brings the greater satisfaction. Sometimes even the second thing provides something that makes the first thing easier to complete.

A fourth rule: Everything you need presents itself, or stands near by. I marvel at what can be used to solve problems when the right stuff eludes my grasp. I frequently make up uses for things for which they were never intended. In fact some surge of joy expresses itself when this happens. I also find that the small piece of what I need just happens to be around when I need it, so that I dont need more material to create what I need. Some of these extra pieces become pleasant reminders of this process. Of course, I would be the kind of person who likes the worn and mended rather than the new and shiny.

I have a certain oppositional nature and a certain distrust of the status quo. Simply, it doesn’t comfort me. That constructed center doesn’t reflect who I am, so I often find comfort in doing quirky things. I make up rules for a while; and then I change them. Not to exclude anyone, just to hone my awareness. I don’t really know if anyone feels good about being like everyone else, mostly I assume most of have varying degrees of similarity and difference unlike a constructed normal.



The most recent rule of play: Once I tell a story about how I enjoy something, I bare false witness. Strangely what I thought I enjoy shifts slightly to challenge and reveal a new story. I no longer do enjoy that exactly in that way. Play seems very flexible. It makes room for inconsistency; probably the rules only approximate the experience.

So the final rule might be that when you believe something, loosen up the perspective to embrace the wobble. Allow for growth and change. Believe loosely.

a second approach: becoming a play auto mechanic

I drove the Saab up yet another gravel road and dislodged the muffler from the manifold. I could have cried. I was miles up the gravel. No other traffic. I really didn't like this game. eventually three people stopped and asked if they could help, but we were at a loss. I ended up tying a rope around the clamp and threading it through the back of the engine around some supports. I turned around. I made it several miles before I had to tighten the rope, due to scraping on road rocks and near paralyzing fear. When I got back to down, I called Dennis. And he said that's what he would have done and that aside from the noise the car would be fine. Oh, how I hate the engine's growl.

After complaining elegantly at my lost hike on a most beautiful day of October, I again went under the car. After unwrapping the rope and fetching some copper wire, I pushed with my shoe to align the pipe and wrapped wire snug enough for a three hour drive home.  The engine growl calmed: an almost tamed engine.

Fixed by playfulness, I mused. Before departing I took a walk along the river and found a fire pit, from which I extracted fishing notions, making a set of false flies:  playful happiness, soothing despair.

a third approach: first next

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

this new playful attempt puts my ideas in a format 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 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 consider that people who are encouraged to approach life playfully, perhaps by exploring these suggestions, may discover a resource for a healing.

a fourth approach: stamped

I frame a day playfully. The elements include tasks on a list in my mind, and added loose threads of being in a town, I left almost a decade ago.  I have 30-year roots. A college town changes, but some of the characters remain the same or recycle themselves. 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 remember people who have been dead 30 years. I am fascinated.

One friend 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 I had eaten lunch in his hometown. I hadn’t been there for a long time and it was the setting for an old television show.

The morning developed around the theme of not wanting to get out of bed, and I decided to play at indulging myself. I lightly wondered at the lethargy, but ended up reading for an hour about the brain, 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, aren't they grand?"

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 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 a 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 seemed obvious rather than nostalgic. The panhandlers still rub me wrong. While in the copy center an odd fellow came in; and overhearing his comments, I had to wonder about his sanity. It inspired a brief 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 stuck together in a safe that some undoubtedly quirky fellow had had in his house in DC. They had become the responsibility of the real estate agent to remove. I became the user, reuser, and 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 n-plicates that had begun to fill more and more space. Although I don’t know this man, I included a note to document the times I had 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 threatened to force a repeat of last year's dance 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 on my envelope, which reminded her of when she started working at the post office and the rate was 8 cents for a first class letter.

I went over toward the other bank and was distracted by a photo and the word ‘Hapa.’ Having links to Hawaii, the word immediately evoked “Hapa Haole,“ the term for mixed ethnicity. Sure enough some guy in LA had a traveling show of photographs of mixed ethnic humans with hand written text below their image about how they answer the question, "Who are you? 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: Were 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 spoke as well. Which king paid more than the price of gold for a set of Aluminum utensils? When had 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 were sadly lost; part of the first hard drive crash. The Riley continued 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 had they worked there? They answered my questions. In some fashion, they were of another age. The age that wasn’t fully extant even 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 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 evocative about all the shoe boxes left in the house last may in hinton after the arsonist's fire consumed the back wall, and the fire department’s dowsing of the flames that took off much of the roof. this 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. across my life, i have had a series of boxes that i filled with special objects. 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: a whispered language. i gathered the boxes from the floor of the neighboring house, where they dried 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 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 show."

the boxes will eventually join the series of journals i keep. 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 benefit from metal bits that would nicely weigh their limbs. things like that enter the creative process. 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 april 1960 has his bed in a mexican dish that came from the house on andrews lane when we moved in oct 1974. i can count out my life ...

a sixth approach: soul induction one

The soul* always plays. Sometimes we forget.









*I use the word soul to refer to that fragment of a universal experience that feels like our personal link to everything 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 the soul.


Soul: hovers outside awareness
Soul; non linear timeless
Soul: all at once 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; seems absent, though present
We can go through life without connection to Soul
Soul: always in balance; not belief bound.
Soul; doesn’t compete.

an out of order eighth approach: mind as inquiry

an out of order eighth approach: mind as inquiry

Is there ever a permanent order? Can something be out of order and remain out of order? Which order reigns?

An odd and wonderful thing about play stems from attempts to figure out why we play. Every attempt so far fails to show that an 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 nature remains senseless. It remains senseless but not unimportant. I hope that after this exploration play still seems senseless, and 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 seventh approach: spirit

This text takes inspiration from the timeless quality of play. This timeless quality seems to heal some inner imbalance. Aspects of healing extend from physical cuts and scratches to emotional hurts and neglect. Healing extends to spiritual aspects of living.

Thus, this book encourages play, bringing us back into personal balance, exercising basic skills of inner awareness.

Breathe these pages.

seconds: note one: the stumble

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 now 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.

seconds: note two: play portal

I have a sore wrist. I sorted buttons from a tin I have had around for a year, sitting on two yoga cushions in my bedroom, the tin.  It is an old yellow and red slightly dented cylinder advertising a cracker company. I had my doubts about button sorting. I dismissed the activity several times, but the invitation persisted. I can sense that I had to sort those buttons to continue playing the vast puzzle of my life. These buttons now sit divided into four sets. I touched every one of probably a thousand old bits that haven’t been touched in years. 40 years easily, I imagine. That takes me back to a time when I was in elementary school.

The transition from school to home was difficult. I don’t know why. But a habit developed that I sat in a chair in the corner of the kitchen in the afternoon and talked to my mother. There may have been an accounting of my day: perhaps a litany of school complaints.

The main idea as I have come to see it was my request for help with what was going to happen next. I had to go through some portal. Her words and my words created a spell, rather than solved a problem.

I wanted help deciding what I would like to do, though in retrospect I didn’t really.

I might have been waiting for her to reveal some secret of our past that would make everything make sense, or perhaps I was waiting for her to reveal some magic ability that would banish doubt and anxiety.

I didn’t think the things my mother proposed were what I wanted to do, but...

Eventually I would get off the chair and go off to play until dinner. At that time I had my own room and a closet with toys. Sometimes I rearranged the closet.

seconds: note two and a bit: waste bin

***
Welcome to the ‘waste bin’ of my story.
Scattered about are the italicized Appendices of false starts, branches that proved awkward, some part of which I just couldn’t let go. I created a realm into which to put these pieces that might appeal to some other inner state. I am charmed by the idea of making these words into strings of tiny marks, the suggestion of sense.

I like the notion of a place for left over pieces, because when I play I try to use every little scrap. I use what someone throws away. I’m drawn to what has been cast off. From the start I have recognized the scrap bins of others as a good source of material.

I begin again. I restructure. This time I have moved my initial thoughts to the back of the book to create an original appendix so that the book opens as an invitation to play, rather than a series of thoughts about playing.

I feel disappointed when I can’t play first.

seconds: note three: altered time

Play alters my sense of time. In play I accept a layering of time as experience unfolds. Of course, I could reorder these vignettes and place them in chronological order, but that is not my experience of play. Even if everything in my life happened along an ordered time line, the layers of my experience draw from disordered time. The advantage we each have is that we can, if we choose, draw on any developmental milestone we already have accomplished. This allows a type of creative flexibility. We can approach a set belief and alter it. We can explore fluid truths. This includes regressing back to a time when we hadn’t learned something yet.

I am reminded of my elementary school self. “I don’t need to know that yet,” was what I told my parents when they tried to teach me something about what we were learning in school. And please don’t ask me when or how I learned read. I was raised on a book called Why Johnny Can’t Read; and to this day I think that book was more about can’t reading.

Now I like to read as many as seven books at once. I discovered that the chaos of several stories layered together often produced unexpected connections among the stories or the plots, or the characters, or the authors, or the settings. This makes me sense the flexibility of truth. When I first heard a Greek Myth retold from the perspective of a victim, supporting a completely different sense of what had occurred, I was spell bound. This revealed a flexibility of truth. Both sides from their perspective were faithful to truth; and these truths were completely contradictory. How amazing a discovery, truth was not unitary. It formed and reformed around perspective and background. Truth had playful qualities.

seconds: note three point three three three: backwards

WHERE did I write, “I’m backwards. I’m backwards.” The speaker was the youngest Burnstyn child. Mom would know his name. Did I like the sound of his delight or was it being told the story that framed my attention? Was it the adults laughing? Had he been playing like this before we came? He was in the driveway of their new house. It was my first visit and I was not yet seven.

I want to use that for an explanation for how to read the blog, which of course starts at the current entry and moves back to where I started. 

I look at my dozen postings and think how awkward. We come to everything backwards. We join in now, and then construct back to some point that serves as a beginning and then feel like we are moving forward. How do we manage this? Is it like turning everything on our retina upside down? How many ways of playing are really partially incomplete alterations of perception?
Is there some mind button to push that reorients what is there?
What is it about buttons and the notion of pushing something to set it into motion? Buttons are knobs or attachments. They join layers of fabric. They are a catch and release.
If I don’t do more writing will I have things to post and if I just post a page a day after what period of time will I have said everything I want to say about playing? I guess I’ll find out.
There's the wobble. I'm backwards.

seconds: note four: open time

Play seems to depend on open unstructured time. I can’t say I am going to play for a set amount of time. Usually I just go out to play without a clear idea of where I am going or what I am going to do. I need some kind of extra time to fit the next piece into the puzzle. When I sat in the corner chair and my mother proposed activities, I rejected them. Then after a while I got up and left to go do something. Mom brought me to a threshold. Thinking about it now, the sound of her voice and her presence may have been what I needed.

Thinking isn’t what is going on in the interim; I’ll tentatively call it arranging.

Regard it as a stance of the inner mind that is sensitive to a myriad of possibilities and doesn’t arrive at a decision by making them, in the sense that we are trained to think.

(I don’t really know what I am going to do. This is some other way way of knowing; it is not exactly making a decision. When I am attuned to it, in my play (worrls) world, the flow of ideas and the impulses to complete actions happen like riding a wave. You get on one and then ride it and it takes you some where you ride the next.)

If you want to be open to what comes next, you have to get out of the way, and you have to stop proposing choices based on a list of likely scenarios. Maybe the improbable is about to occur. You can propose, and I do sometimes, but it doesn’t seem playful. Be sensitive to which activity opens a space. Then let wonder and some other sense of order take over. This can sound passive to an activity-minded individual, though I experience a swirl of activity unfolding. This part of the universe is anything but passive. We are the activity, even, if it is hours sorting old buttons.

With those buttons is it their age that catches my attention? Is it their history as a form of value? For me they evoke game tokens. Does everyone have an image of a button jar or box?

seconds: note four and a half: truths

While driving across country this spring I initially stopped at every, and then when that was too frequent, every other rest stop. Somewhere in Minnesota stopping put me on the shore of a lake in the Mississippi river where muscles grew prolifically. It became the center of the shell button industry, which subsequently vanished when the shells were over-harvested and buttons could be made of other materials. Do these old buttons have something to do with that experience?

I found an old red World War II ration token in the bunch of buttons, and a scissor sharpener, and an old hem stripper.

Two summers ago driving across the country and wanting to make a souvenir of my trip, I stopped in Zanesville, Ohio. Outside of town I met a guy selling tokens of lots of things, including UPA blue and red ration tokens like the one I found in the button tin. I hadn’t seen them before and had asked what they were. I bought a few other things with local significance. Now another one of these tokens appears in a mess of buttons. Would I have known what it was or taken the time to find out? Why does that matter? I don’t know yet. It has an evocative power that informs a stubborn attachment to matter.


The truth is that I still don’t know what a button collection is about: the old buttons with their threads still attached and their discoloration and their shades of off-white. Someone over time buttoned those buttons into buttonholes. And unbuttoned them and lived and played and laughed and cried, and most of them came from shells and maybe one of them came from a lake formed in the Mississippi river in Minnesota, part of an industry that formed and developed and disappeared, a trace remaining on a sign in a rest stop parking lot. I like knowing about this


I am drawn to write this text on a surface; perhaps, the interior of a container of buttons.

seconds: note five: doubt-play

I HOPE this is working… Ahh, self-doubt, now there is something to play with.

I WAKE at five and get up. I write in my journal until half past and link small sharks to eavesdropping. I am looking for a playful approach in and out of self-doubting. Is dissatisfaction a component of self-doubt? Or is self doubt some creeping dissatisfaction?

I WRITE with the (desntist’s) dentist’s office pen. The pharmaceutical company’s pen ran out of ink yesterday, it had covered many pages and possibly several months, scrawling on both (dies) sides of a continent. I sometimes think of pens as having greater meaning than convenient writing implements: the pen being mightier than the sword, we hope. It is a souvenir of time spent writing. It bears no responsibility for the content; but with a little rummaging, it can be drawn into the story. It came from somewhere. It had placement value as someone in the advertising world says. With the question of big pharma’s influence on the prescribing practices of physicians, it has weight. That pen had a nice weight that made it a good writing companion. In some ways the writing was spoken, the pen standing in for a listener. It never speaks, but takes note. It might make an odd mark under my influence. And it can refuse to go on, as it did yesterday, running out of ink amid a flurry of discomfort. It can be almost like a little receiver. And then as I write on the computer, I am writing to whom through what? The keyboard is some modified souvenir pen.

SO WHERE are the small sharks? They are in the water swimming around unseen and not threatening the swimmers on the surface. The small sharks were with an expansive school of small fish. I can see turmoil, fish swimming deep below. And can we hear the sharks evoking fear? Are they pens or swords? And even if I can’t eavesdrop on them, I can eavesdrop on conversations about them. I can learn day by day that it wasn’t Jeff who saw them, nor was it Arthur, but Tuko. She swam earlier. She’s more elusive. Her placement on the beach requires intentional tracking. She’s also an artist and a neighbor. Ah, artist is where the doubt dwells. Call yourself an artist and the pen stops writing. What did you say? The whole conversation pivots. If several were eavesdropping the room gets silent. Perhaps she will converse with me about small sharks, or about sharks and eavesdropping or about something entirely different that will lead my creative thread to some satisfactory pass toward further creative constructions.

SO WHAT about writing earlier in the morning like this? Will that allow me to have my say about something that interests me that I can carry around during the day and bring out as I meet people at the beach? Here, this is what I’ve been thinking about. What have you been thinking about? It isn’t for everyone. Some people will feel silenced by the perceived complexity of my thoughts. I am prone to scattered thoughts. I am also prone to collecting those pieces. Is it complicated? Mostly like an overheard conversation, it is banal. Misheard conversations might be an angle to pursue.

AND HERE are the first birds, I wondered for several weeks how early the birds start. They splice their voices into the frog medley. If they ate the frogs, would they be like small sharks among the school of fish. It is at least a quarter hour before sunrise when they start. It is the cardinals first and then come the doves. I guess I have been awake several mornings. Ask me later and I might not be so sure. Hear the doves? Doves

seconds: note six: opposition

From within comes resistance to being told anything. Two paths cross. “No, I won’t.” and “No, no, no.” How odd to write this and sense the familiarity with how a friend reacted to an exercise I suggested. Here it is, her response coming at me from within. I know this stance. It isn’t playful, but can be played with. I see so many of us still as youngsters pouting and all but stamping our feet, saying I won’t play with you. What I am not saying is that you are hurting my feelings.

The first path has to do with presentation of a request. I have to slip it by my judging mind. See if in some way you would like to do this sometime. When it fits somewhere in your plans or your activities, try it. Feelings are hurt, but then there’s not wanting to miss out.

The second path is like running up against a solid wall of opposition. I will not and never will. In this position something has to dissolve and be transformed. The entire play universe recreates itself. To do this, I imagine throwing myself down on the floor as if to tantrum. I do just that, on the carpet. It seems melodramatic and surprisingly a little fun. I end up looking at the dust and cobwebs under the bed. I play dead. After I play dead a partially reconstructed universe forms.

Right now, between reading in several books and jotting down these thoughts, I give up, and play dead. It might last a while. I can sense the resistance to the project of living my life and am curious to discover the path of return to engage my playful nature.

Even the tone of my writing voice seems distant and disengaged. Am I lecturing myself? Some separation settles in and that calls forth the tantrum. This is the very nature of it. I am not remembering a time like this. I am experiencing it right now. And in a way I am resisting it even in describing it. This is when the event jumps up from the page and takes over and shuts the reflection down. Hey, I’m really not playing. I am not. You can observe all you want, the transformation won’t occur, the playground is closed, period. Go nap.

seconds: note six point sevenfive: resistance

6 and 3quarters

In the course of what I lightly call writing my book, some amusing playful resistant twists occur. I was writing about repetition as a method of being playful. The first draft got deleted by mistake: slightly unnerving. The second draft seemed to miss the point. So did the third. I noticed that the playfulness entered through slight variations that occurred when I repeated something. I had done that in writing the chapter over and over again.

I stopped on the point and stacked rocks on the old fishing pier pilings. I liked how a few rocks could form a stone cap. A series of stone caps were conversing with each other; they observed the waves and the coming and going of the tidal water. I played. There are still some pieces of metal from a previous game I played metal placing. Along the route home I collected a few beer cans as a civic duty and ended up spilling some liquid on my bag and sweater. Played washing bags and rags to get rid of the smell, though back in the yard I discovered a neighbor had dropped off a shredder from a thrift shop across the border. I was very confused, and thought someone else had brought it, as it was already in my kitchen, when I met him at the door. I came from the back yard and had just moments before been at the kitchen door myself, as apparently had he. He insisted he had bought it for me, as I had asked him. What also confused me was that I had asked him if he had one. And he said he hadn’t.


Play doesn’t happen as an imagined activity; it is happening all the time as it unfolds. It is the work of my eye and my hands, stacking or weaving or placing something in relation to something else. And my goal without doubt is to save the planet bit by bit by recycling everything we throw away, turning it into something that is reexamined, recycled into something that amuses, until it can be reused for something else.

seconds: note seven: laughing

One afternoon in my last semester in design school, I came back to the studio to work on what was not working. I joined two other classmates. I don’t remember how our attention fell on Lottie’s sculptural solution to our assignment. But this women who didn’t seem to have the same attitude to design had arranged on her desk the most beautiful collection of foam-core surfaces that met the challenge of the assignment in a way that was so simple and understated it took my breath away. One of us called it to the attention of the others. Enviously we admired the structure. It dawned on us that perhaps she hadn’t yet attached the elements together. There was a tension and energy in the room and a sudden burst of laughter as we disbelievingly finally touched the structure to test our perception. And then the whole hypothesis dissolved as each one of us through gales of laughter realized this was just a discarded pile of material. I laughed so hard I had to hold onto the door jam to get my side to relax. And then we stopped laughing, like you do when you can’t stop in grade school, as Lottie came in with a new pristine sheet of foam-core from the supply store.








The memory still fills me with such playful delight and joy. I sense perception dancing, casting a spell over the room. That sense of each of us drawn magically right along on each other’s coattails. I hope we didn’t hurt her feelings. I can’t imagine how we could have explained the event. I think we three just went away playfully transformed.

seconds: note eight: sigh

How odd, I clearly was close to something and it evaded me. Even though I had a sense of it, it didn’t stay. But like a lost thread of a dream, elusion stands. I don’t know when it will return. I am aware of waiting. Well, I wait, then. I wake the next morning and here it is; it is a sigh. A breath that reorients me to what is in front of me, around me, what offers to engage me. I am here. Sighs are sometimes interpreted as impolite, so we are socialized to stifle them. But I think the sigh realigns inner and outer worlds, or it can do that, given a chance. It is a type of mini-meditation. So yesterday was about sighing and being present.

Yawns aren’t about being tired but are probably a realignment of muscle groups. Sometimes we only let ourselves realign at the end of the day. And why are yawns contagious? Can we hear them? Perhaps it isn’t visual.

Sigh

seconds: note nine: wobbles

The surprise in play
is how captivated I become
by some detail:
in this case the wobble.
The word play can refer
to that little give and take
within the machinery of gears
that mechanically allows for the whole thing
to get going.
I am curious about a collection of wobbles.
They are my affirmations of play.
The earth wobbles;
the moon wobbles;
the north pole wobbles;
and the surface of the sun wobbles.
And my,
as I try and accomplish some task,
memory wobbles.
I am so pleased with these wobbles.
The tide wobbles.
The splinter in my finger wobbles.
Some wobbles are miniscule.
Some wobbles are enormous;
but in the realm of wobbles,
wobbles tend to add something
without destroying the integrity
of the material or the system.
Maybe that’s what I like about them,
and maybe that’s at the heart of some ineffable explanation.

a note on the image: this is a wobble totem. I made it over a decade ago at the Eno River Festival, Durham, North Carolina, out of a small worn piece of river wood, 2 rusty iron washers and a bit of fishing line found as I walked around. I placed the washers around the wood and threaded the line through the washers to catch a hook of wood. I continued walking around the gathering, dangling this pendulum of sorts.

seconds: note ten: written/spoken

What is it about my spoken voice that gets left out of my written word?
How come I can charm and convince and even lead with my spoken word, lines that simply flow out of my mouth from my mind; but I can’t accomplish these feats with the written word?
Sometimes I like the sound of my written word, but I can’t figure out the discrepancy. I am equally surprised when my spoken words produce laughter. I am delighted but unaware of the source of humor.

I was asked to make an announcement at a gathering of artists and I was struck that the people who were speaking in front of the group used what I would call a timid voice and far too many words to convey a point. I didn’t have a timid voice; I spoke succinctly with authority. Not because I felt like an authority, but so people could hear over the hum of creative conversing. I felt this as a form of translation, as though the timid were speaking a foreign language. I began, “Let me translate that for you.” The room pealed with laughter. Was it the unexpected frame and the charm in my stance? Add this discrepancy to my wobble collection.

seconds: note eleven: alone

No eleventh note. I have fallen into a hole. A hephalump hole from memories of Winnie the Pooh.

How come I don’t know how to engage the playful side of other people?

Well, before I posted the last note a friend sent me a link to a site where a young boy played the ukelele and sang an English song. Only he doesn’t speak English, which only added to the layers of cuteness. An acquaintance joined me on the porch, where I was sitting watching and writing and she passed along a friend’s aphorism. Cute feeds us. I thought about little babies, new to life, reaching, or simply resting. Somewhere in the midst of this I heard a young child playing a word game, where she repeated some refrain. She was out on the street and I could barely hear her. She seemed to be both playing with someone and playing alone.

I think of the wonderful things people say in childhood as they are learning the way into language before all the rules apply. I suppose these are the wobbles in the spoken word. “Whose is this is?” my daughter once said. I kept repeating it, until I could write it down. I was charmed. I kept that slip of paper for many years as a token to remind me of the layers of cute.

I have been wondering about the solitary nature of how I play. How I am amused by how things fit, or almost fit. How they remind me of something else or almost remind me. How I am pulled to make language wobble a bit, keeping meaning.

What was that hole I fell in? It was the report card category called "plays well with others." I am sure I always got a check mark. My brother didn’t always. When I spend time observing the habits and choice of spoken content of others, I rarely notice a quality of playfulness. How do we hide from our playful nature?

I wish there were a playful way to object to a lack of playful intent. I’d like to have some quip like the friend’s friend’s aphorism that melted the resistance. I’d like to be the person in the crowd who politely objects. Not enough playfulness here; but, of course, it is not in objecting at all, that’s just digging in deeper.

I’ll just have to keep playing and improvising, saying yes. After listening awhile I’ll have to charm the snakes out of the trees, as a friend said. There are many avenues to playfulness.

But I’ve come to admit that as an adult, I play by myself.

seconds: note twelve: um

Um.


Well I had a pleasant morning waking before dawn and writing a few journal pages and then stretching in a few yoga poses and then arranging some of the game boards around the upstairs room, where i am planning a display of a series of small boxes.

I'm going to invite Tom, a fellow down the road to come and explore the boxes. If it goes well, I'll invite a few more people one at a time to see how they respond.

As I walked over to have breakfast and spend my morning on-line checking up on medical research, investments, email, phrase origins and the blog, I resumed my humorous collection of detritus. Yesterday I gathered a handful of rusty smashed bottle caps.(to put with a bunch of found change.) So far today it is a few aluminum can pulls, a dozen small yellow stones painted when the road line got painted, a small piece of plastic, which i will throw away, and a handful of bananas, which weren't on the road, which I arranged on the hood of John's car. By this time it being not that much after sunrise.

Four English house sparrows accompany my reverie.

Um.

seconds: note thirteen: flirting

Play is like flirting. Maybe it even is flirting. It encourages you to engage a side of someone that feels alive. There is a promise of fun and connection. We want to be around these people; we feel better in their presence. They seem to know something about living that we want to discover inside us. And they sense we know this, too.





This completes a circle of notes. Soon, I'll start again at a beginning.

3; entry one: beginning

So okay: three journal entries (i)
Friday Dec 26ishth 2008 or several days before (created Sunday Dec 14th, recreated some Sunday Dec 20ishth, 2009)

Let’s just say that since you were about ten, you wanted to write a book, and let’s say every few years after that you would start some writing or collect some idea for a book. And then let’s just suppose you got older and decided to take time off from your work to write a book. Let’s assume that you aren’t really a writer, but more the kind of somebody who likes to jot down ideas. In fact you have been filling volumes of paper pages with ideas since you finished high school.

Now granted you’re a playful sort, so you have decided about a decade ago that the book will be about how to be more playful in your everyday adult life, it follows that the intention is for the book to capture some of the playfulness in your life and to encourage others who want to be more playful to be so immediately, with every turn of the page, so to say.

Looking for some documents, I came across a file marked ideas for my book. This is not a recent file.

What I hope to communicate is a sense of playfulness that informs much of my life. It isn’t fun and games, so much as an attitude and a bit of humor. I savor creative unexpected solutions. I like the feeling that finding-something-that-will-work-for-what-is-needed evokes. As a collection these feelings refer to the personal solutions to dilemmas that face a grown man.

I believe most humans can choose to be more playful and that we could enjoy a lot more of what happens in life, if we made this choice.

3; entry two: motion/stillness

So Okay: a second one (ii)

The machine was out of gas, even though I had just filled it with gas;
and when I finally refilled it, it ran. I had made up a series of ungrateful stories about how this had occurred,
but the moment I will savor was later on the phone - an interpretation -
hearing how the lawn mower is mad at me for letting that other fellow mow my lawn this summer.
Lying on my back on the sofa, I kicked my legs in the air and laughed freely. Who behaves this way? Who gives permission to be playful in the body, dancing and prancing when feelings arise in our limbs? 

It seems in our nature not to be still creatures all the time. 
Some times be still; sometimes be motion:

dodge the balls
lobbed across the evening sky 
when an adolescent,
playing among a circle 
of neighborhood children.

My brother has something he does in the kitchen when he discovers a big new genealogical link in the family hedge, his wife calls it the cousin dance.

To movement I respond with stillness, to stillness, movement. That is the idea that accompanies this morning. Layered with these two previous thoughts: We were walking in rainy mist and the walking and earlier stretching accompanied a quietness in my mind. 
A peacefulness settled.   We were cloud walking.

3; third entry: folding time

Oh okay, a third one. I am folding time (iii)

Sunday 28 Dec 2008
Decide that play uses what you have and goes from there toward wherever comes next. That’s a big piece of how to explore the territory. It isn’t doing without, it is very much doing with.



Thursday 17 Sep 2009
Staged the first Lily Point rock stack with and for the walking group after our regular 45 minute morning walk.




Sunday 15 Jan 2010
What about Froebelgabe? 
Explore and decide that the yarn balls are now worn beach stones and the columns are the aged pylons upon which a cannery once stood, and the loosed logs are the sticks and the beach is the stage: wood stone water, discovery and insight: doing with.

iv/ in one pocket: tools

Be amused and entertained by what tools develop out of what is at hand.

It pleases me that the lack of some implement has led me to some alternate playful approach to an activity that I never would have discerned without the detour of inconvenience.

Consider.

I collected ocean fishing lures after a beach storm. I was going to make something, but I just got interested in the pieces. I wanted to make beach charms out of feather and bones and shells. I had forgotten to put needle-nose pliers in my pocket. I ended up using rough sea stones to create a frictional cutting edge. I remember thinking that I had rediscovered the predecessor of scissors.

iv/ second pocket: nest

Nesting in my pocket

Some activities nest within others. The wonderful luxury of play reveals how with inner encouragement, one activity flows into and initiates another. Some activities beach themselves and simply end, leaving us open to choose the next action. Or we stop one activity and leave it and go on to another. In this manner the second activity nests in the first. The game of house cleaning performed this way connects unrelated activities. Although chaos can tip the balance away from productivity, there are some enchanting aspects. Generally time loses linearity. Sometimes a lot more gets done in a short amount of time. Sometimes a difficult or noisome task abruptly reaches completion. Frequently a missing component of some project unexpectedly appears. I like to think of this as the return of the missing sock. I have literally chuckled when some missing hardware appears in an unexpected location and fits the need to complete a task that I have repeatedly postponed. Today I am getting rid of all sorts of recyclable paper from drawers: many years of paper. I have found a few keepsakes. I am ready to tackle the next desk. Did, though didn't find any treasures.

I found an old lock mechanism again in a drawer. It was in the house when I moved in eight years ago. I like this object. I don't know where it came from. I didn't notice that it had one bolt that released the handle until two days ago. It feels hand fabricated. Yesterday I mounted it on the slider bathroom door. I drilled a single hole and in half an hour had the handle in place with the lock mechanism displayed on the door exterior. Hanging that door took two years. Michael did it while I was away. He said it would be simple, if I brought him a 36inch track kit. Tiling the bathroom took several years. Dina and her father did that and put in a few irregular creative squares with my encouragement. I really like the tile details and the brass handle. And I like a new idea for display nooks. There's a bit of sawdust to clean up on the next cleaning round.

I invite us (dear readers) to do a postponed task and see if it can be shaped playfully, using intuition, timing and lightness.

iv/ third pocket: back alley of the soul

Journey in my pocket finding a journal page after learning how to use the strike through function on the text I had chosen first.

January 11th, 2002 Puna Hawaii.
June 9th, 2009 Point Roberts, Washington

Like some poem
these entries.
Shall I call the soul a non-linear processor of the mind? Do I want to say that that is all there is to it? Norman Mailer said it might span life times. Is that necessary? Of course, isn't that the linear trying to exert some influence. Clare said language dictates how we perceive. It is a form of control over our minds. We are brainwashed through conventions of language. We are socialized through language. We define our identity through language, mostly through spoken words. Other 'languages' of the world that span cultures and species are operative. They are non-linear and probably not very verbal. Some will call them the languages of emotion or desire. I call them the languages of connection. They may be from my soul or from my heart. They are my animal languages. They are my animistic languages. 

I can speak of stones. 


Connections are about my desire to know and be known. Will I learn in these seasons to speak these languages more directly. When they are spoken, they are literal and then linear. Even though they are clearly non-linear in origin. I have trouble with linear speakers. I fear that they will label me as a tease or even worse as a threat. Why do some of us repeat themselves incessantly? 

I am not really going anywhere: I am here already. I am simply playing, opening my heart, accessing my soul. So the exploration of connection makes more sense. Exploration of puzzles fit here. The exploration of language indirectly touches core beliefs. The exploration of layers and significance, including the most recent revelation that of course as one penetrates deeper and deeper one is likely to end up much of the time passing through meaning back into the primal ooze or some chaotic molten substructure, or even through to the other side, which rather than being some new or future or heavenly plane is just the back alley that runs behind the room we had entered on the most current quest for meaning. 

There are a series of these short quips about such. I am sensitive to them. I've carried them with me lodged in special recesses. Here is the elephant parable peeking out again about perceptions of the world. Above we just entered the rooms of mystery deeper and deeper until we're back out on the street. Ah, here is the meaning of life, being that there is no meaning of life. Here is my grandfather's tale about pessimism being a luxury that can't be afforded. Pessimism wastes too much of the  precious resource that we all use to create a vibrant world. This resource perpetuates itself and wages peace and holds the mystery of the present moment at the center of a spiritual practice.
 
If I succeed in writing a book about play, it will tell stories threading intuition and serendipity into presence. It will link fragments of a larger story about a world order that continually and playfully solves the most seemingly serious dilemmas of maintaining balance. The wager is justice, a justice that isn’t fair but rather attends to the subtle differences of all organisms in a complex web, valuing the unfolding. 

Some of the important play instructions are about activities that impact least on global resources and most on a quality of life. The stories come from a level of excitement. Take time to fiddle with the outcome based on new threads that lend themselves to expression in the moment of telling. All these packages of found objects impacted by the creative machine of our commodity-culture are wordless stories about unraveling and near savored memories. But are they about the present moment? They are only about something as they are playfully fitted together. Once they are fitted, they are about the past. They are about memory. They trace something valuable that no longer exists. New constellations unfold. Take time to savor new relationships. Sometimes the old ones hold an evocative power to fool us into believing that the past contains more valuable than the present. Address this disservice. All acts of coveting objects of beauty for any other purpose than preservation of the delight they evoke is folly. This is true about the golden objects in the safe deposit box There is no treasure greater than this breeze. Can my exploration communicate this? Or does my play have it’s own message that I keep trying to nudge toward this story. It might be that I am saying something quite different to different people and I only think I am speaking these metaphors against scarcity and aggression. That would be disappointing on several levels. Do I need recognition? Will I have anything to say after I say this? Will the exploration successfully alter the consumptive processes in time? Am I willing to proceed, knowing they won’t? Which treasure is my consciousness to the world?

iv/ fourth pocket: histories

Object Histories

Carrying something around in our pockets,
Nothing really,
but just something
to see where it fits.
It might just fit in a pocket.
A smooth stone, some found pennies, a bottle cap, several buttons, a crumpled shopping list, a couple of rubber bands and a paper clip. I like the image of the parent who empties the pockets of the child’s clothes before putting clothes in the wash. What story do these token tell? I tend to set things out to observe them, sometimes in a place; sometimes, no place. I stumble upon these tokens, maybe rearrange them, adding like to like, or an odd bit to a set of likes.  They evoke reverie. Try it, notice, do that, too.

We continuously come across cherished and worn objects that beg to release histories. These secrets of use become encoded in the worn surfaces and chipped or broken corners. I have several rolling pins; some came from a neighbor’s home. She was over 90 when she died and her home then emptied and sold. I wondered how many pie-crusts and how many biscuits had come under these wooden cylinders. In an age where kitchen goods sold as antiques fill roadside warehouses, I wish that pie and muffin tins could recite stories, including overheard conversations and favorite recipes.




Tell the story of some object, simply and with a sense of humor. Let it spark someone's imagination. If no one is around to listen, write on a slip of paper and use it as a label for the object. Whose old worn tool is this is?